NEW YORK>> Long before the complaints about shrieking parrots, many years before lawyers were hired and stern letters exchanged, and more than a decade before the Department of Justice literally turned the building into a federal case, the Rutherford, a 14-story co-op in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, was a pretty tranquil place to live.

At least it seemed that way to Charlotte Kullen. In late 1999, she was 26 and had already navigated a couple of difficult landlords as a renter in the city. When she closed on a small studio apartment on the Rutherford’s fifth floor, she felt relief.

“I was like, OK, peace and quiet and no problems,” she said in a recent interview. “It’d be an investment. And then, you know, in five years or whatever, I get married and I go have kids somewhere. In the meantime, I can paint my walls, I can decorate.”

Soon after arriving, she met her next-door neighbor, Meril Lesser, who had also recently moved in and was working on a master’s degree in psychology. The pair had plenty in common. They were both from New Jersey and roughly the same age. Both were deeply attached to their animals. Kullen owned a cat and eventually two papillon dogs, as well as a horse she kept in a barn in New Jersey. Lesser lived with two parrots.

The women quickly developed a friendship, one that started warmly enough. Together they went to bars and parties and sought a place in Manhattan’s social whirl, all the while trying to gain traction professionally. Kullen was laid off from a public relations firm, then cycled through a few different jobs before founding her own PR shop and working out of her apartment. Lesser was briefly a social worker and eventually started making jewelry, which she sold through an Etsy store.

In January 2015, however, the relationship quickly unraveled. That was when Lesser brought home a third parrot, a Goffin’s cockatoo named Curtis. Kullen was soon complaining that Curtis emitted an intermittent, nerve-shredding screech, which roused Ginger, a white-fronted Amazon, to start cackling. The noise went straight through the wall, Kullen said in court papers, and sounded as if one animal were being tortured while another laughed.

After the women failed to find a resolution, Kullen spent months begging the co-op’s board to intervene. More than a year later, it did. In March 2016, the head of the board demanded that Lesser quiet her parrots. When the warnings didn’t work, eviction proceedings began.

The melee that followed would wind through two courts, drag on for eight years and cost the building a small fortune in legal fees. It spotlighted one of the perennial quirks of life in New York, a place where millions of unavoidable neighbors dwell in tight, intimate configurations determined largely by chance.

Ultimately, the Justice Department would bring a discrimination suit against the building that would hinge on a brief 2016 letter from a psychiatrist. The letter stated that Lesser’s parrots were not merely pets but emotional support animals — animals, Lesser would later explain in a deposition, that helped her manage depression and anxiety. The full implications of this would not be evident for years. An emotional-support parrot sounds like a zany detail in a laugh-tracked sitcom, but this story evolves into something grimmer and more perplexing, and ends with two lives altered forever.

“Past Birdie Bedtime!”

Lesser acquired two cockatiels in college, she told Kullen, and they were with her when she moved into the Rutherford. She added a bare-eyed cockatoo named Layla — cockatoos are slightly larger birds that can live for 60 years — and Ginger, the white-fronted Amazon parrot. For a time, all four lived in the apartment, but the cockatiels had died by the time Lesser found Curtis during a visit to Project Perry, a bird sanctuary in Virginia.

The Rutherford is a pet-friendly building, and no permission was needed to add another bird to the flock. Layla and Ginger had been relatively quiet before. That changed when Curtis arrived. It wasn’t long before Kullen was texting about the noise.

“Way past Birdie Bedtime!” she wrote at 11:37 p.m. on Feb, 2, 2015.

Nine days later: “Are you home? Curtis is going nuts again.”

“Just checking out at supermarkt & then home,” Lesser replied.

The women seemed to strain to keep up their friendship, chatting about laundry room mishaps and an employee’s outburst at Trader Joe’s. But then Kullen’s texts get shorter and more desperate.

“Curtis!!!” Kullen texted on March 18.

“OMG!!!” she texted the next day.

“Coming home! Sorry!” Lesser texted back. “Will definitely figure out a sound proofing solution!”

Even with white noise and earplugs, the sound was unnerving to Kullen, who sent beseeching emails to the board and Halstead, the building’s management company. The din often made it hard to hear clients on the phone, or to recruit new business, she wrote. She started losing sleep and grinding her teeth.

That May, Halstead sent a warning letter to Lesser. But at the time, Kullen was apparently the only person complaining. In September, Jim Ramadei, the board president, sent her an email, asking if she knew of other tenants who were similarly affected. A legal complaint by one person, he wrote, will look like a “spite suit,” and spite suits never win.

“I have asked and people, while they can hear them,” he said of the birds, “they are not bothered by the sound. I need some help here.”

A dozen recordings

A small studio at the Rutherford can cost $500,000 or more, but the place was not designed for luxury. It opened in 1961 as a rental that catered to nurses at a nearby hospital.

Developers in this era used “cheap materials,” said Steve Troy, the Rutherford’s current board president, in a candid appraisal during his deposition in the case brought by the Justice Department. With 175 units in the building, the board regularly hears gripes about dropped shoes, barking dogs and loud TVs.

“If we didn’t correct the noise complaints,” Troy said, “the whole building would be a cacophony.”

Over time, other residents began complaining about the parrots. Marcia Okon, who lived across the hall from Lesser, said she had walked out of the elevator one day and heard what she described in a deposition as “an auditory assault.” It was bad enough and frequent enough that she stopped inviting friends over and considered selling her apartment, according to Okon’s deposition. Sam Keany, who lived directly under Lesser, started sending emails to a Halstead account executive.

“It is 10 p.m. on Saturday and the birds in 5J are raucous,” he wrote on Feb. 6, 2016, one of a series of emails that are part of the court docket. “Nobody is at home. We are trying to sleep.”

Okon and Keany were members of the board, and their complaints seemed to galvanize Ramadei, its president. In March 2016 — more than a year after Curtis arrived — he sent Lesser a formal legal warning that gave her 30 days to address her parrots’ noise or else face eviction.

The next week, the building received a letter from Lesser’s psychiatrist. “In order to function optimally, Ms. Lesser requires the presence of three emotional support animals,” Dr. Adele Tutter wrote, listing Ginger, Layla and Curtis by name. The birds can’t be separated from one another, the doctor explained, and Lesser can’t be separated from the birds.

The letter ended with an anodyne sentence that should have been understood as a live grenade: “Thank you for accommodating Ms. Lesser’s disability according to the Americans With Disabilities Act.”

Third rail of apartment living

Federal law about emotional support animals is straightforward: They must be accommodated unless they pose a safety threat — a dog that bites, for instance — or accommodation is prohibitively expensive. Nobody from the Rutherford argued that the parrots were dangerous. And nobody proposed a reasonable accommodation, let alone calculated what it would cost.

“Emotional support animals are the third rail of condo and co-op living,” said Aaron Shmulewitz, a lawyer who represents 250 buildings in New York. “Literally, only bad things can come out of refusing a request for a reasonable accommodation in cases like this.”

In June 2016, the Rutherford sued to evict Lesser. The next month, she moved out, leaving her apartment unoccupied.

Frustrated and angry, Lesser emailed the Department of Housing and Urban Development in May 2018 and described a failure to accommodate her disability. As the government investigated, Lesser tried to sell her apartment.

In 2019, a surgeon from Florida made an offer of $467,500, but the Rutherford board rejected that buyer. In his deposition, Ramadei said the offer was riddled with missing and conflicting financial information. (The Justice Department later described the rejection in a court filing as “retaliatory.”)

The pandemic slowed HUD’s investigation, but in January 2021 the agency issued a “charge of discrimination” against the Rutherford. The building agreed to suspend the eviction case and opted to fight the government’s case in federal court, rather than in HUD’s independent judicial office.

From then on, lawyers from the Justice Department would represent the interests of Lesser, although their client was technically the United States. Lesser now had the very deep pockets of the government behind her.

“A culture of litigation”

Ramadei said in his deposition that he hadn’t initially known what the phrase “reasonable accommodation” meant and hadn’t asked anyone to explain it.

“Because this, to me, is not a problem with reasonable accommodation,” he said under oath. “It’s a noise issue.”

Even if Ramadei were right, the Rutherford had blundered. It never hired a professional to place a microphone in an adjacent apartment or the hallway to measure the decibel level of the parrots, which is the standard operating procedure.

Instead, the Rutherford leaned heavily on Kullen. Her six-hour deposition, taken in September 2022, is difficult to read, in part because it captures her distress and in part because that distress is, legally speaking, beside the point. The judge overseeing the case signaled that she wanted a mediator to help the sides come to a settlement, and on Aug. 16, 2024, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York issued a news release with the result.

The Rutherford would have to pay Lesser a total of $750,000 — $585,000, for the shares in her apartment, plus $165,000 in damages. The release described the settlement as the largest ever obtained “for a person with disabilities whose housing provider denied them their right to have an assistance animal.”

Reporters and TV cameras briefly camped outside the Rutherford. Most residents knew little or nothing about the case, so late in October, the board finally explained all on a Zoom call. Residents took turns asking questions, trying to grasp the scale of the damage. In addition to the settlement, more than $400,000 had been spent on legal fees, half covered by the building, half by the building’s insurer.

“With all due respect,” said one resident, Andrew Garn, “I see a culture of litigation.”

Troy, the board president, did not return emailed requests for comment.

A jar of feathers

The Rutherford is a co-op, which means buyers agree to a lengthy set of bylaws intended to elevate the quality of life. This confers on co-op boards outsize power, and in many cases the president has outsize power over the board. Shmulewitz, the real estate lawyer, said he had encountered plenty of co-op leaders who were as imperious as any medieval monarch.

“Some board presidents,” he said, “let emotion get the better of them.”

Ramadei said the only emotion that had motivated him was empathy for anyone within earshot of those parrots.

Lesser’s parrots were simply loud pets, he said, and she was a savvy performer. She turned up at her deposition with a jar of parrot feathers, he noted, explaining that their presence soothed her. Ramadei still doesn’t buy it.

“I see a really good actress with a prop,” he said.

He no longer serves on the board and acknowledged that after the settlement was announced some residents were angry enough to give him the silent treatment. But his goal wasn’t to make friends, as he put it, and his legacy, he said, will be not the parrots but the improvements he made to the building, including a $1 million renovation of the lobby. Plus he oversaw a bylaw change that bars parrots and every bird on the planet. Today, the only pets allowed in the Rutherford are dogs, cats and fish.

“And they’ve got to be little fish,” Ramadei quipped. “With their mouths sewn shut.”

As Kullen looks back on her years at the Rutherford, she can think of nothing she would have done differently. She’s even nostalgic for her pre-Curtis friendship with Lesser.

On second thought, maybe she has one regret.

“When I moved in, there was an apartment on the 10th floor for sale,” she said, with a pained smile. “I could have had that one.”