Gladys Gonzalez arms herself with a hammer every time she steps out of her 21st-floor apartment at the Robert Fulton Houses.
The 25-floor NYCHA building on West 17th Street in Chelsea has become a nightmare for tenants since Stuart Newman, a man in his 40s described in court papers as aggressive, moved into a unit after 77-year-old Harvey Wasserman died in June 2024. Newman has no legal right to the apartment, according to a New York City Housing Authority lawsuit filed that November, yet he has refused to leave despite court action and repeated NYPD visits.
Gonzalez, who lives directly above the squat, gave The Post a grim inventory of what she faces. “They piss on my floor, they s–t on my floor,” she said. She added that the problems extend far beyond illegal occupancy: “I get that they’re homeless, but it’s not just the squatting, it’s the drugs, it’s the pissing, it the s–t. I come out of my apartment with a hammer — it’s me or them.”
The situation has spiraled into violence with alarming regularity. Police have made five arrests connected to Newman’s unit since 2025, an NYPD spokesperson told The Post. Those arrests include charges for menacing a 58-year-old tenant with a frying pan, striking a 56-year-old with a vase in the head, and harassment. Just this past Thursday, a 42-year-old victim suffered head, arm and leg wounds after being hit with a metal pipe; that investigation remains open.
Miguel Acevedo, head of the tenant association, has watched the cycle repeat endlessly. “The police have dragged them out of there, they come right back. It’s beyond crazy,” he told The Post. “I think it’s easier to evict a tenant who owes back rent than this squatter.”
The squat has attracted a rotating cast of homeless individuals who tenants say have attempted to seize control of the building’s top five floors. Newman brings them in nightly, according to residents, and the group attacks each other and residents, uses drugs, strips naked, and colonizes staircases, hallways and balconies with furniture.
One tenant, who withheld her name out of fear, described a chilling encounter with Newman. “One day the squatter was dressed in black, he had a black hat and all of a sudden, he gets right there and he pulls out a knife, and he’s just sizing it up and going, ‘You’re not going to kill me,'” she said. She pays $1,000 monthly for the privilege of terror. “I don’t think it’s fair for me to face them as a single female. I pay $1,000 a month and they’re living here free and scaring the s–t out of me.”
Amelia Martinez, a decade-long resident, slammed the legal protections that have stalled removal. “All of a sudden they have squatter rights. They got a lawyer, so they can’t be evicted,” she said. “You have to go through the court system. That’s crazy. If I did that, they’d arrest me, walker and all… It’s disgusting.”
When The Post visited this week, the previous night’s chaos lingered in an interior staircase: clothes, syringes and urine. Newman’s door bore a large “A” plus multiple marks and dents. “The door looks like that because the homeless they were throwing bricks at it one day because he wouldn’t let them in to get high,” Gonzalez explained. “They clean it up every day — housing comes every day and brings down stuff from the 25th floor.”
Newman has refused entry to NYCHA officials, Acevedo told The Post. The squatter cuts a distinctive figure in the building, photographed by tenants emerging from a top-floor staircase wearing a pastel tropical bird shirt and a makeshift towel turban with dangling multicolored fabric strips.
At last week’s monthly tenant meeting, Manhattan District Attorney’s office representatives said they were working to identify the squatters, though not all names are known.
The crisis reflects a broader collapse in NYCHA vacancy security. A March report by the NYC Department of Investigation found squatters had taken over at least 548 vacant NYCHA units between 2022 and 2025. NYCHA has since found approximately 40 more and launched monthly inspections of vacant units. “NYCHA staff routinely work with the NYPD to address issues concerning unauthorized occupants and loitering on NYCHA property,” Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Sklar told The Post.
Gonzalez has exhausted her patience with every level of authority. “Nothing ever happens,” she said. “And what do they say? Oh, it’s public housing — we just gotta deal with it. Nobody should be subject to this.” She described another regular intruder: “There’s one that’s transgender, she used to sleep on my floor with her boyfriend. The last time I called the cops, her boyfriend was completely naked, only had a shirt on, no shoes, no underwear, and he was literally rubbing his penis and laughing at me.”
Acevedo frames the struggle as systemic. “It’s a constant battle with NYCHA, with the police, with the borough.”