690 Allerton Avenue,

Bronx, NY 10467

Its brazen refusal to crumble and fall, despite the landlord's best efforts to level the place.

690 Allerton Avenue is noisy enough to induce a kind of Lovecraftian madness. Someone's always blasting music, day or night (in fact, it only gets WORSE at night). There are children running, jumping, and screaming at all hours. I myself have experienced the "joys" of living beneath someone who frequently allowed his kid to ride a tricycle around the apartment...at midnight. If you complain about the noise, people look at you like you sprouted a Siamese twin. It's the kind of place where poor behavior has become so normalized that you're the odd one out for actually expecting peace and quiet. Nobody wants to live in a building that triggers a flight-or-fight response every two seconds, but good luck convincing the people here. It's gotten so bad that I've considered purchasing an inflatable bed so I can sleep in the hallway of my own apartment because it's the LEAST noisiest place. Emphasis on "least" .

And you can forget about going through the proper channels for noise complaints, because the management doesn't care. In fact, they will repeatedly lie to you about addressing issues with problem tenants.

You're pretty much left to fend for yourself around here.

Most of the tenants have absolutely no consideration or respect for the people around them—they're the types who act as if fulfilling the basic requirement of paying rent somehow entitles them to make everybody within spitting distance completely miserable. I've seen people squatting in the courtyard to relieve themselves (without wiping, by the way); I've watched tenants snort lines in full view of small children; I personally witnessed an incident back in March of '21 where a tenant's door was nearly kicked in by a group of seven or so men who took a break from partying at 3 in the morning so they can attempt to physically assault their ELDERLY neighbors for taking umbrage at their noise. Nothing was ever done about these particular tenants, by the way; even with video evidence provided BY THE SUPERINTENDENT HIMSELF. You know those stories you read online about nightmare tenants that nearly bring decent people to the brink of PTSD? Well, this is where people like that go when nobody else will take them.

And the people who run this place know that.

The management doesn't care about anything: no heat or hot water in the winter? We'll get on that before Ragnarok, we swear! What's that? Your light fixture produces a burning smell when you flip a switch? Pfft, it's probably fine as long as it doesn't catch fire!

The amount of collapsed ceilings alone is alarming; and if yours starts to bulge and sag for whatever reason, you better pray it doesn't fall on your head when you're sleeping, because nobody will be in a hurry to fix it. Or they'll claim temporary amnesia, all the while muttering something along the lines of "hurr durr, didn't someone already come by for that?"

And trust me when I say that a LOT of people have had their ceilings collapse around here. Nobody cares, nobody fixes anything.

Sometimes they don't even bother fixing up units for new tenants, which is exactly what happened to us when we first moved in—we basically did everything ourselves, so it's no surprise that things are falling apart decades later.

There are roaches all over the building; there's ants everywhere; there are rats the size of puppies doing laps around the courtyard; one of them even made it to my windowsill (which is no small feat given the distance from the ground). Every night, you can hear these filthy creatures chittering away. Maybe they're plotting their escape too. And a lot of the tenants dump half-eaten food all over the halls and stairwells, which only exacerbates the issue.

Oh, and if you need a professional for...well, anything—good luck. The management isn't going to send you an electrician, no, no, no—they're going to grab the first guy they can pay under the table so he can gawk at a problem he isn't trained or qualified to fix. Understand that this isn't speculation: some of these employees ADMIT this. There is a LOT of under-the-table stuff going on here.

This is the kind of place where the people in charge would rather let things get worse in the hopes that it'll scare off all the old tenants so they can bump up the rent.

Hire competent people who care, not the first guy you can pay under the table. And try to actually DO something about the noise and the problem tenants who have made the building unlivable for anybody with functioning ears. If you wanted to run a zoo, there's one not too far from here.