Duchess Apartments

At first I was really drawn in by the spacious apartment. It seemed so clean and so big. The first few months were fine, but then I noticed little things. Like the bathroom walls would ooze yellow tar that was built up from a previous tenant who smoked, as well as the tenant above me who smoked. I notified the landlord and he didn't do anything. This was the start of a trend that only got worse. Only one phone port worked out of the four in the apartment, which put my WiFi router in a bad… location. When I had my internet company come see what they could do to boost my speed they told me that the building had not updated its wiring since the 70s, and it wasn't equipt to deal with high speed data. Two years of asking and none of the other ports were fixed. The bath tub would regularly back up filling with sewage and contents from my neighbors sink. It would take a minimum of three days for the landlord to get someone in to fix it. The plumbing in the building is so old that you cannot run both if the outdated washers without the floor of the laundry room flooding. Several rooms in our apartment had mold problems. When we installed a new light switch we noticed that the wires in the walls weren't properly capped off to prevent fire. The lightbulb in the kitchen went out and it took the landlord two weeks to fix it, every time I told him about it he would say "that's the first I heard of it". Once he misplaced my rent check and tried to charge me a late fee. He claimed to have not received my notice to move, even though he was told in person I would be leaving and I sent the letter via certified mail. He tried to stick me with an eviction for leaving when I told him I would. We also reported to him that the door to the laundry room was broken and could fall on someone, he told us he had a new door he just needed to install it. When the old door fell on my husband we tried to see if we could install the door ourselves because the landlord clearly wasn't going to have it done. Overall, the apartments are shoddy and need a lot of work. It would have been a great place to live if the building wasn't so poorly maintained, and if the landlord actually remembered to do his job. Read More