These apartments aren't necessarily bad, but there's a lot of flaws you should know about before renting.

-Parking lot is in terrible condition. There's several bumps and cracks over it. It's not level at all. There's no painted parking spaces, so parking is more of a crap shoot with people parked every which way. It's poorly maintained in the winter. When we were moving in they told us that they were replacing it and have these nice plans and blueprints. A year later, no change, it's still awful. The main entrance gate is also only one car wide. More then once I've almost been hit by someone trying to go in/out at the same time as me.
-There's a school across the street of the entrance and people park all along the road. It basically means that in the morning there's a ton of traffic and you can't really see around the parked cars to see if there's oncoming traffic. It's a pain to get out in the morning.
-My car, which isn't even that nice (Civic Si), was vandalized twice in a year. It seems to be safer when parked away from the road at least.
-Difficult to heat. The heating vents are at the top of the apartment rather then the bottom. This makes it take longer to heat the apartment which already has a ton of air space thanks to the high ceilings. On top of that, the windows tend to be pretty drafty despite the impressive looking insulation windows. It took over a weekend to reheat the apartment after the heat went out for the night. Speaking of that...
-The heat went out 4 different times this winter, including on the coldest night of the year. Each time they didn't have it fixed until morning. Bring a space heater.
-Heating is a disaster to manage on the east side (side facing Dutton St) because of the amount of sun it gets. This side gets direct sunlight basically from sunup to early afternoon. Combine with the huge windows it gets extremely hot in these apartments on a sunny morning. In the winter it gets up to 80 and you'll want to be turning on your AC or opening windows in the middle of the winter. In the summer it can get near 90 degrees and the AC just can't keep up.
-The east side apartments get a lot of road noise. Dutton St is very heavily traveled until the wee hours of the morning. It's also the main route that emergency vehicles tend to take, so it's a rare night you don't hear sirens and speeding cop cars going by. The windows are also thin so you can hear people talking on the sidewalk below and it's close enough to the road that you can hear people's stereos if they're on loud. Since it's very close to the road, if you open the windows on the lower apartments, it ends up smelling like car exhaust.
-The main hallway doesn't actually go down the center of the building. It's actually closer to the east side. This means the rooms on the east side are longer along the side of the building but not very deep, while the rooms on the west side are the opposite. In a 2 bedroom apt, there's almost no room for a full size couch despite the large square footage. It can be difficult to setup a nice living room while still being able to get to both bedrooms.
-Because of the off center hallway, the rooms are laid out differently on each side. On the west side they share an entire wall covering the length of the apartment so you tend to hear a lot more of your neighbors. On the east side they tend to only connect at a short wall on the bedrooms so it's a little bit quieter. The floors and ceilings are thick though, I rarely hear neighbors above or below me.
-You better be a dog person because they are EVERYWHERE. Nearly everyone seems to own a dog. This would usually be fine but a lot of owners are fairly irresponsible with them. This is especially bad in the winter when a lot of the dogs don't make it out of the building in the morning before deciding to pee all over the entry way. The entrance smells like dog piss year round. A lot of owners let their dogs go near the entrance too, which they aren't suppose to do. Management occasionally sends out menacing sounding letters, warning people to take care of their dogs better, but they've never actually taken any action.

There are some good sides though. The apartments look real nice so guests are usually impressed, even if you aren't. The staff is generally friendly and fixed most of my problems in short order. It's conveniently located to downtown Lowell (which would be a bigger plus if downtown Lowell was worth visiting). If you can deal with noise, dogs, wonky heating, bad parking and fairly high rent, you'll probably like it here.

User Responses
From: ricedrake	Date: 06/11/2008
I am thinking about looking at a unit in this building today. This is a very helpful review. The complaints in this review are difficult for someone to see upon first viewing apartments. Thank you.

Your thoughts? Post a response to this review. Display my response: with my username anonymously Responses appear below reviews and one response per user is permitted.

   Free estimates on moving trucks      Find apartment share/roommates