The Carlyle is definitely in one of the better parts of Baltimore. As a student at nearby Johns Hopkins University, I never worried about walking home alone at 2 in the morning. It's conveniently located within walking distance of supermarkets, convenience stores, etc. I can't fault the location.

What I can fault is the building maintenance and the management. The apartments (I lived in a two-bedroom) are quite spacious and priced about average for the area, but there's a ton of little things. The floors are cheap parquet wood, with a coating on them that peels and chips constantly, getting all over everything. The walls are rarely painted (not always even between tenants). The elevators are tiny and break often. The doormen are.... odd, but at least social.

The maintenance in the apartments is awful. Most notable is the water system. I lived in two different units two consecutive years. The first had a pipe leak behind the shower in one of the bathrooms, to the point that all the tile had fallen off the wall, exposing the rusty metal behind the drywall. The building had covered the wall with a shower curtain and promised to fix the apartment for over a year. Never did, after repeat calls. Also in the same apartment, a water leak under the floor led to areas where water would well up around your foot when you walked. The other bathroom in that apartment also developed a water leak, such that the plaster on one side of the wall crumbled off completely and the tiling fell from the other. Neither problem was ever addressed by maintenance after repeated calls.

In my second apartment, a pipe developed a leak behind the wall in my bathroom. The maintenance guys appeared out of nowhere one morning, punched a huge hole in the wall, fixed the pipe, and left the hole gaping in the wall for three days before they came to patch it. Their work also left dried plaster and paint all over the fixtures and walls of the bathroom.

Maintenance in the rest of the building follows suit. The building is newer by perhaps 10 years than other buildings in its area, and yet is more poorly maintained than almost all of them.

Regarding the staff - the maintenance and door staff are always genial and friendly. They remember your name and are helpful (if incompetent, in the case of maintenance). The building's management (a married couple who also live in the building) are also perfectly nice - but also completely incompetent. They wouldn't notice for months if you missed a rent payment, or two, or three (one fellow student I know actually tested them on this). After some confusion arose over rent payments, I spent months asking every few days for a list of previous payments I'd made. It was always "I'll get to it first thing this afternoon," and never appeared. Eventually I stopped asking and nothing ever since came of it. I doubt these guys could show me a copy of my lease if I asked for it, and the one rental agent they employ is deaf as a doornail.

They do have a parking garage, which has a several-month waiting list and costs a good deal. It also gets closed once a year for two days for them to "resurface the cracks." Otherwise you'll be parking on the street by the townhouses nearby, which is low-crime and doesn't cost anything but may mean you'll end up walking up to 100 yards to your car.

The place moonlights as a Quality Inn hotel, which lends it a certain air of bustle and new faces all the time, but also means you'll occasionally walk into 100 people in the lobby who just got off a charter bus.

In summary, they've got the biggest apartments in the area, and if you're a student (or a senior citizen - those are the only two major groups of people in the building) you'll find it tolerable and quirky. In particular the noise control is excellent. And I don't mean to say the place isn't liveable. I lived there for two years and mostly didn't hate it. But if you're used to living in nicer places or you have maintenance problems, you may end up unhappy.

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