My friends have called my apartment building many things, well before it was my building. Last year, we’d walk by it and they’d call it scary, gross, old or sketchy. They scoffed at its solemn and stately structure, long since worn by the passing of time and tenants, and I’d feel a pang of defensiveness for the place. My mother found the building to be rickety: somewhere she wasn’t quite sure she wanted her kid to live. She eyed each room suspiciously as we carried my furniture and boxes inside, searching for something wrong, something that would confirm its inability to host her precious daughter. It’s difficult for me to grasp the distrust they have for my building’s old bones; I always thought it was beautiful.
The four-story structure is short and square, made entirely of red brick and gray concrete. Above and below the windows, the dark brick is arranged to form decorative rectangles with happy pointed corners, and the edifice is adorned with carved stone spirals and ornamentation darkened from decades of dirt and exhaust.
Inside, the floors are made of real hardwood, with a strip of lighter wood going down the center of the walkways — the memory of a floor runner that is no longer there. The air in the halls always smells like old cigarettes. The doors lock with real keys and I struggle with the entrance to the lobby each time I use it; I jiggle and twist my old key while trying to turn the handle, the scuffed glass of the door rattling in its wooden frame during my daily dance with the knob. There is no elevator, and the wood stairs and railings are deeply penetrated with grime that couldn’t be sanded out when they were refinished last week…