Pasquale and Elise Forino View Full Caption DNAinfo/Murray Weiss

MIDTOWN — The shuttering of the famous Carnegie Deli over an illegal gas line hookup has cost Elsie and Pasquale Forino more than access to giant-sized pastrami sandwiches and strawberry blintzes.

The Forinos have lived above the West Side eatery for 57 years, raising three children in their modest four-room rent-controlled apartment above the spot where countless New Yorkers and tourists line up for gastronomic gluttony.

But their lives have been in limbo since April, when Con Edison crews shut off the gas to the building after finding that the restaurant hooked up an illegal gas main, leaving tenants including the Forinos without heat, hot water or a stove to cook on for six months and no end in sight.

Now, as the temperatures drop, the Forinos and their neighbors in the other four apartments are concerned about how long they can keep taking cold showers and starting to wrap themselves in sweaters and heavy blankets at night.

“You wake up some mornings and there’s just no sense of normalcy,” said Elise Forino, 83, who bought a hot plate to cook small meals and boil water that she uses to take an occasional warm bath.

“People say, ‘Go to a hotel,' but it is very expensive,” she continued. “We are Depression kids and not extravagant.”

Her husband of 61 years, Pasquale, says he did not mind taking cold showers during the hot summer days, or occasionally staying with their children rather than staying at home.

“But we are starting to feel like victims now,” he said, pointing out that up until this issue the deli owners were good landlords.

The deli paid thousands of dollars in fines and completed repair work to satisfy city inspectors who, on the heels of a deadly explosion that caused by another illegal hookup that destroyed several East Village buildings, killing two people, are being abundantly careful.

Edward Little, the lawyer for the deli, said the eatery's work is done. They've replaced all the old gas piping with new lines, and brought everything up to current-day codes.

He said that now, the building is awaiting final testing and then approval from the Department of Buildings — which has to clear the building's gas test — before Con Ed can come in and make a final examination and restore the gas service.

“I realize that with all the explosions lately that everyone is being extremely careful, but we have never lived through something like this,” said Pasquale, 87, as he sat near his newly purchased space heater.

The Forinos moved into their floor-through apartment back when the neighborhood was known more for its writers, artists, musicians and actors than mile-high sandwiches and mobs of tourists.

The couple say a friend of Elsie’s introduced them shortly after Pat was discharged from the Army. Growing up in Detroit, Elsie said she read Vogue magazine as a child and dreamed “since I was 12 years old” of moving to New York to be a designer.

Pat, who was from East Harlem, wanted to live elsewhere.

“He did not even want to live here,” Elsie said of their Manhattan apartment. But there was no taking Elsie away from her designer’s post at the nearby Essex Hotel. And the location worked well for Pat, who bicycled to work at the Visiting Nurse Services and at the now-defunct Dorset Hotel, where he was a manager.

As for their children, their daughter, Jenianne, got a front room when she was born two months after they moved in. The boys, Stephen, and Marc, arrived over the next three years, and shared a bunk bed opposite Jenny’s room.

The Forinos, meanwhile, had a queens-sized loft bed built for them in their not-very-loft-like living room that allowed their children enough space to play underneath.

The aroma from the restaurant wafted through their apartment, particularly during the early years when the the restaurant cured its meats in the kitchen, which was then located directly beneath their home.

“Our children used to go to school smelling like pastrami sandwiches and pickles,” Pat recalled.

Today, their apartment has the feel of a museum, with shelves filled with records and books and the walls lined with artwork and family photos from a bygone New York.

“We’ve had a wonderful life here,” Elsie said.

“We plan on dying here,” added Pasquale, who had a cameo in a Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose" film walking his family's dog outside the deli.

They say the restoration of heat and hot water can’t come soon enough, but they added they will not be celebrating with a meal in the deli one flight of stairs below them.

The couple have only eaten in the Carnegie Deli once in five decades living above it.

Thick meat sandwiches is not Pasquale’s cup of tea. And Elsie is a vegetarian, who says she has a soft spot in her heart for cows ever since she had a valve replacement using bovine tissue 20 years ago.

“I have a little calf in my heart,” she said, putting her hand on her heart. “And it’s been beating there for a very long time.”