Tenants paying up to $10,000 a month for waterfront views at Eagle + West in Greenpoint say they’ve endured some surprising issues in their apartments, including mice, broken elevators, and noisy pipes.
Photo: Audley C Bullock/Shutterstock
Yusef Imani moved into a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment at Eagle + West, the puzzle-piece towers on the Greenpoint waterfront, in September 2023. The neurosurgeon was wooed by the floor-to-ceiling windows and buffet of amenities — a cycling studio, indoor and outdoor pools, a “state-of-the-art fitness center” — and willing to pay for it, at nearly $10,000 a month for a ground-floor unit. Friends would come over and ooh and ahh at his views of the Empire State Building and the complex’s massive communal terrace. “Then they’d ask me what it’s like living here,” he said, “and I’d tell them: It sucks.” The inconveniences started small: His apartment’s motorized blinds went on the fritz and destroyed his plant pots. Then came the mice in the primary bedroom, the den, and his bathroom. The hot tub that was part of his amenities package, for which he paid an extra $250 every month, was often out of order. This was not the carefully crafted luxury he was promised: “It was a pig with lipstick on it.”
Since the 2005 rezoning of Greenpoint’s industrial waterfront, a steady procession of glass towers has risen along the shoreline, nearly all offering some version of the same pitch: stunning views and luxury living. Also, easy access to the many restaurants and bars flooding your TikTok feed and, per one local, frequented by “finance bros masquerading as art handlers.” But Brookfield Properties tried to distinguish Eagle + West by tapping OMA (the prestigious firm co-founded by Rem Koolhaas) to design a pair of stacked, cantilevered towers to house the property’s 745 units, most of which are market rate. The megadeveloper has advertised an “opulent and refined living experience” within its 30- and 40-story towers, which began leasing in summer 2022, but several residents claim their time in the complex, where a studio is currently listed for $4,071 and a three-bedroom for $11,704, has been decidedly lowbrow. (So great is the disappointment, it seems, that complaints about the towers have been piling up on Reddit and Google.)
One investment banker said he and his wife started waking up in the middle of the night after the pipes behind the walls in their two-bedroom corner unit began giving off sharp, hollow clicking noises. When a maintenance team finally came to inspect their apartment, which is in the shorter 227 West tower, they cut holes in the wall that the banker said were left patched up with painter’s tape for months. “Aesthetically, it was not nice,” he said. Management ultimately made repairs that dulled the noise and fixed their butchered wall — and, later, offered concessions on rent, which a property administrator stressed were “based on the market” and not the issues with the apartment, per an email shared with me. Still, a version of the clicking, albeit a slightly quieter one, persists today. “If I’m paying like $8,000 a month in rent, I just want to be able to sleep,” the tenant said. Another former resident, a commercial-real-estate investor who had rented a $7,000 penthouse one-bedroom until September 2024, said his bathroom would flood whenever he showered. “The floors were constructed in such a way where the water wouldn’t drain one way,” he told me. (Eagle + West said the issue with the bathroom floors has been addressed.)
Another finance guy (are you sensing a pattern?) told me that while renting with his husband at the taller 1 Eagle tower, the maintenance staff removed a broken lock from his patio door. The lock needed to come off, but then building staff failed to replace it, letting cold winter winds blow through the unit for about a month until a new door was installed. Their bathroom floor also pooled with water after showering, and noise from other apartments, like the shrill beeps of a low-battery smoke detector next door, carried through the paper-thin walls. (“Very poltergeist-y,” he said.) Still, the couple stayed in the complex, ultimately moving last July to a one-bedroom at 227 West for which they pay nearly $4,500 a month.
There hasn’t been any flooding or mysterious noises in the new unit, but they still have complaints. The gym, housed in a bridge connecting the residential towers, has “dust bunnies running around,” the finance guy claimed, while spin bikes are allegedly missing pedals and a cracked mirror has been taped up for months. (Another tenant, the real-estate investor, said he stopped doing push-ups on the gym floor after too many run-ins with “big blocks of hair.” He switched to bench presses.) Residents at 227 West also claim at least one of the three elevators servicing their entire building is usually out of service; some even said they’ve had to climb 20-plus flights of stairs to get home. “There was a time when only one elevator was working and we had to wait five minutes,” a consultant who rents there told me. “You don’t expect it from a luxury building.”
Which isn’t to say that everyone’s unhappy. Debora Domass, a product manager, told me her “tiny” studio in 1 Eagle is a serious upgrade from the ancient railroad or cockroach-infested loft apartments she previously lived in in the neighborhood. (“All my friends were like, ‘What happened to you? You used to be the biggest hater of those high-rises.’”) She’s got a Bosch washer-dryer and dishwasher; the “really lovely” doormen sign for her packages and make sure they don’t get stolen; and “everything works and is convenient.” But even she had some complaints — there have been a few leaks already, and while she doesn’t use the gym, she’s noticed that it is under repair kind of a lot. She’s mostly irritated by the ever-expanding surcharges: “Bike storage room? It costs extra. The outdoor pool that used to be included? Now extra for this season. Everything is a money grab.” In a statement, an Eagle + West spokesperson called the property “an awesome place to live,” noting the staff “works tirelessly to deliver a positive experience for our residents every day.” Per management, 95 percent of the building is leased, and many of the tenants’ issues, including the out-of-service elevator, have been addressed.
Are these, to some extent, just standard inconveniences of apartment living? Since 2023, a total of 45 complaints, including for leaks, mold, and heating issues, have been made to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development about Eagle + West — roughly on par with its neighboring high-rises. But tenants in its towers are paying a premium for frictionlessness, according to the finance guy: “Luxury is not having to worry about the minutiae of daily life.” Delusional or not, high-end renters and condo owners across the city have found themselves facing similar disappointments in their glass boxes. 432 Park Avenue on Billionaires’ Row has devolved into the poster child of defective buildings after a series of well-publicized complaints about frequent flooding and elevators that shut down during high winds, trapping at least one resident for an hour in 2019. Last year, a couple who purchased a $6.1 million one-bedroom in the Mandarin Oriental, Fifth Avenue, alleged in an ongoing suit that not only was their apartment missing drawers and the millwork warped by the time they moved in, but the developers were “nickel-and-diming” them over missing place mats in a way that was “inconsistent with the luxury and value promised.” (They also alleged in a separate, ongoing suit that the building’s amenities had been neglected, causing the “rooftop oasis” to transform into “a wasteland of dead foliage and an algae-infested pool.”) Most recently, residents at Brooklyn Tower said they have spent years without promised amenities like outdoor pools, a multi-floor Life Time athletic club, or the “world’s highest dog run.”
Imani, the neurosurgeon, ultimately left his high-ceilinged apartment on the waterfront for a different kind of luxury: a Fort Greene brownstone. In November, he traded his lease at Eagle + West for two entire floors in his new building, where there’s a backyard and a park nearby that his cane corso, Blu, can run around in. “That view’s nice, but it’s not everything, man,” he said.
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