Andy Dwyer has an apartment on one of the upper floors of the Lefcourt Newark Building at 1180 Raymond Boulevard, with an east-facing terrace. The views of Manhattan are one of the reasons he continues to pay $3,600 a month to live in downtown Newark’s best-known Art Deco building, despite all the problems that are happening within it.
But his patience is wearing thin.
“Would you like a glass of water?” asks Dwyer sarcastically, who is holding up a cup with brown-colored liquid inside. “I bathe in this water.”
The water quality is only the tip of the iceberg. The discovery of mold in his unit was so severe that the owner offered him a rent abatement. Leaks and plumbing issues are frequent complaints among neighbors. The basement bowling alley, though it sounds quite luxurious, hasn’t worked for the past five years. Perhaps worst of all, the locks on the front doors of the building’s main entrance don’t work, nor do the security cameras or the buzzer. Last year, a security guard was stabbed while on duty, but the building’s management never alerted tenants or fixed the front door.
“Their modus operandi is to not tell anyone what is going on and not respond to inquiries about what is going on,” Dwyer said. “You find out problems when things suddenly don’t work. This situation has been going on for years.”
The problems at the building seem to have begun around 2020, when the management of the building changed from Cogswell Real Estate to Cushman & Wakefield. Since then, when things go wrong in the building, it has been all but impossible to get someone on the phone. Dwyer even showed up at Cushman & Wakefield’s Newark office to no avail.
Last year, the management company established an online forum called BuildingLink for the tenants to communicate with each other and post items for sale. However, the forum was shut down when the building became flooded with complaints.
“We have observed that the forum was being misused, specifically, the Help Wanted section was being used to post complaints rather than its intended purpose,” wrote Kimberlee Nacarelli, regional property manager for Cushman & Wakefield, in an email dated last year. “This misuse undermines the platform’s value and prompted the decision to disable comments.”
Despite these problems, Dwyer loves the building and considers himself their resident historian. He enjoys reciting facts about it. Designed by Newark’s master architect Frank Grad, it originally opened in 1931. The 35-story building at the time was the tallest office building in all of New Jersey.
The building was originally known as the Lefcourt Building, named after the developer A. E. Lefcourt. It later became known as the Raymond Commerce Building. Now it is called Eleven80.
After the 1967 riots, the building was abandoned and came into city ownership through tax foreclosure. In the early 2000s, a new owner took over the building. While office-to-residential conversions are becoming more common, Eleven80’s reopening as a luxury apartment building was a forerunner in this movement and the first of its kind in Newark. But that company also fell into financial trouble, and it was sold to the current owner, Pacific Oak Strategic Opportunity REIT, around 2008.
One thing tenants seem to agree on is that safety is the most serious concern. Last year, on September 17th, a security guard was attacked twice on the same day by the same assailant, once inside the building and again on the sidewalk outside the building, the second time with a knife. The tenants claim they were never notified by Cushman & Wakefield that an attack occurred and had to learn about it from those who witnessed the attack. The front doors still remain unlocked at all times of the day.
Holguin-Veras showed this publication an email from 2024 showing that property manager Leah Mullens said the door would be repaired, but it never was.
At a recorded Zoom meeting last October, one tenant asked Nacarelli why no one was notified about the attack.
“We would not tell the building about something like that—it didn’t happen inside the building,” Nacarelli said. “We can’t announce everything that happens in the City of Newark or something that happens outside.”
Nacarelli at the meeting said she didn’t know the original incident took place inside the lobby.
Our publication reached out to the management company for comment, but we never received a response to our questions.
“Even if it happened outside, it happened to a staff member of yours,” said Susana Holguin-Veras, a 10-year resident there. “The least you should have done was alert the whole building of this incident.”
But this was not the only breach of security that could be attributed to the unlocked front doors. Tenants have also reported strangers off the street wandering into the building. One such stranger, an unidentified man, had wandered into the building and was found in the women’s locker room. Dwyer claims that a homeless man was sleeping in the vestibule on the first floor.
Amid all of these mounting problems, last year, there was a report in Real Estate NJ that the building’s owner, Pacific Oak Strategic Opportunity REIT, put the building up for sale with JLL as the broker.
This came at a time when the company issued its 10–Q last year, expressing financial troubles. Dwyer wonders whether the company’s financial troubles mean it can’t afford the renovations or if the company is trying to empty out the building to make it more attractive to investors.
“It’s a lot easier to sell a building if you don’t have leases,” Dwyer said. “Are they literally trying to drive people out of the building? Maybe the thinking is, if you’ve got a new investor who’s going to pour money into the building and revamp all the kitchens and bathrooms, you can’t do that when tenants are living there.”
Anna Horsford, who lived at Eleven80 for ten years, was one of the residents driven out of the building. The final straw was learning that a male intruder had infiltrated the women’s spa. “Everything is broken — this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work — and then we found out about the intruder,” said Horsford, who eventually moved to the Renaissance Towers. “This year they raised my rent $200 — for what? It was way too much for the quality being provided.”
As Horsford walked out the building for the very last time, she said the doors were still not working.
