Alexander The Great Apartments

Not real apartments.
Sep 14th, 2022

Apr 18th, 2019

DO!! NOT!!! LIVE!!!! HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!! To be perfectly honest, I'm shocked to see this building still standing. While it has been over 10 years since I last stayed here, it's still burned in my mind as one of the worst, if not THE worst places I have ever "lived" at, if you can even call it that. Because unless it's been completely gutted from the inside & dramatically changed since then, this is a HIGHLY-ILLEGAL building. Hands down, the worst house conversion I have ever seen by clearly someone who had absolutely no idea what they were doing & simply did not care. The back apartments had an extremely narrow hallway, where each teeny apartment had no windows, nothing. If a fire happened back there, there was only the one hallway to get in & out. No other way of escape. So if a fire were to happen IN the hallway, or, God forbid, at the entrance of the hallway, everyone that lived there, unless they wanted to take a chance in going THROUGH the flames, would quite literally be dead. We lived up front where we had the front entrance to go through, & ONLY that. There was a staircase leading up to the second floor & a door for a fire escape that led to a ladder that you climb down from the back wall of this converted house. That ladder was SO rusted through, my mother & I knew if we took a single step on it, it would disintegrate. The building "lobby", as I guess you can call it, was not secure whatsoever. None of us had a key to lock it & anyone could walk in, & DID. One of the first evenings after we moved in, my mother & I decided to take a walk by the docks to get some fresh air. Only when we opened our front door, which led into the "lobby", there was literally someone right on the other side of our door, sleeping on our steps!!! We immediately shut the door & both promised that, once the sun goes down, we will simply never go out. And on the last night we were there, my mother placed her bike outside by our front door to make room, because everything was packed in boxes & ready by the door inside. We woke up the next morning, ready to go get our moving truck, only to find someone had stolen her bike while we were sleeping. To be honest, neither of us was surprised. And if we hadn't been so very very tired when we made the decision to put it out there, we definitely would've known better than to do that. For the inside of our "apartment", we had doors from the original layout of the house, that literally went nowhere. They were glued into their frames so you could not open them because on the other side was literally a wall. The window a/c unit in the living room was really bad & rarely kept us cool, the only one that did was the unit in the window of the first bedroom, so we both had to sleep in there. The second bedroom, where the bathroom was, had no a/c whatsoever. The oven part of the stove, we could not use, for our own safety, because it leaked gas whenever it was turned on. The first bedroom, I think they intended to turn the 2-3 weird doorway openings, maybe into a shelving unit to store your clothes & stuff, but gave up after making the openings, & so they just shoved a cheap dresser into one of them & called it a day. I remember my mom was shocked that the bathtub in the bathroom was porcelain (iirc), & they had chosen to paint over it to make it match the bathroom. I imagine the reason why I don't remember much else about living there, is because I simply don't WANT to. We never felt safe & while we brought up the issues to the landlord at the time (dear. Freaking. Lord. I SINCERELY hope it's not the same person after all this time), but it was glaringly obvious he simply did not care. To him, he knew we all didn't have a choice. Whether because we were on section 8 & no other place in the area accepted housing vouchers anymore, or needed somewhere cheap to stay because it was all that could be afforded, or didn't have an amazing credit score to get in anywhere else. While we all saw ourselves as struggling people trying to make things better for ourselves, he only saw us as money bags & nothing more.
Jan 29th, 2024