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Apartment wars are breaking out over stroller traffic jams – New York Post
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Tyler Moore has a wife, two daughters, two strollers, a wagon, a scooter, a mini balance bike — and a small, walk-up apartment in Astoria.
“It’s a big stress,” the 32-year-old teacher, whose girls are 2 and 4, tells The Post.
To avoid feeling like he’s living in a hoarder’s den, Moore would sometimes colonize the landing outside his apartment with his family’s various modes of transportation.
“They didn’t block anyone’s walk,” Moore says of the mess, adding that his neighbors he shared the hallway with didn’t mind.
But some people did. In fact, the Moores, along with the three other young families in the building, are currently butting heads with others in the apartment about the plethora of carriages cluttering the hallways and lobby.
“I understand why someone would be mad,” Moore says. Still, he adds, “the reality is that they take up so much space inside the apartment.”
The Moores aren’t alone. As families struggle to cram their kids and all their accouterments into tiny spaces, they sometimes roll their prams into common spaces — often flagrantly breaking fire codes, which forbid bicycles, baby strollers and other items from being stored in building corridors.
It’s a prevalent enough issue that some new apartment buildings, such as One Hundred Barclay in Tribeca and the Ashland in Fort Greene, have space designated specifically for stroller parking. The luxe 555 West End Avenue even boasts its own “stroller valets,” who will store your kid’s chariot and fetch it for you whenever you’re ready to go for a walk.
Unfortunately, most New Yorkers aren’t so lucky.
Andrew, who lives in a four-floor walk-up in Brownstone Brooklyn, says that the building’s growing stroller population has been a source of tension among neighbors.
“For a long time, everyone would fold up their strollers and toss them at the bottom of the stairwell,” says Andrew, who asked that we not use his last name to avoid further building drama. “But that got messy.”
‘Everyone would fold up their strollers and toss them at the bottom of the stairwell.’
Childless residents complained that it was unfair that only some individuals (the ones with kids) got to take advantage of what was supposed to be a shared space.
“It really was offensive to some people,” Andrew says. Plus, “strollers are often dirty and stinky, and that didn’t help.”
When the landlord installed a rack for families to hang their strollers, things improved only marginally.
“It’s not always feasible to fold your stroller and then lift it over the railing while holding your baby,” says Andrew, who has kids of his own. Some carriages, he says, would languish in the lobby for hours until a parent’s partner would get home and hang it up.
Moore says that the families in his building, as well, have recently reached an agreement with their landlord about the stroller situation: Each unit can store one stroller in the building’s lobby. It’s mostly working, except when the woman who cleans the building comes by. She still complains about the carriages obstructing her pathway.
“We worked out this little system where the landlord will tell us when she’s coming and we’ll tell everyone else so we can clear the area,” Moore says. “But there have been a few times that we’ve forgotten. We’ve heard the cleaning lady get all of her supplies, and we run out and bring everything in.”
Lee Fryd thinks the cleaning service has the right idea. The Tribeca resident, who suffers from chronic back pain, tripped over her neighbors’ stroller while getting out of the elevator in her building a month ago. When she complained, they called her unneighborly.
“It’s very rude,” says Fryd, who declines to give her age but says she’s over 55. “The hallways should not be used as a closet.”
It’s the entitlement that really gets her. “They are clearly saying, ‘This is too ugly to put in our home, but not too ugly for us to stick in your face,’ ” she says. “I just want to be able to walk into my own home without tripping!”
