With the exception of West Philly, which we'll leave out of this discussion since it's more or less a wasteland of slumlords and hookers, I've always lived in fairly reasonable apartments. It started up on 19th & Pine when I lived with Kelly. That was a great place, high ceilings, his & her's sinks and a wonderful location. The guy that lived upstairs smoked a lot of dope and professed to be an acupuncturist, but it could be worse. (Of course I can say that because he set fire to the building after we moved out).
My next city apartment was with my husband at 13th and Walnut. We were diagonally across the street from Woody's and so we experienced Techno Night on Wednesdays right from our couch. Our first Memorial Day weekend there we found a squatter in the empty apartment next to ours, called the cops and watched the good 'ole Philadelphia PD bust through the door. This guy must have been about 300lbs of solid muscle. When they finally did lease that place it was to a guy who we swore was running a meth lab. He never hung curtains, just black trash bags in the windows. He was nice enough, but his "friends" were a bit loud at strange hours of the day and night and I think most of them had Tourettes. Post wedding we didn't fit anymore so we decided it was time to start looking. It did have huge beautiful windows that I could stand in but the "one butt" kitchen was significantly lacking for two people who like to cook. Plus, it caught fire.
One night we came back from an evening out to find the lobby gutted. We could see clear through the building wall to the neighbor's toilet. Apparently Philadelphia Management had brought in PECO and some electrician to do some work. The fire started in the basement and came up through our wall. Aside from giant sooty fireman handprints on the wall and the fact that it smelled like 4,000 girl scouts had a campfire in there, our personal items were fine. A good dry cleaners and three days later we were gone.
We moved down the street a few blocks to a first floor apartment on 13th & South. We thought it would be far enough up on South that we wouldn't get the crazy noise on Friday/Saturday night. Instead we got all the people walking to the craziness. They knocked on our windows, rang our doorbell and got into fist fights in front of the house. I've never called the cops so much in my life. It did have two bedrooms but it was like living in a concrete box. Since we couldn't keep our windows open we never had any light. I think I suffered seasonal disorder while living in that place. About 6 months after moving in, my husband was up late one night and heard a funny noise. He had just enough time to unload the bookshelf and move the furniture before the ceiling let loose with about 40+ gallons of rain water from our upstairs neighbors balcony. He was nice enough to not wake me up through this fiasco so I discovered our trashcan in the living room collecting water the next morning.
It was at this point that I started making biblical references about waiting for the locusts to get us next.
As previously mentioned my landlord decided to sell that place and that is how we ended up here. For those of you who aren't jumping in your cars/onto planes/throwing on your running shoes to come visit, I thought I would entice you with our new view of the city. We haven't seen any locusts but there are a lot of crickets here....
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