Take Notice

The lobby renovation in my Lower Manhattan co-op took years of planning, an assessment and months of disruption. So, too, did refurbishing the old elevator. And no work has been as expensive, dusty or intrusive as the massive facade repairs we currently are doing for the second time in five years.

Despite grousing, shareholders understand these projects are not optional. Work eventually will end and construction fatigue will fade. What will remain, perhaps until the end of time, is the proliferation of permits, alerts, warnings and notices that litter all of our common areas. 

In my building, copies of the Tenant Protection Plan Notice to Occupants and the Safe Construction Bill of Rights appear not only in the lobby but also on every floor next to the elevator button — above which is already a schematic showing the location of exits and warnings not to smoke and not to use the elevator in case of fire.

The bulletin board in the mailroom area of our lobby includes: a stop sexual harassment notice, a fire safety notice, a smoke detector notice, a carbon monoxide detector notice, an e-bike fire safety advisory and two work permits, not to mention the recently revised COVID-19 compliance certificate. Two more work permits are taped to the building’s front door along with a building energy-efficiency rating and an actual building energy-usage chart. Even after leaving the building, we’re not in the clear: On the sidewalk is an easel papered with four more work permits.

And no relief is in sight. After our current facade work is completed, five shareholders are lined up to start renovations, which means a new round of permits and notices will go up. When those projects are finished, at least two other renovations will follow. And by then it will be time for the next round of facade repairs. The shed will go back up — along with yards more of printed jabber.

We are suffering from a collective case of infoxication: the nonreaction to too much information. The postings in “public-facing locations” are intended for our safety, and yet I doubt any of my neighbors would get a grade higher than F if asked to describe the contents of even one of these word salads. Square yards of city-mandated wallpaper have turned our co-op into a permanent “Please, POST ALL BILLS” work site.

Worse, we have lost a valuable community hub.

The mailroom was once the town square of our co-op, the bulletin board our town crier. While turning the keys in our letter boxes we could eye announcements placed on them by fellow shareholders. Apartment 201 is giving away a bookshelf. It’s a boy for 302 and a rescue pup for 403. The teen in 504 is in an off-Broadway play. The memorial for the resident in 606 is next Tuesday. Talking about these non-mandated notices with fellow mail gatherers provided a built-in and increasingly rare opportunity to connect not just as fellow shareholders but as neighbors.

Now the only reason to be in our mailroom is to grab the mail and take packages off the shelf beneath a bulletin board filled with information no one pays attention to. As with the city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds, reams of important documents posted here and throughout the building have become a mandated annoyance. 

In my building, the board takes no liberties when it comes to complying with city codes and regulations, even when doing so requires a tango of contradictory actions. That’s why shareholders are fined for leaving shoes and bikes in the hall while the board tapes flammable paper notices to the walls above. And during our last renovation, it’s the reason we had to choose a hard-to-open, easy-to-smash glass front door to conform with the building’s 1931 design, but then had to cover it with 2023 notices, warnings and letter grades. 

Perhaps it’s time for the city to expand its green initiatives to include important residential notices in the 21st-century delivery system it already relies on to distribute vital information such as mass transit alerts, road closures, bad weather and missing people: email. Even if the number of public-facing notices throughout the five boroughs was limited to one per resident, email posts would save more than 85 million pounds of paper. That’s over 42,000 tons — the weight of a cruise ship, or the felling and processing of more than 10,000 trees.

Maybe then we’d get back our bulletin board and find community again in the mailroom — after first ducking under the ever-present sidewalk shed, yanking open the heavy front door and heading for the lobby, completely unnoticed.