Tenants rallied in a blizzard against the notorious landlord as heating outages and crumbling infrastructure push them to the brink. 

By COLE SINANIAN | news@queensledger.com

JACKSON HEIGHTS — “What do we want? Housing justice! When do we want it? Now!” 

Clad in an enormous fur hood that nearly obscures her face, Mirela Bulagea leads the few dozen of her neighbors before her in the chant as she squints against the blowing wind and snow in the courtyard of her Jackson Heights apartment building. 

If you’d told Bulagea a year ago that she’d soon be speaking at a press conference as one of the lead organizers for the newly inaugurated La Mesa Verde Tenants Union, the Romanian-born mother of two might not have believed it.  But for Bulagea and her neighbors at La Mesa Verde, a six-building apartment complex along 90th and 91st St in Jackson Heights, the union is a necessity. Landlord A&E Real Estate Holdings is among the city’s most negligent, having topped public advocate Jumaane Williams’ annual “Worst Landlords” list in 2025 with 4,872 open HPD violations across its 181-property portfolio.  

At La Mesa Verde, this means chronic heating failure broken elevators, rat and roach infestations, and damp, black mold-covered walls that have brought health problems and despair to the property’s tenants,  leaving them with no choice but organize a union in the hope that together, they can force A&E into compliance. 

“We all have to work hard to make payments for rent,” Bulagea said. “All we demand is for them to provide decent living conditions for everyone.” 

‘We Won’t Back Down’

At the press conference, held February 22 amidst a once-in-a-decade blizzard, tenants described unlivable conditions and demanded that A&E address the hundreds of HPD violations across La Mesa Verde’s six buildings. 

“We’re here today because our  landlord has left us in freezing and unsafe conditions and we’re tired of them ignoring us,” said Ivonne Calderon, a mother of two originally from Mexico.

The Queens Ledger toured Calderon’s two-bedroom apartment in December as part of an investigation into conditions in the building. The walls in her living room were covered with peeling and bubbling paint, while rat and cockroach infestations had forced her to pack all of her food and kitchen  supplies into airtight plastic bins. 

Calderon, who pays around $1,300 a month, described calling A&E’s emergency maintenance hotline, only to be sent to voicemail or told to wait for a callback that never came. 

“We’ve paid our rent, but we haven’t received the basic living conditions that we’re owed,” Calderon said in Spanish at Sunday’s conference. “We’re united, and we won’t back down until our homes are safe.” 

As her neighbors aired their grievances outside in the snow, Emily Benko, who had planned to speak at the conference as one of the union’s lead organizers, sat coughing at a friend’s house, sick with bronchitis. The 34-year-old carpenter has been without heat since the last week of January in her one-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment, for which she pays $1,999 monthly. 

In an interview, she explained that when her heat first went out during late January’s cold snap, she left small cups of water around her apartment to gauge the temperature. After just a few hours they had all frozen, she said. When she came down with bronchitis last week, Benko decided to take her dog and cat to a friend’s house until her condition improved. 

“Basically I’ve just been living in my bedroom for a month because it’s smaller and I just keep the heater on and keep the door cracked,” Benko said. “I was afraid if I went outside for too long, I wouldn’t be able to get warm again.” 

Inconsistent heating, broken elevators and moldy walls are problems in A&E buildings throughout Queens. Earlier this month, the Ledger spoke to tenants at 32-52 33rd St in Astoria, where the heat would turn off nightly in some apartments, causing the temperature to drop into the 50s during some of New York’s coldest days in years. 

Several tenants at the press conference complained of an old and faulty heating system, leaving corner apartments like Benko’s cold while others swelter. La Mesa Verde was built in 1927, while its two boilers were most recently renovated in 2008 before A&E acquired the building, according to an A&E spokesperson in an email statement via PR firm Rubenstein Communications. The spokesperson explained that only one of the two boilers is reliably functioning, and that management has already invested $400,000 in a replacement boiler to address heating issues. The new boiler was supposed to arrive on February 23, the spokesperson wrote, but the blizzard had delayed delivery.

“Our boiler service company has attempted several different repairs since January to restore service to the down boiler and has determined that the boiler is approaching the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced,” they wrote. “Upon this determination, an emergency permit was filed to begin the boiler replacement work immediately.” 

The spokesperson continued: “With only one of the two boilers servicing the property fully functioning, some apartments are being over-heated and others under-heated. We were losing pressure and steam was escaping through the damaged boiler. Welding crews were dispatched to seal off the steam headers that were connected between both boiler plants. Until the work is completed for the ultimate solution of replacing the out of service boiler, we continue to work on steam balancing for the properties to provide more even heating levels to all units.”

La Mesa Verde Property Manager Jenna McKeegan did not respond to requests for comment. 

Strength in Numbers 

Emily Mervosh lives at 35-65 86th St, a different A&E building just a few blocks away from La Mesa Verde. She attended the Sunday press conference in solidarity with La Mesa Verde tenants, and described similar conditions at her building. Like at La Mesa Verde, lack of adequate heating, mold, peeling lead paint, collapsing ceilings, chronic infestations and unresponsive management has led tenants at Mervosh’s building to organize a union, which she said she hoped would one day coalesce into a city-wide A&E tenants union. 

“We are slowly building, and we want to collaborate with other buildings like Mesa Verde,” Mervosh said in an interview. “Because there really is strength in organizing, strength in numbers. So we’re trying to organize as many A&E buildings as we can.”

In January, the Mamdani Administration ordered A&E to immediately correct outstanding violations at 14 properties across Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, and announced a $2.1 million settlement with the company that would go towards restitution to tenants for the alleged harassment brought by A&E’s neglect. Neither La Mesa Verde, 35-65 86th St, nor 32-52 33rd St were included in the settlement.

Founded in 2011 and led by Douglas Eisenberg and Margaret Brunn, A&E has been hit by recent financial troubles. In February 2025, PinusCo. reported that A&E faced foreclosure proceedings on a $506.3 million J.P. Morgan Chase loan backing a 31-property portfolio. Meanwhile, in order to purchase the 32-52 33rd Street property in Astoria, the company took out a $22 million loan from the now-defunct Signature Bank, which folded in 2023. A&E now owes the $22 million to Spanish bank Santander, which acquired Signature’s debt, according to online databases ACRIS and Signature Portfolio Dashboard.

In an email statement sent to La Mesa Verde tenant organizers, Jackson Heights City councilmember Shekar Krishnan condemned A&E’s neglect and pledged solidarity with La Mesa Verde tenants.

“As neighbors, you all have stood up for each other and looked after one another day after day,” Krishnan wrote. “And we will hold A&E — one of the worst landlords in our city, who has been especially neglectful in Jackson Heights — accountable.” 

He continued: “A&E’s greed has gone unchecked for too long and while the recent settlement is a step in the right direction, as Chair of the Oversight and Investigations Committee and the representative of the most A&E buildings in the city, I will keep fighting for tenants’ rights and an end to A&E’s neglect.” 

‘We’re All Working Class People’

According to Benko, tenants at La Mesa Verde began organizing last summer. Both of the building’s elevators had broken in March, forcing many tenants to climb multiple flights of stairs daily— a potentially dangerous physical burden for the building’s elderly and disabled tenants. 

Benko credits one of her neighbors, a woman named Celina della Croce, with igniting organization efforts at La Mesa Verde. She said della Croce, who did not attend Sunday’s press conference, had previously worked as a professional labor organizer and is now a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) — a socialist political organization with chapters nationwide. 

Della Croce gathered a group of tenants and fellow PSL organizers to canvas La Mesa Verde, going door-to-door with flyers for the nascent tenants union and urging neighbors to unite against their negligent landlord. Meetings were held in building lobbies and group chats were formed, which Benko said have been instrumental in both forcing A&E to make necessary repairs and keeping each other safe as temperatures dropped and conditions in the building worsened. 

“If it wasn’t for the tenants association, people would have died,” Benko said. 

On cold days, neighbors with heat used the group chat to offer up their space heaters to those without. It was through one of these tenants’ group chats that Benko met Bulagea, whom she now considers a friend. Bulagea had responded to Benko’s post in the chat about some Swiffer pads she was giving away. The two women met in the lobby to exchange the pads, and ended up bonding over their shared struggles. 

“You don’t have to be best friends with your neighbors,” Benko said, “but you might as well take advantage of the proximity. We’re all working class people.”

More than 100 tenants at La Mesa Verde have signed onto a lawsuit against A&E seeking both immediate corrections to outstanding violations and restitution for alleged tenant harassment brought by A&E’s negligence. Lawyers with Communities Resist — the legal nonprofit representing La Mesa Verde tenants in the case  — gathered retainers from tenants, while the union’s organizers coordinated mass 311 calls in an attempt to address the building’s most severe violations as quickly as possible. 

Benko said it was these coordinated efforts through the union that pushed A&E to fix one of the elevators, which has now been working since early January. The other elevator, however, remains broken. 

“It feels like we have some power,” she said. “It feels like when they break the law now, they’re not gonna get away with it as easily.”

At  Sunday’s press conference, Communities Resist attorney Christos Bell urged tenants to continue organizing, both with regards to the legal case and in their day-to-day lives.  

“We are trying to do our best to compel them to make the necessary repairs in this building, but it’s not just about legal cases,” Bell said. 

“By ourselves, we’re not gonna be able to win,” he continued. “But together, that’s when we have the power to win.”

A section of Jackson Avenue was renamed ‘New York Irish Center Way’ in honor of the generations of Irish that have called NYC home. 

GEOFFREY COBB | gcobb91839@Aol.com

Author, “Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past

LONG ISLAND CITY  — It was a bitterly cold day on Saturday February 7th for the celebration of the renaming of the stretch of 1040 Jackson Avenue as New York Irish Center Place, but the Irish are a hardy bunch. About seventy brave souls defied the seven-degree day and subzero wind chill to watch City Councilmember Julie Won unveil the new street sign.

Won spoke of how her family, which immigrated from South Korea, was warmly greeted by the Irish community when she arrived in Queens as an eight-year-old. She related how Irish mothers passed on educational advice to Won’s mother and how supportive and welcoming the Irish community was to newcomers to Queens.

“It is important to honor the Irish who have done so much to build our community,” Won told me. Won has helped the center receive over $500,000 in grants. She said that last year alone a mind boggling 25,000 people came to the center, including many outside the Irish community.

The Center hosts three annual programs. In March it stages 40 Shades of Green, a Saint Patrick’s Day cultural marathon celebrating Ireland’s patron saint.  Along with Culture Lab LIC & McManus Irish Dance, the center presents the Queens Irish Heritage Festival as well. A world music series called Crossroads Concerts blends and juxtaposes Irish folk traditions with music from many other cultures.

Forty-three different organizations use the center for programming like Irish dance classes and Gaelic language and literature events, but the center’s outreach also includes non-Irish groups that serve the larger community including suicide prevention services, alcoholic anonymous meetings, immigration counseling and an ever-expanding list of others. The center welcomes people of all races, ethnic backgrounds and faiths. Last year, for example, eighteen Indian American events took place at the center. The center also teamed up with  Councilmember Won to raise more than $14,000 in a Christmas toy drive for underprivileged children.

For Twenty-one years, the Irish Center has served as the beating heart of New York City’s Irish community. The idea for the center was conceived by Belfast native Fr. Colm Campbell who saw a need for a place for the Irish community to gather. Angela Reily, the widow of legendary Irish folk singer Paddy Reilly addressed the audience on Saturday: “My husband would be happy to see how successful the center has become,” she said. The singer was instrumental in raising money for the center and helping to found it. Following a long and hard structural renovation and generous gifts from local Irish building contractors, the Center opened its doors in 2005.

The director and beating heart of the New York Irish center is Limerick-born George Heslin, who has run this multi-purpose community center for five years. Prior to his appointment, Heslin served for 19 years as founding Artistic Director of off-Broadway’s Origin Theatre Company. Warm, personable and capable, Heslin is also a recipient of the Irish Examiner/New York Man of The Year Award.  Though Heslin is modest, he proudly noted, “No other Irish organization does what the New York Irish Center does.”

Heslin says that first and foremost the center is a social service organization. The center radiates a typically Irish ability to welcome people, which Heslin demonstrates in his love for people, especially many of the Irish senior citizens for whom the center is a social lifeline.  He describes his work helping Irish seniors living out their lives overseas as a “privilege,” and said that the center plans to create more programs to cater to the needs of older Irish people including new programs in grief counseling and befriending seniors. Many of these seniors now have no living relatives in Ireland and the center is their only true connection to the land of their birth.  Dozens of these Irish seniors look forward to the lunch the center serves them each Wednesday.

Heslin and his small staff have worked hard to expand the cultural offerings the center stages, including traditional Irish music, dance and theater. Last year the center staged an astounding 160 events, which paid some four hundred artists who performed at them. Stageandcinema.com described the vibe at performances there as “ a bit like stumbling into a well-kept secret; it’s an intimate gathering place and an unassuming, cozy, cultural enclave.” The New York Irish Center is much more than a home to the New York Irish community. It is a home for thousands of New Yorkers, many of whom are not even Irish.  As former Executive Director of the New York Irish Center Paul Finnegan remarked, “It is fitting that this section of Jackson Avenue will now be called the NY Irish Center Place because it is home to an inclusive, caring community in a building built lovingly with the hands of its past and present generations.”