Image courtesy of Google Maps.

Soon after it opened in the late 1970s, downtown Hartford’s Bushnell on the Park honed a reputation as a power address for corporate executives, local television glitterati and players on the Hartford Whalers hockey team.

The days of Oriental rugs in the lobby and a doorman are long gone. And the slow decline in recent years at the 12-story, curved concrete building overlooking Bushnell Park accelerated after a rooftop water pipe burst in early 2018, damaging nearly two dozen units and hallways. More than a year later, the damage still has not been fully repaired.

“It’s like living in a tenement in downtown Hartford, you wouldn’t believe it,” said Paul Mansour, a unit owner who lives in the building and works downtown. “The owner of the majority of units made a lot of promises and has done very little.”

The majority of the 180 residential condominium units in Bushnell on the Park – 129 – are controlled by a single owner, Gideon Asset Management LLC, of Brooklyn, New York. The company purchased the units in late 2014 and rents them. The remaining units are owned by individuals who either live in them or have tenants.

The unusual ownership structure has given Gideon and its managing partner, Issac Klein, control of the property. Under a previous majority owner, individual owners fought for and won a seat on the condominium association’s board of directors, but the seat does not carry a vote in decisions affecting the property. The Wells Street building, constructed as apartments in 1978, was converted to condominiums soon after, but only 51 sold, with the rest remaining under the control of a string of single owners.

Rebecca Koladis, a real estate at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, said recent condominium unit sales at the Bushnell Tower are going for double for what a comparable unit at Bushnell on the Park would fetch in a sale. A one-bedroom at Bushnell Tower would likely sell for $150,000 to $180,000 compared with $85,000 at Bushnell on the Park.

This week, a Gideon spokesman, said repairs – some tied to the burst water pipe – are now underway, including tiling the floors in hallways and replacing damaged walls.

Aziz Syed, a Gideon portfolio manager, said he considered the long wait for repairs related to the water damage to be reasonable, given they were in the “high hundreds of thousands of dollars” and were being financed through a property insurance claim.

“I understand it from the tenants’ end,” Syed said. “If I had to deal with what they were dealt, I would be upset, too. I completely understand.”

Gideon got off to a rocky start as the majority owner. In early 2015 in frigid weather, just weeks after Gideon purchased the building, the city ordered the building be emptied of its residents. A pipe supplying heat ruptured and another set of pipes bringing water to fire sprinklers burst.

In recent months, individual unit owners also have grown increasingly uneasy about the deterioration in the parking garage under the building. Chunks of concrete are falling down from the ceiling, and complaints to city drew a citation from housing inspectors in August.

John Collins, the city’s acting building official, said Gideon has been pursuing plans for repairing the garage, and Syed said the work is now beginning. Collins said he doesn’t consider a seven-month window unreasonable for getting underway for a job that is “a fairly substantial big fix with steel and stress concrete involved.” Collins said Gideon has taken out permits to repair the units damaged by the burst water pipe.

Even before the water pipe burst and problems intensified in the parking garage, tensions were running high between Gideon and the individual unit owners. The individual unit owners sued Gideon and its manager in 2016, alleging that Gideon ran Bushnell on the Park as though it owned the entire building, ignored maintenance complaints and misappropriated condominium association funds.

In late 2018, Gideon agreed to a settlement, including paying $50,000 to the condominium association, $40,000 in legal fees and other conditions, according to a copy of the settlement.