5 elderly holdouts fighting closure of assisted-living home

No one is leafing through the books of the library or digging into a treat in the ice cream parlor or painting at an easel in the art room.

Two years after the owner of Prospect Park Residence announced the building in the trendy Park Slope neighborhood would be sold and converted to condos, its fate remains in limbo.

Yet nearly all of them — including Holocaust survivors, a Tuskegee airman and a floor full of people with advanced dementia — have heeded management's call to leave.

All of this," said Deborah Pollack, the daughter of Guide, who has Alzheimer's disease, "is an effort to protect my mother from having to go into a storage facility.

The home's fate remained secret, following state Department of Health rules, until its closure plan was approved and then announced in March 2014.

"If you tried to evict 120 old people in landlord-tenant court, it would take you five years and probably $10 million in attorney fees," said John O'Hara, an attorney who has filed seven wrongful-death suits against the facility claiming inadequate treatment or improper discharge played a role in fatalities.

On hot days, they said central air conditioning was cut off, leaving many parts of the building stifling, and window units were ineffective and noisy.

[...] in a countersuit against the families of the remaining residents, he called for $50 million in damages for their interference in the sale, "slanderous" allegations and resulting "mental anguish."

Choosing to close was not an easy decision, he said, but costs became untenable at Prospect Park Residence after the expiration of temporary tax benefits.

[...] Deitsch finds a tiny bit of common ground with his opposition, saying residents' complaints should really be with the Legislature and state regulators.

The department's filings say that residents' "distress and conjectural fears" do not override the rules and that they "have refused to engage whatsoever with the operator on the subject of transfers."

The lawsuit targeting the closure says it failed to adequately ensure residents would be transferred to appropriate new homes and not forced into unnecessarily restrictive settings.

Judith Goldiner, the Legal Aid attorney representing residents, said not all of those homes allow outside aides, a major concern for maintaining consistency, particularly for those living in a fog of dementia, as some of the holdouts do.

Justice Wayne Saitta of the Brooklyn state Supreme Court ruled the initial closure plan inadequate and intervened on specific complaints, including the resumption of central air conditioning and consistent hot water.

Ruth Willig, 92, moved to Prospect Park Residence in 2009 to be close to her daughter Judy Willig and felt a sense of community there — but the mood in the home changed once the closure was announced.

[...] when she learned the building's fate, she called her daughter, Laura Perry, sobbing, and fell into a depression, convinced she had played a role in others' pain by convincing them to move there.