Stanley Bard Comes Up Short In War On Tenants

            We wish to express our condolences to our illustrious proprietor Stanley Bard, who has been excluded from this year’s Village Voice “10 Worst Landlord List”.  We know he was really shooting for it, but hey, there’s a lot of competition in this town, and sometimes these things just don’t work out.  Maybe with a little extra effort he can make the list next year.

            I’ve gone through the article—actually a series of articles—in the Voice, and assembled a select list of factors involved in choosing the lucky 10 slumlords.  Through a close study of this list, Stanley may someday realize his dream of cracking the top ten:

-Dark and forbidding hallways. (We already have these, though they used to be much darker and more forbidding.)

-Looks like a crack house.  (Yeah, a great big Gothic crack house!)

-Horrible bedbugs coming from one of the walls.  (I hear lots of hotels have these; maybe we could drag in some old mattresses from the street.)

-Drug addicts get in through unlocked doors, get high in the hallways.  (Here they are considerate enough to use the bathrooms.)

-Obstructed or rusted fireplaces.  (Yes, ours is obstructed by a wall; we’ve been thinking of busting it open with a sledgehammer one of these days.)

-Stench of urine, feces and trash dominate lobby. (The stench just dominates our hallway once in awhile when somebody throws out a bunch of diapers.)

-Hordes of rats, mice, and roaches patrol the building, breeding in the garbage cans left in halls.

-Stonework crumbling. (Ill-advisedly, Stanley got this fixed.)

-Landlord threatens and beats tenants with a bat.  (At 71, Stanley’s best bat-threatening-and-beating days are probably behind him.)

-Landlord commands a goon squad to throw people out.  (This may be a more practical suggestion.)

-Landlord takes money from welfare checks in exchange for cashing them.  (Oh, why not?)

-Blood in the elevator.

-Toxic mold, stachybotrys.

-Walls reduced to rubble, a huge pit in the floor, and debris everywhere.

            Compared to some of the buildings around town, we live in a true renter’s paradise here at the Chelsea.  Stanley has his work cut out for him, but we think he’s up to the task.  Then, after the awards dinner, he can throw us all out, fill this place up with high-maintenance yuppies, and let his son David deal with it as he retires, triumphant, to the luxury of his New Jersey McMansion.