The horrific, five-alarm Wallace Avenue fire in the Bronx on Friday, January 10, 2025, displaced 252 residents, including 58 children, and left people injured with severe smoke inhalation and other injuries. Over 200 of the city’s first responders were on the scene to extinguish this massive fire.
The New York City Department of Buildings issued a full vacate order due to “extensive fire damage throughout the structure” and “collapsed partitions,” according to Fox 5 News. The fire broke out in the upper floors of the six-story building.
Residents are left traumatized by the fire as they have lost all their valuables and are living in a shelter with nowhere else to go. Many residents ran out of their apartments in the blistering cold with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. The attorneys at Ronemus & Vilensky currently represent 20 individuals at the burnt-out 98-unit building at 2910 Wallace Avenue, just east of the New York Botanical Garden. One client fell and injured her leg and back, while others are suffering from smoke inhalation.
A History of Complaints Against Landlord and His Properties
While the cause of the fire is being investigated, records indicate that the building’s landlord, Ved Parkash, has faced countless complaints and lawsuits over alleged neglect and disrepair, including reports of electrical issues and no heat and hot water. According to a news report in The City, Parkash fought the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s (HPD) Heat Sensors Program in court in 2024. He wanted to exit the city’s program requiring landlords with the most violations and complaints to put monitors in each apartment that automatically send temperature data.
Parkash owns nine other buildings, all assigned to the HPD program.
Landlords of buildings in the HPD program must notify all tenants about the monitoring and provide them with the option to opt out. They must also submit the locations and readings of the heat sensors to HPD, which must undertake heat-related building inspections every two weeks. Failure to put sensors in each apartment or provide appropriate heat could result in thousands of dollars in penalties for landlords, depending on the type and number of offenses.
Wallace Avenue tenants were forced to use space heaters and stoves, a potential fire risk, to keep their apartments warm.
Known as a “Notorious Slumlord”
Parkash’s record as a negligent landlord has been on the city’s radar for some time, according to the Bronx Times. He was named the city’s worst landlord in 2015 by then-Public Advocate Letitia James. Property records website WhoOwnsWhat lists Parkash as the landlord (or one of multiple landlords) for 72 buildings throughout the Bronx and Queens, with heat/hot water as the top complaint for all but seven of them. In 2017, the New York Post dubbed Parkash as a “notorious slumlord” who owned an apartment building infested with rats carrying leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that infected at least one resident who had to be hospitalized.
HPD records indicate that 2901 Wallace Avenue received 11 complaints at the start of January 2025 due to a lack of heat. According to the WhoOwnsWhat, 239 heat/hot water complaints to 311 have been recorded over the past three years.
Parkash and associates are involved in 16 active lawsuits in the Bronx and Queens.
About Ronemus & Vilensky
As the most experienced personal injury law firm in the greater New York City metro area, the attorneys at Ronemus & Vilensky have been called upon numerous times to provide excellent legal advice and counsel and help victims recover damages. We have procured millions of dollars for our clients and led the way to pressuring the city and landlords to take responsibility and make radical changes in their apartment building for the safety of residents.
