Landlord as serious 'low'life!
Even more mini-apartments revealed
The carving-up of a former Lower East Side yeshiva into ridiculously tiny, double-decker micro-hovels is worse than first thought when The Post exposed the issue last week: City officials say a second apartment in the building was also subdivided, making a total of 20 cramped, single-occupancy units.
Many of the units had no windows and ceilings barely four feet high; the wiring, plumbing and rickety walls and staircases were all jerry-built without permits, officials said.
The subdivided apartments, on the fourth and fifth floors of 165 Henry St., are a death trap waiting to happen.
“If there was ever a fire, there would be literally no way to escape some of those units,” said city Buildings Department spokesman Andrew Rudansky.
“The worst of the units had ceilings 4½ feet high, and your door would open down to an illegally built set of stairs,” he said.
“It would be extremely dangerous for any first responder to go in there and save someone’s life.”
The Post first exposed the bizarre illegal conversion of apartment 601, a 634-square-foot unit on the building’s fourth floor, on Friday.
The apartment had been divided horizontally, creating an additional floor, officials said.
Councilman Ben Kallos compared the subdivision to the low ceilings of a building in the 1999 flick “Being John Malkovich.”
The city is still looking for owner Xue Pin Ni, who claimed to live there and is now facing up to $400,000 in fines if the violations aren’t remedied in the next 45 days, Rudansky said.
Soon after The Post called officials about an apparent similar set of stacked micro-hovels — one floor up, in 701 — that apartment, too, was raided by the city.
Owner Jin Ya Lin of Maryland also faces some $400,000 in potential fines.
“They have these in Hong Kong, these cage apartments,” Kallos said Saturday. “But this is America, this is New York and we can do better.”