Good cellphone service comes at a price

Tenants at 165 Pinehurst Avenue, a six-story brick building on a hilltop in Washington Heights, have something most modern Americans would envy: impeccable cellphone service.

But it comes with a cost. They worry their building in northern Manhattan is going to collapse.

Their reception is so crisp because of two cellphone base stations and 20 antennas positioned on their building's roof, sending and receiving thousands of calls each day for T-Mobile and AT&T.

To the cellphone providers, this hub -- and others like it -- are essential to accommodating the explosion of mobile data and voice communications.

But the tenants, as much as they like their clear reception, are in an uproar because they argue that their 82-year-old building cannot bear the weight of the base stations.

Long, zigzagging cracks have appeared along the building's outer walls, and mortar has crumbled from the parapet, which supports hefty I-beams that the base stations sit upon.

"Before this went up, we were told we couldn't come up here, because it wasn't stable enough for human weight," said Meg Gibson, a longtime tenant, as she surveyed the building's factorylike rooftop on a recent sunlit day.

The rooftop, painted silver, was crisscrossed with snakelike metal coverings, protecting transmission cables. The rectangular cellphone antennas stood sentinel along the edges. Two raised metal platforms, resembling miniature oil rigs, filled a quarter of the rooftop, supporting the cabinetlike base stations that receive and send calls.

The tenants did not mind much when the first base station, which belongs to T-Mobile, went up in 2006, but grew concerned when the second one, owned by AT&T, was installed last fall.

Ms. Gibson said her roof had a "chronic problem" of disrepair, and alerted the city to her concerns. The Buildings Department  issued a notice of violation to the landlord, Shahram Mobasser, for failing to maintain the buildings' walls, and, in a report, noted four large cracks beneath the base station's support beams, though a city engineer concluded that it was hard to determine the cause of the cracks.

The Buildings Department approved the landlord's application to erect the AT&T base station last summer, after determining, a spokeswoman said, that the plans complied with the building code. Sarita S. Marbella, the architect who signed off on the work last February, would not comment on the tenants' complaints, citing a confidentiality clause with AT&T.

The tenants are suing the landlord for allowing the stations to be installed. But industry experts said it was highly unlikely that the base stations were causing the structural harm that the tenants claim. Roger Entner, a wireless industry analyst with Nielsen, said the cellphone antennas were relatively light and the base stations not unduly heavy.

"The base station only weighs a couple of hundred pounds -- it's like three fat men," he said. "If that is cracking the stuff, the building has way bigger problems."

Steve Kazella, a managing partner of AirWave Management, a company in Chester, N.J., that consults for landlords negotiating with wireless carriers or their cell-site partners, said buildings probably faced a bigger threat from the weight of their air-conditioning units, and yet people tended not to complain about those.

The number of cell transmission sites has grown rapidly in recent years. Last December, there were about 250,000 such hubs, up from 183,000 in December 2005, according to the CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group. The demand has created an opportunity for property owners, who can lease residential and commercial sites and even church rooftops to wireless companies, typically for $1,000 to $3,500 a month, Mr. Kazella said.

It is unclear how much Mr. Mobasser, who owns 165 Pinehurst Avenue, earns from his roof's base stations, or whether he plans to address the violation; he did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Yet representatives from T-Mobile and AT&T said they were exacting in installing such equipment safely, with the approval of structural engineers and in accordance with building codes. Typically, they said, cellphone companies send crews to areas needing coverage, who in turn identify feasible sites and approach property owners with offers. By law, the ultimate responsibility of the building's maintenance falls with the property owner, a spokeswoman for the Buildings Department said.

Ms. Gibson and a neighbor, Carol Dunn, said they measured radio emission levels in their apartments, and found them to easily exceed federal limits. They began worrying, too, that they were being bombarded by radio waves that they believed might cause cancer, though research on the subject has been inconclusive.

But they avoided adding that claim to their lawsuit, because doing so would have made theirs a federal case: cell tower emissions are covered by the Federal Communications Commission. T-Mobile and AT&T, for their part, said their emissions complied with the F.C.C. guidelines, and cited government findings that such radio waves did not pose health threats.

Mr. Kazella said the tensions between tenants and landlords like Mr. Mobasser would probably persist, given that wireless companies were scrambling to find more cell sites to accommodate the new generation of phones, like iPhones, used not just for talking but also for heavy data transmission.

"If you get AT&T on your roof, you're in iPhone heaven," he said. "It can really improve your quality of life."