The Curious Case of the Ground Floor Apartment in the Building Across the Street From Me

Edward Hopper, Night Windows, 1928

Ever since I started taking an extended sabbatical from Online™ I both have no idea what's going on for the most part and have started to wonder about pretty insipid minutiae in my daily life. Hence why a ground floor apartment in the building across the street from me is what is currently occupying my ignorant, crisis-absentee brain.

I would like to preface this post by saying that I, like everyone else who lives in cities, enjoy peering into other people's apartments when they are lit up at night. If you don't like doing this as well, you are a very bad liar. I'm pretty sure there is even a word for this phenomenon in some other, more poetic language like German or Japanese, but I can't remember.

We begin our story a few months ago on some routine nightly walks with the dog, during which I cannot help but catch glimpses into the many apartments in the rather dense part of DC in which I reside.

The apartment building across the street from my apartment building is what is sometimes referred to colloquially as a "dog bone" plan in architecture - a long central corridor boasting an angled wing on each side, which makes it look like a dog bone from above. This kind of apartment layout was particularly common in urban areas in the 1930s and 40s, and there are many examples in Northwest DC, which saw a great deal of development during this period.

The apartment building across the street, which I will henceforth refer to simply as "the Dog Bone" is a less modern building than the one in which I reside (which was built in the 1960s), but in a way that is deeply endearing. For example, the Dog Bone still has a mail room/front desk with an attendant, whereas my building has its own Amazon Locker. The folks who do maintenance at the Dog Bone work there full time and have embroidered Dickies jumpsuits, whereas our property manager hires contractors in slick vans to work on our building. The windows are smaller in the Dog Bone, yet the apartments themselves (from the outside) appear bigger.

Anyways, a few months ago on my nightly dog walks, I kept noticing that an apartment on the ground floor of the Dog Bone always had its lights on, though nobody ever appeared to be home. Furthermore, while the other ground floor inhabitants always kept their blinds down for privacy, the entirety of this apartment could clearly be seen from the street from two sides (it was a corner apartment). I started checking this apartment every night to see whether or not anyone actually lived there, but I saw no one. I began making inferences as to what the situation was.

First off, the decor. This apartment was decorated like a rather tepid Target furniture department display, as if the inhabitants simply walked up to the store attendant and said "I'll take one of everything." Strangely for an apartment, the walls were painted pale blue instead of the usual landlord special (beige). Closest to the window, was a white Wayfair-chic dining room table with a brass vase of fake white flowers on top. Against the wall to the left of the table was one of those cheap $30 laminated particle board bookcases seen most often in college dorm rooms and first apartments decked out in the most unsettling bland decor - a handful of neutral-colored books that didn't seem to be about anything at all, some clunky marble bookends (again, Targét chic), and a picture frame with the store-brand default stock photos still behind the glass. A pristine beige sofa with some pastel floral pillows cozied up to the wall facing the window, and beside it was a little white desk with a cheap, miniature globe (I will once again reiterate the sheer Target-ness of this apartment), and a brass pencil jar full of nothing but Ticonderoga pencils. The apartment is a studio; if you look in from a certain angle you can see a bed, made up and un-slept in with a generic pastel floral print comforter and stiff-looking matching pillows. Finally, passing by the smaller window, one sees a tiny, studio-sized kitchenette with no sign of use whatsoever - not a sponge in the sink or even a tea kettle on the stove.

My initial thought regarding this apartment was that the building managers kept it as a model apartment and that nobody actually lived there. This would explain the eerily generic decor and absence of any kind of personal touches. It would explain why all the lights were always on, even at night. It would explain why the blinds were down - the building owners wanted you to look into this apartment, as an advertisement of sorts. I wasn't sure how commonplace the practice of keeping a model apartment kept to show prospective tenants was, or even whether or not this was a Thing. I based my assumption off of home builders who have show homes to show off all the bells and whistles of the highest end model of their speculatively built suburban homes (like the Bluth house in Arrested Development). This answer satisfied me for at least a month, perhaps two, but then something happened.

One night, in the middle of February, I approached the Dog Bone apartment, fully expecting to see nothing out of the ordinary. Instead, there were people inside. A young woman with long ombre-dyed hair sat on the edge of the bed; at her feet, a large, open suitcase. Facing her was a tall man in a long, wool overcoat. The woman appeared mildly distressed, and it looked as if she and the man, whose face I could not see, were deeply engaged in conversation. I tried to see if there was anything in the suitcase but could not. Not wanting to be detected, I fled the scene, returning my dog to the apartment.

A bunch of potential scenarios began to run through my head. At first, I did not want to let go of the model apartment theory. I assumed that this woman was someone who worked for the building, perhaps in charge of maintaining the model apartment, and the man was someone she knew, maybe someone else from the building maintenance team - but this did not explain the mild distress, the suitcase, or the man's dapper clothes.

My second assumption was that this was a break up. The woman began seeing the man shortly after moving into the apartment, and lived with him for an extended period of time hence the stale look of the interior. Now that they are heading to Splitsville, she will have to live in the apartment once more. The open suitcase wasn't for packing but unpacking. However, a new fact soon eliminated this scenario. After the scene with the man and the woman, the lights were no longer on in the apartment. They have yet to be turned on even to this day. It's completely dark.

My latest assumption was that the woman was living with the man and not in the apartment, and he asked her to move in with him permanently, and she has since moved out of the apartment altogether. Because of the coronavirus, nobody else has moved in. An easy way to confirm this would to be able to see into the apartment and distinguish whether or not the furniture was still there, however the apartment remains dark inside, and I can't get close enough to see into it during the day due to the surrounding landscaping.

Every night, I walk the dog past the Dog Bone. Because of the stay at home order, more people are, well, staying at home. Many more of the windows are lit up, with one exception: that single ground floor apartment, now given an extra status of mystery thanks to the sheer expanse of alone time provided by COVID isolation.

This is perhaps an uninteresting and disappointing story. Perhaps you're wondering why I took an hour of my time this morning to write it. The answer is that I had to tell somebody - the mystery, as quotidian as it is, felt too great to bear alone. After hashing this all out, I finally think I've pinpointed the exact reason for the eeriness of the ground floor apartment and it is this: there is nothing more anomalous in our current pandemic moment than someone who is never home.