Gateway Apartments — Local services in New York

Gateway Residential Management LLC is the most incompetent despicable business I have ever encountered in my entire life. Facilities are far from “luxurious” and the management is negligent, unfit, and often outright malicious. Be warned: do not, under any circumstances, choose to live here or participate in any business with this company.

The Building & Facilities:

The Gateway complex is a deteriorating relic of the early 1980s yet they evoke a 1900-era tenement-vibe, maximizing “living space” with low-slung ceilings. Once you step past the lobby's façade, you’ll encounter the poorest infrastructure in lower Manhattan.

The units are plagued by broken heaters and abominable insulation such that in the winter, there are Siberian drafts through all the windows and your heating costs will soar into the hundreds. In 2014, residents launched a class action lawsuit against building for insufficient heating and insulation which the building lost, yet they have taken little action to improve the conditions. Several times, they shut down the entire building's water due to damaged pipes. Management hikes the rent 6%+ each year while doing nothing to improve the facilities.

Another highlight: the elevators. There are only 4 decrepit elevators per building, servicing up to 34 floors and 26 units per floor. These primitive pulley-boxes are prone to malfunction, regularly causing waiting lines of 20+ people stretching into the lobby. Their lethargic pace coupled with the fact that the only on-site laundry is on the 2nd floor means that you will spend upwards of 3 minutes on average waiting for/in an elevator every time you enter/exit. Grocery deliverers say “these are the slowest elevators in Manhattan.” Often the elevators can’t even handle passenger weight well below their stated max capacity, causing them to stall until someone gets out. This is a serious hazard which management cheerfully overlooks.

The pool is only open during the summer and they charge $7 for a day pass so you can have the opportunity to submerge yourself in an overcrowded pool of 30% toddler urine, or $5 for the pleasure of adult swim for one hour in the gathering darkness from 7-8pm in the same pool of 30% urine, sans toddlers.

The Management:

The management office is a cluster of grossly negligent and greedy individuals who happily use chicanery (fees, small print) to defraud their residents. At the helm of this band of crooks is Vanessa Laucella, the Ass. Dir. of Res. Property Admin.

Their office has taken unreasonably long to “process” my security deposit which I have still not received although we left the unit in pristine condition 3 weeks ago. They arbitrarily charged me an illegal $155 “management fee” and tried to deduct yet another $65 for missing keys which we had, in fact, returned. I had to personally locate the keys at their front desk before they withdrew the charges.

They can also be actively malicious. Gateway requires its tenants to reserve an elevator for moving in/out. I scheduled my move out with their office but when I was moving out, they first denied that I had scheduled a move and prevented me from using the service elevator blocked my movers’ truck from having access to the building, costing time and money finally gave us access to the elevator but tried to physically block the men as they carried my last furniture out of the lobby

The office is also extraordinarily unreachable. They often do not respond to emails, use an unaffiliated call-answering who will not forward your message or provide any meaningful information, and actively avoid responding to you, even in person. Instead of answering my questions, I was faced with a secretarial nitwit who stubbornly refused to let me speak to anyone and insisted that I schedule an appointment via email, which I had already done.

They also do not respect privacy. My roommate was home at least twice when management had men enter our apartment without any reason or permission. They also demanded entry to rooms that were locked without consent of the...

Gateway is located in a safe, quiet, and beautiful area. While I heavily enjoyed Battery Park City and the neighboring areas, issues with Gateway's management and community prevent me from recommending Gateway to anyone.

The management team is extremely slow to respond, does not work on Sundays, and is overall disorganized. Expect issues moving in or out, because both times we weren't noted down properly in their system which caused delays. During our move-out, my freight elevator reservation email took weeks for a response even after follow-ups, and I tried to call the day before to confirm which resulted in an unanswered support ticket. On the day of the move-out, we waited for security to let our truck in, and then waited again for UPS/FedEx trucks to finish unloading which in total resulted 45 minutes wasted of our freight elevator reservation. Finally as we started loading the truck, we learned about our neighbor moving out at the same time and that management allowed the freight elevator to be double booked. Granted, you don't have to deal with management every single day, but keep your expectations extremely low when it comes to anything time sensitive.

As far as the community goes, most of the neighbors are friendly and respectful, but there were many on our floor who were loud and disrespectful. A few people loudly slammed their doors, and there was a dad playing soccer with his kids in the hallway, which resulted in loud screams and the ball hitting doors. We used to live in midtown so noise is a former friend, but to be playing sports in a shared hallway as opposed to going to the park is bizarre and disrespectful. Perhaps we just got unlucky with our neighbors though, but the disrespectful community seemed to extend out to the laundry room as well. People would not properly clean up after themselves and would pretend like no one else had to use the machines. One day, I saw someone bring a huge cart of what looked like months of dirty laundry, and I was just glad to be done with laundry before they came.

I'm not sure if doormen go into the management or community category, but there was only one doorman whom I truly enjoyed talking to and highly respected. The rest acted very rude and would mishandle package deliveries.

We lived in a doormen building in midtown which did not have all of the issues I listed here. In fact, the experience was very much the opposite. Gateway was located in a great area that we wanted to explore though, especially for the summer, and the COVID-19 rates were unbeatable. After we got the lease renewal contract with a high rate increase, there was absolutely no way to justify dealing with all...

UPDATE: No one can ever respond to an email or pick up a phone call. I have followed up about asking that a pet fee be removed from my account 4 days ago as I had to put my cat down, they have no responded. I also needed a fee reversed and they claimed they did it (still shows up on my paper bill + account) They are leaving ME with the responsibility to reach out to THEIR payment processing company to have this fee reversed. Any other company would’ve reached out on the customers behalf. I’m not sure what else they have to do since it’s not responding to emails or picking up phone calls.

Truly some of the worst service ever.

Laundry room is always dirty, courtyard is drenched in urine and covered in feces. Pool is great but overly-priced ($30/3 hours on weekends) and is overbooked often. The gym leaves much to be desired, just like the “coworking” space (it’s just a few tables and chairs in a room with no obvious wifi, printer or anything) you can just as easily work in Brookfield across the street. They have not had a window washer (which you have to pay about $200/window for) for over a year now.

You’ll also never be able to get in touch with a representative through email or phone. If you have any questions regarding your lease, or billing, good luck. They will not take into account how good of a tenant or how bad your apartment is or anything when it comes to lease negotiations. I was late on rent by total accident (I work for a women’s healthcare clinic and it’s been pretty busy) one time in over 2 years as a tenant, and they charged me a fee. I understand this is a policy, but it took weeks to even hear if this could be waived (a no would’ve sufficed) after I called and cried to someone in the phone at how frustrated I was to never hear back, I received a very unprofessional/rude/late no. I have always paid my rent early, I would’ve expected a one-time exception, but even more so, I would’ve expected a response. I also had to hunt them down to make sure they received my additional security deposit which they took MONTHS to cash. I wanted to make sure they received it and it took forever to even have them confirm that.

The only upside was location and the view, but with gateway properties owning the businesses below the building, they’ve pushed out the ONLY pizza place this side of the highway as well as the wine shop. Those businesses were a plus to joining the building, but now we’re very isolated from anything enticing.

I was so excited to join this community, but they really don’t care about keeping tenants...