Plywood and aluminum walls fell from the sky at the Imperial Apartments Monday morning, as work crews dismantled back porches. Inside, elderly Russian and Ukrainian ex-pats cowered behind closed doors, scared about changes at their complex off Fountain Street in upper Westville. The owner, Barry Blocher, was incredulous; he said he’s replacing dangerous, rotting porches to make life better at the complex. He said his tenants should stop “squawking. They should suck it up and say it’s a hell of a lot better than they had it in Russia where they lived five to a room.” Call it a modern tale of life in an immigrant enclave unseen by most New Haveners.
Apartment complexes off Fountain Street and side streets like Cooper Place have become a haven over the past decade for families fleeing either persecution or lack of opportunity in Russia and other former Soviet republics. Many of the newcomers are elderly and speak in heavily accented Russian or Yiddish.
Imperial Apartments is one such complex. The buzzers have names like Mizhirtsky, Popilevskiy, and Nizker. Most of the 12 three-story brick buildings stretch south from Fountain and out of public view. It’s not luxury housing. But the 72 apartments there command a modest enough rent — around $700 a month for a one-bedroom — that a continuing stream of immigrants can afford in a gentrifying city.
The owners, 1776 Cheshire Associates LLC, decided to raze the buildings’ enclosed back porches. Over more than four decades, water rotted these balconies and exterior stairways, according to superintendent Mikhail Kirichenko. It costs $35,000 in labor alone to raze and then rebuild the back porches, according to Kirichenko. So the owners are doing one or two buildings a year, and not enclosing the new porches.
Monday it was building number 496’s turn. The tenants weren’t happy about it. They like storing stuff in the enclosed porches. They worry about shivering this winter; while the porches are veritable sieves, they still block some of the cold.
Elderly first-floor tenants at the complex worry about safety. Without the porches, they have a single-pane glass sliding back door.
“I live here 15 years. I am very worried,” said one woman in her mid-80s who came here from Ilinsk, Ukraine, where her grandfather once served as town rabbi.
The woman said she’s scared not only about losing her back porch, but about losing her home if the landlord finds out she complained. She asked that her name and picture remain out of any article.
A neighbor, Tatyana Dzyubova, translated the woman’s remarks. Dzuybova, a 51 year-old nursing assistant, moved to Imperial Apartments three years ago from Moscow. “People are afraid we will be kicked from here” for objecting, she claimed. She and other tenants say they like being in America, in New Haven, in the Imperial Apartments community where others speak Russian. Dzyubova has made the rounds of government and legal offices seeking help.
“People are voiceless,” Dzyubova said. “They’re afraid.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Sergio Rodriguez replied. Rodriguez is the neighborhood’s alderman. He listened to tenants’ complaints Monday morning. He left tenants with his card and urged them to call him if their apartments get too cold. He assured people, as well, that he would make sure they don’t get evicted for complaining.
“It’s a Free Country”
Kirichenko, the Imperial’s blunt-spoken 59-year-old super, reacted with a shrug when told of the complaints as he oversaw a work crew dismantling the porches Monday.
“I explained it to them. Most of them don’t speak English. We have to do it because it’s dangerous. It’s rotted,” he said. Even though he left Ukraine 13 years ago, Kirichenko still exudes the sunny optimism of a new American grateful to live in freedom. He made a triumphant point of telling Alderman Rodriguez that he votes “independent” — sometimes Democratic, sometimes Republican, sometimes neither. Kirichenko and his wife, who’s Jewish, felt the dismantling of the Soviet empire offered them their last chance to escape religious persecution and find new opportunity.
“Russians,” he said. “They collect extra stuff.” That’s why they want the enclosed porches, he said. “They say it’s going to be cold. I say it’s not your business. We pay for the heat. It’s included in the rent.
“You know, it a free country. You don’t like it? You can move out.”
Kirichenko showed off new back porches built last year at another of the Imperial buildings. The steps are indeed sturdier, with combined plastic-and-wood railings. 
Why not put new glass enclosures on the porch? The glass costs too much, Kirichenko said. And it costs too much to heat. Plus, he said, the open porches are better in the summer. Tenants can grill on them. They stay cooler than glass-enclosed porches.
Barry Blocher, the lead owner, reacted more testily to tenant complaints.
“I’m really starting to get pissed,” he said in a phone conversation. “Its always an uphill battle in that complex. Any time we try to make changes for the better they start squawking. When we paved the driveway, they complained they had to move the cars.” The back sun porches were never intended to be heated, to be occupied in the winter, Blocher said. They’re not insulated. “They’re taking advantage of the situation” by opening their apartment doors to heat the porches in the winter, Blocher complained.
Blocher inherited his ownership stake when his father died. “It was his labor of love. I’m trying to keep it up the way” he would have wanted.
Pierrette Silverman, the city’s director of elderly services, suggests a compromise: new open porches for upper floors, new enclosed porches for the first floors to ease seniors’ security concerns.
Silverman said Monday that she understands the landlord’s need to keep heating costs down. And she understands the need to remove sagging porches. She also sympathizes with the worries of the tenants. “People are afraid to speak their mind. They don’t realize the legal procedures,” she said, noting that many tenants receive federal Section 8 rent subsidies. Silverman has tried, to no avail, to pitch the compromise to Barry Blocher. “I’ve called and called and called. I keep getting an answering machine” and no call back.
Blocher did call back the Independent and was asked about Silverman’s idea. “Is she an engineer?” he responded.