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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Parapsychology Dept. JULY 20, 2015 ISSUE
Room with a Boo
BY REEVES WIEDEMAN
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Others were starting to notice strange things, too. “When I was in the subbasement, many months ago, I definitely felt something weird,” Andy Hamingson, the executive director of St. Ann’s Warehouse, who lives on the fourth floor, said. A veterinarian on the first floor found that objects often fell from shelves, and her television had a habit of turning on without anyone touching the remote. “I’m a scientist, so I’m very rational,” she said. “Usually.” The location of the hospital morgue had become a particular concern. Melnitz suspected the laundry room, while Maxime Malet, a French newspaper reporter, had pegged the gym. “Maybe I can say the fear of ghosts prevents me from going,” he said.
A number of residents were beginning to wonder if they might be at fault. Perhaps the spirits were “anti-gentrification ghosts” conjured by locals who were upset that their hospital had been replaced by high-end apartments; a former patient had recently walked in seeking care. (One local blogger said that the hospital now specialized in “Paycheck Removal Surgery.”) Several tenants considered asking for a rent break, on account of the ghosts—in 1991, the New York Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who wanted to back out of buying a house after learning that the owner believed it to be haunted—but management’s official position is that ghosts do not exist.
Some former employees were less sure. “Yes! Oh, my God! Yes!” Robert Samuel, a former doorman, said, when asked if he had felt anything strange on the job. “Just going down to the employee’s locker room gave me an eerie feeling—like a sixth sense.” But he said the doorman turnover had more earthbound roots: the building is non-union, and pays less than many others. (The building’s owners deny that turnover has been abnormal.) Samuel, who supplements his income by waiting in line for Cronuts and tickets to Shakespeare in the Park, said that he was promised twelve dollars an hour in his interview but was paid only eleven. After two months, Samuel left for one of the new towers on Fifty-seventh Street, in Manhattan, which was offering more. Several other doormen have since followed. “Ghosts are scary, and I believe in that stuff,” Samuel said. “But equal wages for equal work—that’s really what drove me away.”
At 123 On the Park, Melnitz stepped into an elevator large enough to hold a gurney, and rode it up to the roof. “I don’t know why we assume the ghosts are in the basement,” she said. “If you had to live here forever, wouldn’t you come up here?” From the roof, the only visible spectres were the husks of more buildings rising around the park. The anti-gentrification ghosts had a lot of work to do. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/room-with-a-boo?mbid=social_facebook
Room with a Boo
BY REEVES WIEDEMAN
BUY THE PRINT »
Others were starting to notice strange things, too. “When I was in the subbasement, many months ago, I definitely felt something weird,” Andy Hamingson, the executive director of St. Ann’s Warehouse, who lives on the fourth floor, said. A veterinarian on the first floor found that objects often fell from shelves, and her television had a habit of turning on without anyone touching the remote. “I’m a scientist, so I’m very rational,” she said. “Usually.” The location of the hospital morgue had become a particular concern. Melnitz suspected the laundry room, while Maxime Malet, a French newspaper reporter, had pegged the gym. “Maybe I can say the fear of ghosts prevents me from going,” he said.
A number of residents were beginning to wonder if they might be at fault. Perhaps the spirits were “anti-gentrification ghosts” conjured by locals who were upset that their hospital had been replaced by high-end apartments; a former patient had recently walked in seeking care. (One local blogger said that the hospital now specialized in “Paycheck Removal Surgery.”) Several tenants considered asking for a rent break, on account of the ghosts—in 1991, the New York Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who wanted to back out of buying a house after learning that the owner believed it to be haunted—but management’s official position is that ghosts do not exist.
Some former employees were less sure. “Yes! Oh, my God! Yes!” Robert Samuel, a former doorman, said, when asked if he had felt anything strange on the job. “Just going down to the employee’s locker room gave me an eerie feeling—like a sixth sense.” But he said the doorman turnover had more earthbound roots: the building is non-union, and pays less than many others. (The building’s owners deny that turnover has been abnormal.) Samuel, who supplements his income by waiting in line for Cronuts and tickets to Shakespeare in the Park, said that he was promised twelve dollars an hour in his interview but was paid only eleven. After two months, Samuel left for one of the new towers on Fifty-seventh Street, in Manhattan, which was offering more. Several other doormen have since followed. “Ghosts are scary, and I believe in that stuff,” Samuel said. “But equal wages for equal work—that’s really what drove me away.”
At 123 On the Park, Melnitz stepped into an elevator large enough to hold a gurney, and rode it up to the roof. “I don’t know why we assume the ghosts are in the basement,” she said. “If you had to live here forever, wouldn’t you come up here?” From the roof, the only visible spectres were the husks of more buildings rising around the park. The anti-gentrification ghosts had a lot of work to do. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/room-with-a-boo?mbid=social_facebook
