a mini-high line in lynn?

This is a view from my window

I've always thought it would be neat to seed-bomb this little patch of grass that runs along the train tracks from Lynn Station to Silsbee St. It already has some wildflowers growing in the parts that get mowed. People wouldn't be able to walk around there as the tracks are still very active, but it would certainly add some much needed charm to the place.

Strangely, below all this is a series of retail spaces. I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what kinds of businesses would this property suit. What would tolerate trains loudly rumbling over them every couple of hours? One space is some kind of weird commercial parking lot. There's no signage, so it's hard to tell what's really going on. If the train noise could be tolerated, there could be a really neat indoor/outdoor casual restaurant. Just as long as it's not yet another 99 cent store.

Either way, Lynn just needs more beauty and throwing some wildflower seeds up there would go a long way.

Young people of today, this makes me worry:

changing seasons

Every day that I take the train to work I take a photo from the platform with my mobile phone. I always wonder if the people who see me do this wonder what the heck I'm doing.

customer service

I was going to write a customer service post mostly about the art of effective cashiering on my other blog, but I have a more pressing situation on a related topic here. When I moved into this apartment 2 and a half years ago I took a glance at the lights dangling from the 12 foot ceilings and asked how to I get my lightbulbs changed? Thinking am I going to have to buy a ladder? Fortunately, I was told that the building management would take care of it and the couple of times that I needed bulbs changed, they took care of it. Flashforward to today and 5 or six bulbs are out in the kitchen plus a couple of others. So I called the office and asked to get the bulbs changed. "Okay," the girl answered and started to hang up. "Wait," I stopped her. "Don't you want to know which ones need to be changed?" She giggled nervously and supposedly wrote down the information. She said she'd put in a work order. 2 days later, I come home from work and find this hanging from my doorknob:



I am immediately livid. If I indeed needed to provide my own bulbs, why didn't the girl on the phone say anything? I can't reach the lights, so I had no way of finding out on my own what kind of bulbs they are. So I called the next day and when I explained the situation (she seemed to not recall me calling 2 days before) and she says "Okay, hold on" and suddenly I'm taking to someone's voice mail and I haven't been called back. I called later in the day but I guess the office was closed. They aren't open on Saturdays. I guess that would be too convenient.

It's just so damn impressive how every single simple thing I ever ask for from these people is a total ordeal. Getting the screeching smoke detector battery changed took 4 phone calls, one of which she claimed that they didn't have permission to enter the apartment. Hint: permission is written into the lease.

So here's the thing: if you're going to be in a customer service position, then you have to proactively provide customer service. If you can not do that, you are just causing more problems and pain for people. Here is how this could have been executed properly: If residents are now required to provide their own light bulbs, how about issuing a notice that says residents are required to provide their own light bulbs and here is the kind you should get and here is where you can find them. I don't think it takes very much critical thinking skill to do this, but maybe I'm wrong.


Maybe I just need to get a ladder.

Is there a "how many mayo group employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb" joke in this?

Shhhh

Winding down for the evening. About to jump in bed with a book. I crave an evening where I come home and I don't hear my neighbors. I dream of a parallel universe where I only know of my neighbors as people who live in the building and not the woman from upstairs whose bed bangs on the floor and who was waiting in the lobby for her drugs to be delivered very early one morning (I had an early flight) or the guy from downstairs who hasn't improved his bass playing skills despite the hours and hours and hours he sort of practices and makes my walls and furniture vibrate.

If I were more of a writer, perhaps this would be good source material for a novel. The thing that amazes me about all this is for all the years I've lived in apartments, this is the first time that I've had such a horrible noise problem. The exception is the last apartment I had in Brooklyn where the super of the building felt it was okay to have his band perform, complete with cowbell, all night Saturday nights. I called 311 several times. I don't know if they did anything with the information. I remember coming home one night and hearing loud music from 2 blocks away thinking I'd hate to live in the noisy building on the block, only to discover I did live in the noisy building on the block.

Of course part of the source of the noise is the poor construction practices of whoever hung the drywall and the total lack of insulation between the floors. Yes, loft living means the apartments are in a somewhat raw state, but at these prices... I wonder what the situation would have been if these had been sold as condos after all? Certainly such lame workmanship would be grounds for some sort of lawsuit.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of comparable options  for rent in Lynn. If I move, I'd have to live in another town and most likely pay more money. And the idea of doing that, I find completely offensive.

Why Not

I have these periods of real estate obsession. I think it's leftover from my nyc days when i was continuously afflicted with envy of other people's apartments. It doesn't matter how nice or how good a deal your apartment is, there's always someone with an even better place. Lately I'm obsessed with the Macallen Building in South Boston and also with the handful of mid-century modern homes in Lexington and Lincoln, MA. Actually, the homes in Lexington and Lincoln were the among the first mid-century modern homes built in the country. Strangely, now there are so few modern homes in and around Boston at all which makes acquiring these homes very, very expensive.

I want to live in a modern home. Most of the homes in this region are definitely not modern. The ones I have found are waaaaaaay out of the realm of possibility for my financial resources. So I'm forced to settle for places maybe I don't like so much and just dream.

As I've started exploring options for my next home and even briefly considered buying, I began to wonder what would happen if I built a modern home in the middle of some neighborhood steeped in Victorian, Cape Cod and Triple-deckers? What if I just decided to buy a house around here, tear it down and build something modern in its place? And then what if a few others decided to do the same knowing that the city of Lynn was friendly to a variety of architectural styles?

There has been much discussion about how can Lynn revitalize itself and in my view this is the way:  through modern and improved design of residential housing. I think efforts in new housing have to come first- before street-level businesses will come. Go to the website of any major chain store and look in the franchising information section and you will see that companies are very specific about the population and per-capita income of areas they are willing to do business in. It makes sense. It's easy to get caught up in chicken and eggs discussions about how to revitalize a city, but in the case of Lynn, it has to come from real estate first, and that's a tough place to be in. Let's face it, people aren't exactly beating down the doors to move to Lynn and the real estate market is still a mess. But the right design approach can attract specific kinds of people to the area. For all its flaws, that's how I ended up at MV24. It was mostly the right design for my lifestyle and price range. (Unfortunately, this building has an assortment of problems that may ultimately force me to move which I've detailed in another post).

Before I moved to Lynn, I lived in Austin, TX. Austin has a variety of older bungalow style homes, McMansions, ranch style, split level, cookie cutter gated communities - just about everything you'd expect in the suburbs. There are also mid-rise, high rise and lofts (new construction) and a significant number of modern homes in a variety of price ranges, many of which have been designed by local architects. There's even a subdivision of very colorful modern homes called Agave that with the downturn probably hasn't performed as well as its developers might have hoped, but it got built and people are living there!


View Larger Map

My point is, if you want new people, you have to build something new (and new can be recycled when done smartly). It will take time. It will be painful for some people and if enough risks are taken it will be awesome.

my apartment conflict

The current state of my neighbor situation is making me want to move.  The bed above me gets quite the "workout" at all hours and sometimes makes me wonder if it's going to come crashing through the ceiling. I've asked this neighbor to put something under the bed like maybe a few layers of carpeting, but I guess I can consider myself ignored.

The neighbor below me has gotten an electric bass and apparently the only way to practice is to turn it all the way up so that my furniture vibrates. The neighbor to the left has a pair of bulldogs. When they fight, it feels as if the entire building is shaking. He snores rather loudly and seems content to allow the door to slam. The problem with slamming to door, aside from being extremely loud, is that the walls shake so that every other door on the floor rattles and my pictures hang crooked. The other night he put in a movie and cranked the tv up loud. I had to knock on his door 3 times to get him to turn it down (granted not very much). Somehow he seemed surprised.

The neighbor on the other side also likes to watch movies and play video games rather loudly, but sometimes really early in the morning. That is until one morning I was really fed up and banged on the wall screaming. He hasn't done it that loudly since.

But really? Is that was it takes to get people to behave civilly? I have to bang on the walls and scream? It just doesn't make sense. It should be obvious upon moving in that since the floors are concrete and the ceilings are high, noise will reverberate all over the place. Secondly, there's no escaping the fact that the walls are thin. I don't think I have especially good hearing, but I can hear pretty much anything my neighbors do. I know what part of the apartment they are in and what they are having for dinner if it's particularly smelly. The crazy woman who mistreated her dog who lived to the right of me for a year made a tomato sauce so strong I resorted to hanging plastic over the area that seemed to be exposed to prevent the smell from coming through for fear it would take up residence in my clothing. Plus she smoked.

But to me it's obvious that if you are a person who makes noise, perhaps it's better to live in a house rather than an apartment. If you are in a situation with shared walls, perhaps you should keep the volume down a bit. That if you are down the hallway and can hear noise from your apartment, perhaps you are disturbing your neighbors. That if you like to listen to music loudly, wear a pair of headphones. It's hard to me to understand how other people don't see it that way. That it's just ok to be as loud as you want any time you want regardless what the lease says.

So, I've started looking around for another place. My needs are a little bit particular, but I don't thing they're particularly luxurious:

1) commute to boston less than half an hour, or few stops
2) at least 600 square feet, preferably a loft
3) little to no carpeting, preferably concrete or wood
4) a decent amount of daylight
5) appliances made in the last decade
6) demonstrably quiet. I will even ask the person showing the apartment to go to the floor above and walk around to prove how quiet it is.
7) if on the commuter rail, then must be equal or less to what i'm paying now. If on the T then add $200 to what I'm paying now
8) a grocery store needs to be within walking distance
9) a park or beach or walking trail somewhat nearby


Every apartment that I've come across that seems suitable costs about twice what I'm paying now. I just can't spend that much and still consider myself a responsible person.

I've considered Lowell, but the commute could drive me insane and every time I need to fly really early in the morning (which is most cases), it could potentially be a very expensive ordeal to get to the airport.

One solution I've considered is bribing my neighbors to move out. It doesn't guarantee that the next person who moves in would be any quieter though. But it could be potentially less expensive than moving.

So how do you deal with your unreasonably noisy neighbors?