Is Your Building's Boiler Room as Clean as the One at Tracy Towers?

Frank DiBlasi, board president of Tracy Towers, says that he often shows slides of the cooperative's boiler room to shareholders to illustrate that the building is well maintained. "We could have meetings in there," he notes. "There are some [boiler] rooms where you can't take the stench. People look at it as a room that generates heat but it's also a place where you can generate a lot of problems for the building."

Boiler rooms: meticulously clean, well lit, and free of debris. What a concept. The three men who maintain the ones described here say that one element of a healthy building is a boiler that is in tip-top shape and in a clean room. It's the kind of common sense that is not always so common.

Meet Michael Leahy. Leahy, 61, understands the need to baby a boiler room. As resident manager of Tracy Towers in Kips Bay for the last thirty years, he recalls when the building's current boiler was installed in 1999. "The old one was hard to maintain. I was relieved to get a new one."

Each month, he and his staff spend almost three hours cleaning the pipes. "We try to do as much as we can ourselves. If you aren't on top of it, you are going to have a mess." Leahy paints the area every year, slathering grey on the floor, blue on the boiler, and even adding a tribute to the Pittsburgh Steelers (a painting of the helmet in a black and gold box is in the center of the room). He is a longtime Steelers fan, an obsession this Irish immigrant picked up from a former coworker at Con Edison in the 1970s. He added the icon because "it puts a smile on people's faces."

Still, there is a more practical purpose for keeping the area squeaky clean and appealing. It makes it easier to spot leaks. "If you have a dirty boiler room, you won't notice them immediately," says Leahy.

 
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Photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio