West 96th Apartments

The building itself is lovely. Apartments are well maintained and the playroom, roof deck and gym are certainly selling points. OK location: close to Whole Foods and Central Park, but you will need to travel at least 10 blocks south for decent restaurants (which has been a huge disappointment for us!). The doormen and maintenance staff are also very nice and helpful.
The issue with this place is entirely due to the price and management. Apartments start out averagely priced. However rate increases have ranged from 8−15% in any given year. There are also numerous surprise fees — out of nowhere, Equity Residential decided to charge us a $ 75/​month and $ 500/​annual pet fee. A pet fee was stated nowhere in our original contract with Archstone, but they insisted on slamming us with a $ 1,400 random charge mid-​contract! I’m wondering when we will start being charged for our children… They also decided (mid-​contract) to charge residents monthly for heat and water, which was currently covered under rent. Since the meters were set for the overall building, they –of course– charged us $ 500 to readjust the meter for individual unit measurements. Then are the general gym/​convenience fees, etc etc etc.
You are also not allowed to have more than 1 guest (one nanny/​parent and one child) in the playroom. It is a very large playroom and we have never seen more than ~6 children at any given day/​time, but management’s directive is that any more than one guest will be turned away. Forget play dates for your kids. (or maybe they’ll start charging extra fees per guest??)
Lastly, a large portion of the building is subsidized. This is a sensitive and (politically) contentious matter, but it has become increasingly frustrating and unfair to be assessed fee after fee, and rent increase after incessant rent increase, when none of these fees are shared by the subsidized units. We can hardly afford these ‘market’ rents and live in an apartment that is way too small for our family; however you see subsidized tenants living in 2 – 3 bedroom apartments at ¼ of the price we are paying for a 1 bed. We share the same amenities; however the market apartments pay the lion’s share of the fees and rent and yet live in worse conditions. As a result, we see market tenants moving out every day, including ourselves.
Agree with previous reviews that the building was much friendlier and better maintained/​run while under Archstone management. Equity is bottom-​line driven and cuts corners at every chance to save a $. You will also find that most of its commercial tenants have moved out due to significant rent hikes. The spaces remain vacant until some big paying bank moves in.

Plus Points: Location to Central Park, Subways, B, C,1,2,3, Great Staff (Morning Doorman David, is a great building asset, as is the handymen), Close to Whole Foods ($$$) and Columbus Square, so you have a mini mall one block away. Nice Hallways, good clean modern lobby. Nice roof deck! The stainless steel kitchen works The gym is acceptable.
Minus Points: The apartments have electric heat which is very inefficient and you pay for, its like putting 4x space heaters side by side. Overall, the heat does not work well here in winter, the heating unit produces a very dry arid heat which if I stand next too for too long, feel I cannot breath. The apartment is chilly even with all the electric heater blasting on, the bathroom is always cold in winter. I have had more than one tenant say living in a unit facing the street (Columbus Avenue) is very noisy, we live in the back, in the summertime you hear a very notice-​able (loud) humming from various collective air conditioners units from other buildings which is why the beautiful back yard 750 Columbus Avenue has is not used much in the summertime (again, we face the back yard so we do look at the view, our view being a plus point). The laundry is small and is complete chaos in the morning, evenings are good, right now there are 2x broker dryers and 3x broker washers (and they have been this way for months). Oh yes, the floor we live on lightly shakes from time to time, and this I have checked out with other tenants on our floor, they experience the same thing. Management is not aware of the problem nor is the buildings maintenance. You are right next to major traffic coming from cross town 96^th Street, Columbus Avenue and 97^th Street which has incoming traffic coming from the Upper East Side, so the smog levels are higher here, in my opinion than other places I have lived in the last 40x years. We bought air purifiers, humidifiers and it helps!

For 9 years, I have lived in West 96^th and could not have asked for a better home on the UWS. The members of the management team are very professional. The doormen and doorwoman are amongst the best in NYC and exceptionally pleasant. The maintenance team is outstanding, efficient, and detailed oriented. For the location, the space, and upkeep of the property, the entire team at West 96^th has much to be proud about.

A quick correction to my review in response to Jennifer’s note: we rented under Equity, the current company (not Archstone), and our complaints all involve them. We never dealt with Archstone, the prior company. Stay away!!!
This is an overdue review — my husband and I moved here while I was pregnant for one year as a place to stay between buying and selling places. To be honest, we wanted a place that was safe, convenient and had amenities, and didn’t really have the time or energy to look exhaustively, and Archstone seemed fine. I have to say, in the long run, we felt totally ripped off with this place. We had a bunch of issues, including:
— We returned from vacation at night and shortly after we walked in, heard bubbling coming from one of the toilets, which had not been used since before we left. The toilet then began to fill up with human waste, which began to overflow onto the floor. We ran for the super, and when he got there, we were frantically using a bowl to pour everything into bathtub, and he told us that it wasn’t his fault personally and added that he didn’t want to be in the apartment since it was so late. The waste was apparently coming up through the pipes from the clinic below. Ultimately, they stopped the overflow, but not until our bathtub and bathroom floor were covered (and whatever was tracked in and out by the men working on the issue).
When someone came by the next day to clean, they literally had paper towels and a spray bottle of disinfectant that you’d clean a kitchen with. The super came by and pointed to the word disinfectant and said that it would take care of everything.
I really can’t explain how upsetting and disgusting the whole situation was. I spoke with the then-​manager in great detail about this, and her first response was that «things like this happen» in residential buildings. No, they really don’t. I told her that we felt uncomfortable because of this (and other issues living in the building) and wanted to leave and was told that we could not terminate our lease early. After a great deal of back and forth, they agreed to comp us 1 or 2 days rent, which honestly meant nothing to us and was not the goal. We had a good deal of items that were ruined by the waste, so this just covered those costs. I was also told that the spray bottle was enough to thoroughly clean the area and when I still disagreed, was told that I could have someone clean and that it would be paid for.
I asked to speak to someone at the next level, and Mike called me several days later. He explained that we had a binding contract and that we would need to go to court to get out of the lease. I’m an attorney, but to be honest, just did not have the time or energy to go through this. I then called the general Archstone number to speak to someone higher up, left a message and never heard back.
Apparently, this issue was already happening on the floor, and for some reason, nothing was fixed until we spoke to all of these people. Our neighbors were apparently told by management that just water came out of their toilet when it happened to them (they had been on vacation).
— There are fluorescent lights in many rooms and the cabinets, hardware, etc. are all very poor quality and things broke on several occasions.
— The air conditioners and heating units do not work well at all. One unit provides forced air for both air conditioning and heat. The heat in particular was terrible — if you were near it, it was very hot, but if you stepped away, it was too cold. There was no heat in the bathrooms, which made showering in the winter miserable. It was definitely not an appropriate temperature to bathe an infant in. Right before moving out over the summer, during very hot weather, the AC in our child’s room stopped working. No one was available and management later explained that they had 48 hours to fix it, but as a courtesy, they did it the next day.
— The responsiveness to routine maintenance requests was spotty and often took repeated requests. The maintenance guys all seemed nice and hardworking; there seemed to be a poor system in place though.
–We were repeatedly bullied to have our apartment shown before we had to. We repeatedly explained that we would like the apartment to be shown when we were there and that it needed to be within the 30 day period. We were then given no flexibility during the 30-​day time frame because the people that wanted to see the apartment had been «accommodating» by waiting until they were actually supposed to start showing the apartment. They were much more accommodating to prospective tenants than current, paying ones.
There’s more, but the bottom line is that this place was overpriced and not pleasant to live in. I have never had issues like this anywhere else.

Do not move into this building.
Since Equity bought it from Archstone, the upkeep is lacking. What they seem to do especially well is add on additional costs to your rent. You pay $ 500 a year for a small and poorly maintained «gym» whether you use it or not. You pay for sewage and other add-​ons which increase your rent significantly, all on top of an over– priced basic rent.
The building is noisy because you are on the corner of 96, 97 and Columbus where it seems every ambulance, fire engine (just 3 blocks away) and police car has its siren blasting ²⁴⁄₇. Trucks are forever blowing their air horns due to the congestion on Columbus Avenue. The noise drowns out conversations even in apartments on the higher floors and facing away from the street.
Cabs are hard to come by because Whole Foods customers (on the next block uptown) get just about all of them.
There is often a long wait for elevators as tenants are frequently moving out and in. There is no dedicated freight elevator. One and sometimes two of the four elevators are designated for moving.
The in house staff is exceptionally pleasant and always helpful. The problem with this building seems to be with the ownership and the overall management. There are too many negatives with this building to justify the high rent cost. Pass it by.

Lived here for a year. Management is overall extremely unresponsive, but what bothers me most is they don’t seem to understand the law/​contract very well. For example, they made me fill in PRE-​move in inspection form after I had been living in the apartment for 8 months. Two months before moving out, they asked if they could show my apartment to potential renter on a Saturday, while the contract specified I was only obligated to provide entry at regular business hours during the last month of my lease. I was required to pay $ 500 a year for common facilities but they never set me up for gym access. I finally could use the gym when the fingerprint thing stopped working and everyone could go in and they were too busy with other things to have it fixed.

I’ve been living in this building since I was 4 and I’m now turning 21. Not only is this place extremely expensive but the management doesn’t seem to care about the people in it. A few years ago mold was growing in my guest bathroom. We’ve complained multiple times especially since I had a infant nephew there. It took 4 months for someone to come and finally fix it or at least act like they fixed it. I go in my bathroom and noticed all they did was paint over it. This year it got WORSE! I live with my nephews who are under the age of 5 and I’m pretty sure paint isn’t the way to get rid of mold.
Also my guest toilet. My nephews are very young and tend to flush things down the toilet. It ended up getting clogged and we asked for them to fix it. Thank God we have another bathroom because it was going on a week and we kept getting the «someone will be there» line. We have to go down to the management office and basically cause a scene for someone to actually come upstairs and fix my toilet. It’s like you have to ask multiple times a day to ever get any response from management. I’ve basically grew up in this building and witnessed different management companies but the one we currently have is by far the worse.
There are many things I can say about this building but I rather end my rant now. Anyways before you go about posting how lovely the lobby is (which it is) please make sure you ask tenants how the service is.

I’ve been a tenant in this building since ⁸⁄₂₀₁₂. First, I just want to say that there are a few key lovely staff members in the building that do want to go out of their way to help you, but the management often gets in the way of accomplishing anything. Within a month of moving in we had bedbugs that were clearly left by the previous tenant. The building management did not handle this matter efficiently at all, and in fact refused to allow me to use the private company I wanted to hire to clear out the problem. Instead, they made me waste several weeks for their building exterminator, Terminex, who had no idea what they were doing when it comes to bedbug treatment. Thankfully, we used our guy anyway and haven’t had a problem since. Another major issue is that of constant construction and noise. Depending on where you in the building, you will absolutely hear street traffic, even on the high up floors. Then, they turnover apartments constantly, gut-​renovating making tons of noise throughout the building. Despite complaints to the building management, nothing changes except rent increases, and a fun new bonus we received that we must pay for our hot water starting this month. I’m looking forward to getting out of here when our lease is up!

Make sure you read the «Filtered» reviews. The management finds a way to bury those. All the negative and truthful reviews are made hard to find.

I have not lived in the archstone but i did take a tour as a potential tenant. First of all their leasing agent had completely forgot about the appointment and showed up 15 minutes late after the front desk called her. When she arrived she had no clue what my name was or what kind of apt I was looking for (we had spoken for 20 min on the phone two days earlier). Secondly, in my 15 minute wait time, I had the opportunity to scout out the tenants coming and going. They did not seem like the kind of people that are paying 3k+ a month for a 1br. Most people in building pay much less due to rent control. Lastly, at the end of the tour the agent slipped in the fact that starting june1 all new tenants pay for heat, water, AND PLUMING. When i told this to agents at other buildings they laughed and thought i was joking. BEWARE the red brick exterior is just a façade.
Also a $ 500 annual fee to use the facilities like the gym.
The only positive was the front desk people are very nice and courteous

People working in the building are super nice. However, the management company is horrible and unprofessional. Watch out for your rent increases. When I tried to address the situation with the management company, they simply dismissed my concern and treated me unprofessionally and rudely. I was their tenant for 5 year. Horrible!

RE: Alessa M.
Apartments look great in this building if you don’t mind spending no less than $ 3000 for a 1 bedroom. What a waste of money. You can mortgage a place for that price. If you don’t care about money, than go for yours. I think it’s a rip off.