I've lived at 4701 Pine for a year and a half now. Certainly there are nicer places in the city to live, but for the area and price, this has been a really nice place. Parking is 75$ a month, spaces located under the building, with keycard access to the parking.
As far as noise, we live on the top floor so I don't know how noise from above would be, but I imagine it being very minimal, the floors are very solid and thick. Very rarely do we hear noise from the apartments beside or underneath us. When we have heard noise, it has only been someone hammering something during the middle of the day. The only real problem from noise is the outside noise, ambulances going by, horns honking, people shouting outside as they walk down the street, stuff like that, and it's not hard to adjust to tuning it out. It may have been more apparent for me as I moved up here from the country, someone who's used to living in the city probably wouldn't notice it much at all.
The building is pet friendly, a lot of people here have dogs and there's an outside area specifically for taking your dog out, with some benches to sit while your dog does it's thing. I've heard other people complain of pet hair in the washing machines occasionally, I've never had a problem with it myself and haven't minded the dogs at all even though I'm not a dog person.
In addition to the pet area, there is a pond area behind the building, actually on top of the garage, with some small goldfish, and ducks or geese hang out there sometimes, not sure which as I have only been out there a couple times. There's some garden space up there as well, not sure what the terms of getting space for a garden is.
The building is pretty safe, you have to enter a code to access the building and again for the elevator, and there is always someone at the front desk watching the doors and security cameras. When you get food delivered, the building calls up to notify you, with the option of coming down to pick it up or sending the delivery person up to your place. A possible problem security wise: anyone can give anyone else their access code, we have personally given several friends the code so they don't have to buzz up to us, and the building has never given them a problem about coming in. I personally prefer it this way but someone who is more insecure may not be comfortable with that.
The layout of our apartment is great, bedrooms are huge, closets are also large and plentiful. Our hall closet is so large, we stuck a bed in it and turned it into a guest room. Bathrooms are a problem for us though, they're pretty small and there's not much space in them for placing items, so if you have a lot of items that need to stay out in your bathroom, deoderants, perfumes, make up, etc, you may end up investing in some corner shelving like we did.
maintenance has been pretty good, responsive to our calls by the next day. We haven't had any problems that needed immediate attention, I'm pretty sure they'd come up right away if there were a serious problem, I think the "head" maintenance man lives in the building. There are 2 elevators, whenever one goes out of service, they are on it quickly and they've never both been out. Fire alarms are a problem I just remembered, we've experienced the alarm go off at least 10 times in the past year and several times it has stayed on for 20 minutes. In some apartments, including ours, they tested last year and determined the alarm in the hall could not be heard well enough from inside the apartment. In response they installed an alarm inside our apartment, so when it accidentally goes off, it's VERY loud, you really can't sit in the common area of the apartment during an alarm. Yet, if I go into my bedroom, which is the master, and close the door, the walls, which are so good for keeping out unwanted noise, also dim the alarm noise to the point that it has gone off and my boyfriend slept right through it going off for 20 minutes.
The staff is flexible and friendly, and realistically friendly, not fake over the top friendly, I really appreciate that. Our rent was raised by 60 dollars about half a year ago, and we went down and negotiated with them and got 100 dollars knocked off the rent so we were paying less than we were originally.
other things of note: we've had some ants for about a year now, strangely enough not in the kitchen but in the living room and 2 of the bedrooms. they are not bad, we put up traps which didn't seem to work and generally agreed that we'd rather just put up with the few ants occasionally crawling across the floor than having someone come in and spray poisonous chemicals all over the place. We've seen 2 roaches during a year and a half. There's an occasional silverfish in the bathroom.
The heat is supplied by radiators and controlled by the building. You can adjust them theoretically, though I haven't had much luck with this, and it can get pretty hot sometimes. We have had to open windows during late fall/early winter months to counter-act the heat.
If you want air conditioning, you'll need to buy a window unit.
Laundry facilities are adequate, but cost 1.50 for washer and .75 cents for dryer, which really has to run 2 cycles to dry the clothes so it's 3.00 dollars to do a load of laundry. This building could really use a change machine, getting quarters for laundry is a pain in the butt. And a word of advice if you move here: do your laundry any day but Sunday if you can help it, almost everyone does theirs on Sunday. I've never had to wait for a machine, but it's nice to be able to get a choice of machine and get one that's right in front of dryers so clothes can be quickly transferred between machines.
The location of this place is kind of like a crossroads of neighborhoods. To the north and west, the neighborhood looks sketchy, though as a female who doesn't own a car and has walked all over this place, the only problem I've had with strangers on the street is being hit on a couple of times. To the immediate south, there are some really nice houses, and most everything east of here is filled up with students. Transporation-wise, this place is easily accessible to 3 buses, 2 that travel to center city and one that runs out to the pier 70 shopping center, as well as the 34 trolley and the market-frankford elevated train.
Overall, this has been a great place to live. I've mentioned some small problems, but any apartment you rent is going to have it's share of problems. I have to agree with the previous poster, I've looked at several other apartments in this area and read reviews for dozens of them, this place is definitely the best of West Philly.

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