Tenants Fear Risks from New Cell Antennas By Carl Glassman On the roof of 67 Vestry Street last month, workers were preparing to install cell phone antennas. As they aligned the steel supports for a cooling unit for the new equipment, Carol Downey, a building resident, watched in dismay. “Cellular technology hasn’t been around all that long, and I feel like it’s the asbestos of the next millennium,” said Downey, who lives on the fourth floor with her husband and two-year-old daughter. “They don’t know the health consequences, and they don’t want to know because this is where they’ve put all their money. But how can we fight Verizon and AT&T?”   The prospective buyer is Laurence Gluck, principal of Stellar Management, who owns a variety of commercial and residential properties in Manhattan, including at least two apartment complexes that he withdrew from government housing programs after purchasing them in 2000. Gluck informed Neil Fabricant, president of IPN’s tenant association, in a Sept. 3 phone call that he was under contract to buy IPN from the Cohn family, which controls Duane Street Associates, the complex’s owner. At a Sept. 12 meeting with the tenant association’s executive board, Gluck said that he intends to pull IPN out of the state Mitchell-Lama program, which keeps rents below market levels. According to Fabricant, Gluck said he wanted to protect “poor” tenants, but at the same time “made it clear that he intends to get all the rents as close to real market value as the law will allow.” Downey is one of a group of building tenants, many with small children, who fear the long-term health effects of radiation from cell phone antennas that Verizon and AT&T are installing on the parapets of their roof. Last month, a technician hired by the residents took readings of radio frequency emissions and electromagnetic fields on the roof and inside the apartments to compare with measurements he will take after the equipment is turned on, probably this month. Tenants are furious with the building’s owner, David Ellis, for allowing the installation, which came with no notice. “There are enough unanswered questions concerning the present and future danger of such towers within residential areas that we are requesting that you stop this construction, for the sake of our children and ourselves,” the tenants wrote last month in a letter to Ellis. In an interview, Ellis, who has a five-year lease with the telecommunications companies, said he is confident that the antennas will be “well within” the law. But he said he welcomes the testing by the tenants. “If their consultant finds that there are levels of radiation and other things considered unhealthy, I would immediately send the information to the company doing this. I am sure they would want to make [their own] measurement.” Ellis said he would start eviction proceedings against the companies if he did not get “swift action.” The tenants’ consultant, Stewart Maurer, a former professor of electrical engineering and an expert in electromagnetic fields, said that he has yet to find significant elevations of radiation in other buildings when cell towers are added to roofs. “Many people are reassured by the measurements. It all depends on their feeling of what risk is,” he said. The wireless companies insist there is no risk. According to Heidi Hemmer, director of engineering for Verizon Wireless, the antennas are safe because they are mounted on the edges of roofs where people can’t walk. And because their signals don’t need to travel far in the city, the antennas are very low power. “They’ve been used by wireless for 15 years and there’s never been an issue,” she said. Critics of the proliferation of cell antennas say that Federal Communications Commission standards should be far more stringent because little is known about the long-term effects of low-level radiation. “We feel like guinea pigs,” said eighth-floor tenant Ghislaine Viñas, the mother of a newborn and a two-year-old. “After September 11 you feel funky enough about staying here. And now we have this happening on our roof.”