A three-year fight between a Hudson Heights co-op and one of its residents over whether her shower is leaking into the apartment below has wound through multiple courtrooms, with Castle Village now seeking roughly $200,000 in legal fees from reproductive immunologist Guillermina Girardi. Castle Village management claims Girardi's shower is leaking and wants it redone at her expense, while Girardi, 63, says she has produced about ten city inspections that found no leak at all.
A Contractor Shows Up, Then Walks Away
The standoff escalated this past October when Castle Village management sent a contractor to Girardi's door to carry out its bathroom repair plan, according to reporting by the New York Post. Girardi asked the contractor for the plumber's name, license number, and a New York City Department of Buildings permit — and when the contractor could not provide that information, he left, per the same account. Girardi has said she is not refusing access, but is asking that the underlying evidence be examined, telling the Post, “I am not refusing access; I am asking that the evidence be examined.”
The dispute traces back to a downstairs neighbor's report of a small leak, which a managing agent email initially described as seemingly not serious before management later characterized the situation as uninhabitable, the Post reports. Girardi disputes the claim entirely, saying flatly, “There is no leak to repair,” and going further to allege that the leak was fabricated to harass a shareholder. Castle Village's lawyer, Ingrid Manevitz, wrote in court papers that “the evidence unequivocally shows that there is a leak,” and separately argued that a licensed master plumber is not required for the repair work at issue. Both Manevitz and Castle Village management declined the Post's request for comment.
What the Courts Have Actually Decided
The case has moved through multiple court proceedings, with the courts considering whether Girardi must provide access for repairs.
The appellate opinion also addressed the limits of the business judgment rule, which generally gives a co-op board broad authority and leads courts to avoid intervening in co-op disputes. It noted that courts may review a board's deliberate decision to single out individuals for harmful treatment.
In a decision entered March 3, 2026, the Appellate Division granted Castle Village's motion and declared that under the proprietary lease, Girardi must provide access to repair the leak at her own expense, according to a decision on courtlistener.com. That appellate panel found Castle Village had made a prima facie showing that a shower-pan leak caused water damage downstairs, based on photographs and affidavits from an assistant superintendent and the downstairs resident. The same decision acknowledged Girardi had presented some evidence the leak was nonexistent, based on the HPD inspections — but found it insufficient to defeat the co-op's showing. A separate 2025 appellate ruling, also reported by law.justia.com, dismissed a Girardi appeal outright because it was taken from a nonappealable paper.
Dueling Accounts of the Downstairs Damage
Downstairs neighbor Ariane Zorgniotti reported peeling and bubbling on her bathroom ceiling, the Post reports, and the damage reportedly recurred even after a contractor applied sealant to the pipes. Castle Village concluded, per court papers, that the leak was almost certainly caused by a problem with Girardi's shower pan, citing a building employee's observation that wooden supports around the shower base became wet after the shower ran and that the downstairs ceiling dried when the upstairs residents were away, only for moisture to return after they came back. Zorgniotti declined to comment to the Post.
Girardi and her neighbors give conflicting accounts of what happened when she tried to investigate directly. Girardi and her licensed master plumber attempted to inspect the downstairs apartment last spring, but the downstairs neighbors denied them entry, according to the Post's reporting. Those neighbors have said damage was visible on their bathroom ceiling but maintained they had no leak of their own. Girardi has also said she poured Evans blue dye down her shower drain to test for a leak — a method that would point to a drain issue rather than a shower-pan problem — and maintains no licensed master plumber has ever diagnosed a leak in her unit.
A Renovation Dream Complicated by a Gas Pipe
The conflict isn't limited to the shower. Girardi, who bought her Hudson River-facing one-bedroom for $660,000 in January 2023, had planned to renovate the apartment to add a private office, with her daughter drawing up the plans. But Castle Village's gas-pipe replacement project, part of a $5 million effort the co-op began in 2023 to replace aging pipes, called for a horizontal pipe running across Girardi's kitchen ceiling — a plan she says would prevent her planned office. Castle Village sued Girardi for access to install the gas pipe, and she lost that lawsuit, ultimately complying with the plan. The March 2025 decision separately noted Girardi had complied with the October order as it pertained to the gas-line installation.
Castle Village, which opened in Hudson Heights in 1939 and comprises five identical buildings, has weathered costly infrastructure problems before. A retaining wall at the complex collapsed onto the roadway below in 2005, and its restoration cost more than $23 million, according to the Post's account.
The Price Tag of Three Years in Court
Castle Village's proposed fix for the bathroom includes demolishing Girardi's stall shower and replacing the tiles with building-standard materials, though the contractor's proposal excludes plumber and plumbing work. Under that plan, Girardi and her husband would pay $9,200 toward the work, need to vacate for five to eight days, and have a hotel covered by Castle Village during that time. Girardi disputes the scope and cost, estimating that redoing the bathroom properly would actually run $40,000.
The couple's bathroom history adds another wrinkle: a 2011 renovation replaced the original tub with a stall shower and installed Carrara marble tile, and the previous owner patched a leak with grout in 2018. Girardi says that earlier leak was never disclosed to her before she bought the apartment, despite management, the board, and the seller all knowing about it, and that she and her husband later applied leftover grout and silicone sealant to the shower stall themselves. “We initially cooperated fully,” Girardi has said, describing the relationship with management before it deteriorated.
The Post has reported figures of nearly $170,000 and roughly $200,000 in connection with the dispute over legal fees. Attorney Stephen Radin, commenting on co-op litigation generally, told the Post that a board acting in good faith will almost always prevail in court, and that residents face a difficult burden proving bad faith, animus, or abuse of discretion. That dynamic echoes other co-op cases: in 390 Riverside Owners Corp. v. Stout, a corporation sought access for pipe repairs after submitting a plumber's affidavit, while a separate dispute over a Jacuzzi reinstallation saw the First Department affirm the board's business judgment rule authority, according to a law-firm summary from fhnylaw.com. Whether Castle Village's shower-pan case ultimately follows that same pattern, or breaks from it given the competing inspection records, remains before the courts.
