An eccentric millionaire property owner — known for collecting cans and bottles in her Brooklyn neighborhood — is now negotiating with the city to save one of the landmarked Manhattan properties she owns.
Lisa Fiekowsky, 71, told The Post that she is in talks with the city to save the 125-year-old Renaissance Revival-style brick and limestone building she owns at 451 Convent Ave. The Post reported on Aug. 21 that the property was slated for demolition because Fiekowsky had allegedly neglected it for decades.
“I’m actively working with the Department of Buildings to save the building,” she said. “There’s a lot going on with engineers and lawyers, and I am doing everything I can to save it. I’m not sure my lawyer will let me say anything more.”
The four-story building, which is padlocked and has a large hole in the roof, had fallen into such disrepair that the city deemed it a danger to the public and the Department of Buildings had made the decision to demolish it last month.
Nestled on a pristine block in Harlem’s Sugar Hill Historic District, the structure has racked up thousands of dollars in fines and violations as well as a city lawsuit over a nine-year period. Fiekowsky, who lives in a $1 million co-op next to Prospect Park with her husband, bought the Harlem property in 1999, but failed to take care of it, according to public records.
Now she has surrounded herself with a small team of structural engineers and other experts to try to save the property, and the DOB is giving her a week to put together an emergency plan.
“If the owner’s engineering firm provides the requested additional information and coordinates the proposed work with the LPC [Landmarks Preservation Commission], and the owner follows through with stabilization of the building pursuant to plans acceptable to the Department, we can extend the emergency demolition while the owner mitigates the hazards and makes repairs,” a DOB spokesman told The Post Thursday.
Fiekowsky, who has an MBA from the University of Chicago, owns two other nearby Harlem properties and has earned the ire of local residents who told The Post they don’t understand why she fails to maintain them.
“It’s a blight on an otherwise beautiful neighborhood,” said William Geddes, a commercial photographer and the president of the Hamilton Terrace Block Association, named for the street where the properties are located.
Geddes told The Post that he has lived on the leafy Harlem block that leads into the Hamilton Grange National Memorial where Founding Father Alexander Hamilton once lived, for the last 15 years. He said that during that time, he has never seen tenants or any upkeep at 47 and 60 Hamilton Terrace, which are both owned by Fiekowsky, who also goes by her married name, Silversmith.
Fiekowsky has regularly paid the taxes on both the Convent Avenue property and 60 Hamilton Terrace, which she purchased for $1.5 million in 2005, according to public records. But she owes more than $62,000 in property taxes on 47 Hamilton Terrace, records show.
“We have been trying to reach her to do something about the properties,” Geddes said, adding that neighbors have called police and the DOB in the past several years to report rat infestations and damage, but nothing has helped, he said.. “It attracts vagrancy, garbage and rats. It’s not a good scene but there’s not a lot we can do about it.”
Another neighbor, who did not want to be identified, said that Hamilton Terrace is a close-knit neighborhood where “we have one another’s keys and we function like our own doormen.”
“I’ve been here for 20 years, and I have never seen anyone coming in or out of those houses,” the neighbor said, referring to 47 and 60 Hamilton Terrace. “It’s really too bad.”
When asked if she had seen the owner, the neighbor shrugged and said she had read stories in The Post about how she roams the city in a beat-up car collecting cans and bottles.
“I really don’t get it,” the neighbor said.
In 2018, The Post wrote about how Fiekowsky’s junk-filled Toyota Camry had been an eyesore in her Prospect Heights neighborhood for years.
