55 Cooper Street, Manhattan, NY 10034

55 Cooper Street is a 6-story, 49-unit residential building built in 1936 in the Inwood neighborhood, currently owned by Mark Scharfman. The most pressing and recurring issue for this building has been heat and hot water problems, with multiple complaints documented between December 2023 and February 2025, including several building-wide outages in February 2025 that received emergency responses from HPD. These ongoing heating problems appear to be systemic rather than isolated incidents, as evidenced by multiple overlapping complaints from different tenants.

The building has also experienced infrastructure maintenance challenges, with violations noted in 2023 regarding defective self-closing doors in compactor closets on the 2nd and 5th stories, and various issues in apartment 5E including a loose kitchen floor saddle, missing carbon monoxide detector, broken bathroom tiles, and missing smoke detector. Apartment 1F had documented issues with mold in the hallway and bathroom plaster surfaces in late 2022, though these were subsequently addressed. The property has undergone regular rodent inspections, with mixed results indicating an ongoing pest control challenge; the most recent inspections in 2025 recorded rat activity.

However, the building appears to have maintained an effective bedbug management program, with no reported infestations in the past three years, following three isolated incidents between 2019-2020 that were properly addressed with eradication. Two Department of Buildings complaints from 2018 and 2019 regarding an illegal hotel and permit issues were closed without violation. While the building's systems and maintenance have shown consistent attention to violations when identified, the recurring heat and hot water problems remain the most significant ongoing infrastructure challenge as of 2025, with the potential to impact tenant comfort and quality of life.