A prickly Manhattan couple — frustrated by the prospect of losing their private deck to an adjacent construction project — bought barbed wire to bar workers from their property.
Philip Simon and Tanya Puccini were stunned to learn last year that their treasured terrace was about to be covered in scaffolding as part of facade work on the next-door Grosvenor House condominium.
“Just because the Department of Buildings approved something doesn’t obligate me to conform my behavior and volunteer my property for it,” Simon fumed.
The terrace takes up about a third of their roughly 550-square-foot, one-bedroom pad on West 15th Street off Union Square and is the reason the couple fell in love with the residence, Puccini said.
“It’s a place you can go all night long in the summer. We always have the doors and windows open, and we had grown all these vines onto the fence. It’s really private. There are no other decks, not even any other windows,” she said.
Before moving in, Simon and Puccini asked their broker about the construction at Grosvenor but were told it wouldn’t impact them.
They found out in August that Grosvenor intended to take over the terrace during construction. The condominium offered just $4,800 in compensation, half of which the couple say their landlord tried to pocket.
“Our main problem last year was that no one contacted us,” Puccini said. “They kept telling us, ‘Sorry, you have no rights.’ ”
Natural light and most of the airflow for the apartment come from the terrace, which they had filled with thousands of dollars’ worth of plants, Puccini and Simon said.
But their pleas for privacy or increased compensation fell on deaf ears. Fed up, Simon bought razor and barbed wire and alerted Grosvenor House via e-mail.
“Please take note to inform your scaffolder boys that it would be [a] mistake to attempt any projects that require access to my deck,” he warned.
Grosvenor eventually delayed the facade work, and the couple kept their deck intact and free of the barbed wire — but now the condo has gone to Manhattan Supreme Court seeking an order allowing it access to the space. Grosvenor will need to use the deck for at least two months, according to court papers.