The Eugene — Local services in New York

Please read this review before making a decision about The Eugene!!

The Eugene building and the staff have far surpassed any and all expectations we had before moving here in May 2018. Jared, Stefan, Kevin and the front desk team are thoughtful, friendly and knowledgeable. It makes my day to leave or come home to their smiling faces at the front desk! Valerie at the La Palestra Gym desk has fast become a good friend, and will often take time out of her busy day to talk to me and see how I am. Liam is always supporting and implementing cool new events for the tenants like the World Cup viewing parties and the icey poles in the reception area. If you are looking for a luxury building with the best amenities in Manhattan, whilst still feeling like you are in a small and intimate environment with staff that feel more like family, then you really don’t need to keep looking after The Eugene!

I have read through the 1 star reviews here I am so sad and angry that people have chosen to air their dirty laundry online here rather than email the amazing staff (who would have responded quickly and professionally). Because I know people will read these reviews and second guess their amazing first impression this place, I wanted to offer counter arguments to all the points given in 1 star reviews.

Packages: We have had close to 40+ packages delivered since we moved, and nothing has gone missing or even taken longer than a few seconds for the staff to find in the mail room. Even when we have had to leave things there over a week before collecting, there were NO issues. Front desk protocols: The staff at the front desk are DILIGENT and take more than needed information on guests and stick to their rules. I once saw a friend of a tenant picking up the tenants iPad that she had accidently left there, and they took his photo, scanned all his forms of ID cards in his wallet and signed his name 3 times (signature, printed name and then signature again). The staff at the desk said “we just want to be sure nothing goes wrong and we tick all the boxes.” Construction noise: The noise cannot be heard over the air con. When the air con is off, it is a light humming. The street noise in Manhattan is MUCH worse. If you wanted NO sound, then maybe don’t live in Manhattan. Events in tenant space: The rooms here are hireable. Tenants can PAY to rent space for parties or their own events. I saw the Chinese Association party, and they had PAID to use the bar and the BBQ areas, just like any other tenant. The Eugene than holds charity events maybe once a month MAXIMUM on the roof so it closes by 4pm. These events feature in the ‘events’ section of the tenant app and online portal, and we are emailed about them weeks in advance. Roof construction: It was not construction, but rather the Manhattan window inspection that went on for a few weeks. This meant that the window cleaning poles were on the roof and were moved around to a different side each week. You could still literally use the entire roof and it made no difference to the experience up there. Paid amenities: Yes, you need to pay a monthly fee to use the roof, gym, library, rock-climbing wall etc. That is pretty clear when you get the tour. Internationals: The main reason we picked this building was because of how international their tenants were. Not sure how that is an issue somewhere like New York. Fire alarms: When we moved, we had issues with sensitive fire alarms. The maintenance men came the day I submitted a maintenance request, and installed completely new fire alarms. They then taught me what to do if it goes off again, how to unscrew it etc. Tenant rules: The Eugene takes the rules seriously with their tenants. E.g there is a fine is you are caught smoking anywhere!! Guests: You can bring in guests to the building and 1 guest 3 times a month to the gym. I am at the gym most days and never see people off the street. Sometimes people hold basketball games with friends and non-residence guests that don’t...

My roommate and I just moved out of Eugene a couple of weeks ago, and I have to say, DO NOT GO FOR THIS APARTMENT as the management team (apart from half of the concierge team who are angels) is just so, so, so irresponsible, unresponsive and unreasonable.

Before we officially moved in, the management emailed us our rental contract, the WRONG one. The price on the contract was about $200/month higher than what we've negotiated, and we have to email them back telling them the mistake before they actually sent us the correct version. We will give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

The management's email and many a times phone is basically non-existent as they never reply to your email unless its rent specific.

They fine you ridiculous amount of money without writing them in black and white on the contract. There was a clause on the contract which says that one must inform the management 60 days before the end of the lease on whether they want to renew it, and guess what, you have to pay a fine per day of the EQUIVALENT RENT of your place (so basically a 5K fine in our case if you are one month late in telling them). While it was our fault that we were late, they did NOT warn us in any capacity beforehand on the amount of fine we have to pay, nor was it written in our rental contract. The only thing they did was to call us on whether we want to renew the lease BEFORE its 60 days limit, and we actually verbally told them then that we do not intend to renew it. Again, no warning of potential fines, no emails to inform you about the payment of the fine throughout the entire process. We only realized the existence of the fine when we are paying our last month of rent.

The management wanted us to pay for $155 of cleaning fee when we moved out. My roommate then called the concierge and realized that a third-party cleaner was only $100/hr. Plus, our room was very, very clean in the first place - both my roommate and I are pretty tidy people and we also spent half a day cleaning the room after we moved out. There was no way that a cleaner needs to spent 1 1/2 hour cleaning our room.

When our deposit check was mailed to us, the amount of our deposit does not tally. They deducted $222 off our deposit, when the cleaning fee was $155 and they did not inform us of other deductions.

^^^ Aside from the nightmarish experience with the management team, Eugene by itself is a decent building that is way overpriced and flawed in many areas. The things that irked us the most are:

Amenities are good (in theory) but very overpriced. Many equipment in the Arcade Room are constantly broken, and most of the lounges are open for private reservations (could be wrong here, but I think even external parties can book the room since I saw many third-party firms hosting events on the rooftop), which means that in many occasions you cannot access certain rooms even when you are paying $175/month for the amenities.

Trash room are very smelly, many a times you can smell it in the corridor.

Soundproofing is bad - there was a neighbor on our floor who likes a quarrel and it felt like they are fighting just next to us.

In conclusion, both my roommate and I felt that while Eugene has the potential to become a great home for many with its myriad of facilities, our experiences are absolutely ruined by the management team, who from the first minute seems to want siphon off as much money from us as possible. We were especially outraged by the fact that they choose to not communicate with us with the accumulating fine during our last two months of stay there, and instead gave us a "big surprise" when we are moving out. On that note, unless Eugene conduct a complete overhaul to their management, we will never recommend this...

Edit: going to keep a running log of elevator breakdowns. I want to emphasize that management has literally not sent a single email about elevator breakdowns. Ever. -2/18, 2/19: 2 elevators broken on the same side; over 12-15 people lined up in the lobby waiting to go up. They resorted to using the freight elevator. 2-/20, 2/21, 2/22, 2/23...3/1, 3/2, 3/3: one elevator still broken. I need to point out that there has still been ZERO communication from management about this. 3/16, 3/17, 3/18: one elevator broken.

4/19, 4/20, 4/21, 4/22, 4/23, 4/24...?(?): One broken. Going from 2 stars to 1 because I am utterly sick of this. -5/18,5/19: one broken

--- original review --- While the building is nice on the surface, there were clearly many substantial corners that were cut and the prices being asked are not remotely justified. Examples include: elevators which break down constantly, sometimes resulting in 10-15 minute waits because a single elevator has to service 30 floors (~400 units) loud, ineffective window AC units lots of poorly painted areas (see pic) in the apartments trash collection rooms sometimes get filthy (see pic) and always smell terrible the blinds are covered at the top by what is actually a piece of plywood glued into place gas stoves that are so poorly designed that they literally melt the food in my nearby cabinets dirty apartments upon move-in every apartment has an Ethernet port next to the front door for an intercom system that was never installed many of the tiles on the terrace are loose. One can only hope the barrier is better constructed.

Some other drawbacks to consider: Brookfield will be building another office tower immediately adjacent to this building on the East side, which is of course taller than this building. So aside from several more years of construction noise, the view in that direction will be totally blocked. there are no major market chains nearby, except for an unopened Whole Foods. Trader Joe's, Fairways, etc are all 15-20 minutes away, minimum. the building is literally over a feeder road to the Lincoln Tunnel, which means constant traffic noise at literally all hours of the day and night the area itself is unpleasant to walk around, between construction and traffic. There is no sidewalk leading to the building on one side, so Frogger fans will be at home. They plainly try to rip you off. For example, if you have the concierge handle the internet installation for Fios gigabit internet (which consists of a phone call and maybe fifteen minutes of supervision, if that), you will pay upwards of $130 a month. This costs $80/month directly from Verizon. Front desk staff are wonderful people, but they are not equipped to deal with the sheer volume of food deliveries and other traffic while also handling package pickup. NOTE: the building recently added doormen and started redirecting deliveries, which has helped to cut down on lobby lines. Hopefully they will keep this system, because it was terrible before (15+ mins to get a package is bad). management just randomly decided to take away one of the three rooftop spaces from residents (presumably for investor meetings and the like). There were no new spaces added to compensate for this. not enough elevators (even when they work)

Please don't ask me to email or call with my concerns. None of this should be news, and my emails don't get answered anyway. (This is not my real name, because I don't want friends and family to...