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[Contrast with the sp[l]it level before this in Timonium Maryland: Click here] | |
Footnotes
- ↑ I should neve have been stuck living in the sp[l]it level. It was an American wet dream: the triumph of the full acre lot! The above picture has minor problems: What at the time had been an upscale apartment house is now a dormitory for Loyola College of Maryland. The tall vertical rectangle in the middle of the building's facade was not there back then and I have no idea what it is for now. Over a period of 15 years I lived in 3 different apartments in the building. During high school, it was a big 2 bedroom apartment on the top floor, the right hand side of the forward projecting part of the building. Our nextdoor neighbor was an alcoholic old lady who was half owner of the company (Potts & Callahan) that had the contract for snow removal from the city's streets. On the floor below, in a smaller 2 bedroom apartment was a couple who had retired from owning a steel company. The rent in 1962 was, if I remember $365 per month. There were two towers, the other one, off-page right, connected by a pavilion where there was an upscale restaurant on the ground floor. A psychiatrist had his office next to the restaurant, where he also slept. The owner of the company where my father worked who had sold out had a 3 bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor of the other building. This was a classy place. We had air conditioning. No dishwasher. You had to go to a public laundry room on the ground floor to do your laundry. I did that often over the years. In that first apartment, my mother was drinking herself to death while my father was away "on the road", a first-line sales manager, being mother hen to his [sales]men. He took very good care of them. My mother once threw a table lamp at his head and it went through a window and landed near the building's main entrance, 9 floors below. You could always call down for a doorman to bring your car from the garage to the front door. In winter we had a good view of downtown Baltimore's office buildings. I liked it there. The alternative might have been something even classier in an older building, but this was pretty good. With my mother under the ground and me off at Yale, my father moved to a one bedroom apartment on a lower floor in the back of the building. I was there only a few times. After I graduated from Yale and had a mental breakdown at Pennsylvania State University, I moved back to the efficiency apartment on the 6th floor front to which my father had moved from the one bedroom. $90 per month in 1970. He left to move in with his third wife: Melva the bitch (looked like, acted like Nancy Reagan and was a bookkeeper for a Republican Party advertising agency; she disliked me as much as I disliked her). I stayed in that efficiency apartment from The Baltimore Museum of Art thru my first years as a computer programmer. I liked it very much.
After this there were a number of other places, including some time on the 14th floor of another Baltimore high rise apartment building that was partly upscale people and partly subsidized rents; one day the nextdoor neighbor whom I never met who was a drug dealer either jumped or was pushed from his balcony onto the swimming pool's terrace some 14 floors below, DOA. I commuted from there to the DC Mall on commuter trains some of the cars in which had been converted from gas lighting to electricity.
Invenit et fecit