Brooklyn elevators among city's worst, News finds
BY JEFF WILKINS and JOTHAM SEDERSTROM DAILY NEWS WRITERS

They break down constantly, jam between floors and don't get fixed for days and even weeks. Others are filled with graffiti and the sour stench of dried-up urine.

Beaten-down, broken elevators at public housing developments across Brooklyn are among the worst in the city, found a Daily News survey of 36 projects.

The Sumner Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Tilden Houses in Brownsville and Walt Whitman Houses in downtown Brooklyn ranked among the worst in the borough, together chalking up a frightening 1,590 elevator outages in fiscal 2008.

"Everybody's been stuck in these elevators at least once," said Georgianna Lewis, 67, of the Tilden Houses, where a whopping 550 outages were reported at 16 elevators.

A News survey of elevators at public housing complexes throughout Brooklyn found that the Sumner Houses was the worst, with 506 outages and a 13.3-hour delay for repairs - but others were nearly as bad, according to the numbers.

The notorious Ingersoll Houses in downtown Brooklyn were nearly as bad as other complexes, with 580 outages chalked up among 53 elevators and repair delays of 17.9 hours.

Octogenarians Ophelia Harris and her husband, Paul Harris, have had to resort to death-defying stunts to ride elevators at the massive housing complex - despite that Paul Harris walks with a cane and is recovering from a stroke.

"Our elevator is always broken," said Ophelia Harris, 81, who has lived at the complex for 52 years.

"Sometimes we have to take the elevator in the building next door, climb to the roof, hop over the building, and climb back downstairs to our apartment. It's ridiculous."

The Sumner Houses earned scorn from many of its 2,445 residents over Labor Day weekend, when an elevator at one building sat broken for five days .

"They hardly come to fix the elevator," said resident Alease Jimeneg, who was steaming over broken elevators last week. "It's a shame that we have to live like this."

At the Whitman Houses, Cindy Kitt and family members said they had a near-death experience after an elevator they were riding plunged nine stories.

Kitt, 34, said the plunge was only the beginning of her elevator ordeal. The family ended up stuck in the car for two hours before workers finally pried the doors open.

"It was horrible," said Kitt, who has lived in the complex for 13 years.

"We were coming down from the 11th floor when the elevator just dropped to the second. We all hit our heads on the ceiling when it came crashing down.

"We almost died," said Kitt. "My cousin was crying and I was just praying to God that we'd be okay. I'd rather take the stairs now. It's like death in those things."

A New York City Housing Authority spokesman insisted the problems at many of the elevators were being investigated while also noting that a growing deficit and loss of federal funds has made it tougher to tackle the problem.

Spokesman Howard Marder said that, citywide, the number of elevator outages has dropped 7% to 43,762 in fiscal 2008, but he didn't immediately have numbers for Brooklyn.
jsederstrom@nydailynews.com