The People Under the Stairs
Two years ago, Stephanie and I moved into a beautiful, pre-World War II four-plex in the heart of University Park. We fell in love with the hardwood floors, built in bookcases and location the first time we laid eyes upon it. A week after we moved into our second floor unit, Mark, a piano playing chef moved in below us. Mark was a great neighbor, understanding the proper mix of neighborly socializing and privacy. Sometime last March, Mark fell in love. As Mark and his boyfriend became more serious, we saw less and less of him and, in August, Mark and his boyfriend moved to the Oaklawn area.
Shortly after his move, we noticed that someone had moved a couch and large, plasma TV into the vacant apartment, but we never saw any other furniture moved into the unit. For a few weeks, we saw a few signs of life (i.e. delivery notices on door, packages at doorstep, etc.) but never saw any people moving in or out of the unit. We assumed that someone had simply stored the TV & couch in the unit until they were able to move it to it’s proper location. Every now and then, we would hear sounds of life (creak, pops and the such), but readily dismissed them as signs of an old building. The windows remained darkened, the parking spot assigned to the unit was used by a tenant from another building and we never saw anyone enter or leave the unit.
Perhaps the strangest incident occurred on New Years’ Eve when I heard a group of female voices coming from the downstairs lobby. At the time, we assumed that the bottom two units were vacant and figured that a group of drunk New Years Eve revelers had entered our building by mistake.
On Friday night, as I left to pick up dinner, I came to the bottom of the stairs and was taken back when I saw a couple standing in the lobby. My initial shock soon turned into curiosity as the couple entered the unit in question. How could a couple live below us for almost a half a year and go virtually unnoticed? Better yet, how could someone live below us for that period of time and not introduce themselves to us? Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have neighbors that don’t make a lot of noise, but I still believe in being “neighborly.”
