Sweep Shines Light On Dwight

The sign said United Illuminating planned to terminate service at a 28-unit apartment complex by May 6.

A whole complex without electricity? Livable City Initiative’s (LCI) Rafael Ramos pulled out his phone.

Ramos, the deputy director of LCI’s Housing Code Enforcement, happened to be on Orchard Street Wednesday passing the former Ethan Gardens co-op with more than two dozen city officials as part of the Harp administration’s ​“clean and safe” neighborhood tour.

The Dwight neighborhood tour was the latest in a series that started out in Newhallville and has since made its way to Fair Haven, The Annex, Hill North, and Hill South. The tours enable city officials to hit the streets and look for problems that must be addressed immediately, and those that need a consistent effort to be addressed over the next few weeks.

UI’s threat to turn off the power at Ethan Gardens was one of those problems that had to be addressed immediately.

Ramos put in a call to Pike International, which purchased the former co-op about nine years ago, to ask if the electrical bill had been paid. He was told that it had. So he asked for proof and assurance that, in fact, the building’s electricity was not in danger of being shut off.

“If you shut the electricity off, the fire department is not going to be happy,” Ramos said to the person on the other end. He could prove that displeasure: Assistant Fire Chief Mark Vendetto (pictured above) was standing right next to him.

Ramos handed Vendetto the phone.

A few seconds later, Vendetto reported, ​“They’re going to text me a receipt.”

Wednesday’s tour didn’t turn up nearly as many problems as did previous sweeps; LCI found six violations mostly for trash to add to eight collected earlier.

But officials still found plenty of tasks to keep city departments humming in the weeks to come, including dealing with the pictured Mandy Management property at 198 Edgewood Ave. with a damaged fire escape.

LCI Project Manager Mark Wilson asked a woman who is related to a tenant who lives there how long the fire escape had been in its current condition. She said a while.

“If that is the only form of egress for the family on the third floor they need to address that,” he said. ​“They need to address it right away.”

Preservationist Olivia Martson (pictured with Ramos), who lives in the neighborhood, said that the biggest issues Dwight faces are ​“little things.”

“It’s the trash, the furniture in the backyard,” she said. ​“It’s that kind of stuff that we need to work on.”

She said the neighborhood has been successful in putting pressure on Community Builders, which owns the properties that make up Kensington I and II, to repair their buildings and keep them up.

“If we can get Community Builders to keep up their property, do better tenant screening, we’re OK,” she said. ​“But we also need to work on some of the absentee landlords, those are the ones that aren’t helping us.”

Ramos said Dwight is a pretty stable neighborhood but the city can raise the bar by letting homeowners know about services like emergency repair assistance programs. Officials ducked into a couple of the neighborhood bodegas to make suggestions about cleaning up their storefronts for safety and to be a good neighbor.

They found a few littered and cratered parking lots near the bodegas.

They also found this burgeoning crater, which Public Works Director Jeff Pescosolido kneeled in to get a closer look. He said it looked like something could be failing under the street and would need the attention of water authority.

Dwight Alder Frank Douglass said one of his top concerns is sidewalks. The officials in the neighborhood Wednesday found plenty like these pictured sidewalks that will need some attention from the city’s public works department and the tree warden.

This house has a well-appointed front yard, but a not so lovely backyard.

Mayor Toni Harp credited the hard work of the neighborhood’s community management team, the LCI personnel and the police department with Dwight’s stability. She said it has always been an active neighborhood, even since the days she lived there and represented it on the Board of Alders in the 1980s and ​‘90s.

“The fact that it looks as good as it does is because of the work that the people do in it every day,” she said. ​“There are still some things [that need improvement] but it could have been much worse.”

By the end of the tour, Ramos had good news. The electricity bill at Ethan Gardens was paid and the lights were staying on.