Spiderman lives in our building!

So there was some drama in the our apartment building.

Yesterday someone posted a note on the glass door to the foyer and by the mailboxes admonishing a fellow neighbor for their loud music at 7AM. That did not go over well.
By the time I’d returned home yesterday evening someone had written a response. “Get a life.”

This morning, the sign on the glass down had been taken down. Someone had left a longer response on the sign on the mailbox asserting that it was their cultural right to listen to music at levels that some consider loud at 7AM and threatening even louder music over the Labor Day weekend.

Bighead and I talked about the drama while at work. She, being a lot more even about this than I am, maintained that posting two snippy signs in the building about our fellow neighbor rather than talking to our neighbor is passive aggressive. I maintain that passive-aggression and culture do not excuse inconsiderate behavior. Threatening your neighbors with loud music specifically to offend them in the the name of a cultural-right is just as un-neighborly as passive-aggressively trying to shame your neighbor into turning their music down.

Frankly though, we were both concerned about the escalating anger in the notes and the surfacing negative feelings about gentrification.

Personally, I think that rude is rude regardless of how you feel about what gentrification is doing to your building/neighborhood. I think that an inability or unwillingness to take into consideration the fact that you have neighbors (in fact to breach the tacit but unspoken rules of apartment living) is poor home-training to say the least. It’s irresponsible and just plain lazy to use, “This is our culture” as justification for that bad behavior. It’s bad enough that our neighbors on the street behind us routinely have parties featuring music blasted so loud that there is no place in the building to go to escape it. It was really frustrating to have to think about someone planning such aural assault when I’m trying to have a nice relaxing long weekend. I think that it’s also important to note that there are 14 units in this building. Our broker has personally turned over 8 of these units over the past 6 months. Whether our neighbor likes it or not the majority of this building has been gentrified and the majority has become the minority.

It makes me a bit nervous because I don’t really want to have to deal with the kind of hostility that can surround gentrification. It’s one thing to have it on the street. It’s another thing to have it in my building. I think that on the street I’m a little bit incognito because I’m brown (which makes me worry sometimes for Bighead) but in my building they know that I’m new.

Luckily our building’s got its very own super-hero. Sometime today a level head posted a note pointing out that 1. Talking to your neighbors is the easiest way to resolve a situations and 2. That different people need different things in the morning.

I don’t know who this masked man is, but I love him.