The woman who lived in Greenwich Village’s cheapest rent-controlled apartment quite literally only gave it up over her own dead body.
Patricia O’Grady paid just $28.43 for her cold-water flat up until the point she died in March at the age of 85 after being fatally struck by a car, the New York Post reported.
O’Grady, who had lived in the walk-up since 1955, paid what is believed to be the lowest rent in Greenwich Village.
The unit didn’t have heat or hot water, but it did have two working fireplaces.
“I didn’t even know that [cold-water flats] existed anymore,” Ava Farkas, executive director of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, told the Post. “I think that’s highly, highly rare.”
A former landlord even started a fire in the building to try and drive out rent-controlled tenants, a friend of O’Grady’s told the newspaper. When current landlord Adam Pomerantz bought the property, he was able to raise her rent by a whopping $1.98.
And Pomerantz said O’Grady would always mail her rent checks, even though she could just walk downstairs and hand-deliver them at the Murray’s Bagels shop he ran at the base of the building.
Pomerantz plans to gut renovate the apartment and rent it as a two-bedroom in the range of $5,000. [NYP] – Rich Bockmann