Here's the sequel to my tale of being woken early in the morning by a drunk calling from the front door.
My concern at the time - after I'd hung up on him - was that it might have been a homeless person trying to scam his way into the building to get warm. It went down below -20C that night. As it turns out, he was probably high.
When I got up that morning, I emailed Leo, our building superintendent, to tell him about the call and that the guy had mentioned he was trying to "get up to 1104." Leo responded, saying he'd checked "records and surveillance" and that my caller was one of a number of "undesirable visitors" trying to get to 1104.
Reading between the lines, I sensed there was a known problem here. I was right.
The next day, I got a call late in the afternoon from, I think, the same guy. I hung up immediately and emailed Leo. This was on Sunday. He got the message right away and went out to the front door and chased the people away.
Then the next day, there was an emailed message to all residents from Thorne Property Management, our building management company:
"Undesirable visitors are being allowed into the premises and hanging around the vestibule, common areas and around the 11th floor in what appears to be drug related exchanges.
They are pretending to be dialing up to a suite, sneaking into the building when residents FOB in, granting access to other people, propping doors open and ignoring critical social distancing rules."
The day after that, notices appeared around the building with surveillance shots of "undesirable visitors" to watch out for.
Today, I saw Ingrid in the lobby and asked her about the 11th floor situation. As Karen and I suspected might be the case, the building's resident drunk is at the centre of this. He's an alcoholic single older man who evidently consorts with junkies and other "undesirables" - and may, judging by the message from Thorne, be supplying them or at least facilitating drug exchanges.
The guy has been a security risk for some time. Two springs ago, his key fob was used by thieves to enter the building and clean out a bunch of lockers to the tune of bout $5,000-worth of stuff. For a time, his fob was confiscated so he couldn't get into the building unless somebody let him in.
The present situation is a little unnerving. Ingrid said some people have had knocks on their doors late at night with confused people, evidently high, trying to find this guy.
I said to Ingrid that it was too bad he couldn't be evicted. "Oh, they're working on it," she said.
Exciting place to live.
*
The rabbit hole to Montpellier has finally played out. Or I guess the proper metaphor would be a mine shaft. In any case, I've been reviewing the pictures chronologically from start to end of our French sojourn and have now reached the end.
This one was taken at the Sunday morning market under the arches of the aqueduct, a market that only started in late March. Sister Pat and her sis-in-law Sue were with us. All the ladies were rather taken with the curly-haired lad on guitar in this little gypsy jazz combo that was entertaining the shoppers. Even I could see he had the look of a Greek god about him. Much more importantly, though, the band sounded good.
Late March in Montpellier is like our May. Everything was bursting out, including this beautiful wisteria not far from our flat.
And this one was taken down by the river at the bottom end of Antigone, the 1980s architectural showpiece development just south of the centre. I took many pictures of these buildings. They look great in the sun against a blue sky.
The last four were taken in Nîmes. It's early April now, all our visitors have left and Karen and I are frankly a little bored with Montpellier. So we took the intercity over to Nîmes, which is 30 minutes (by train, longer by car) to the northeast. It's a city of about 150,000, so half the size of Montpellier, best known for its Roman monuments.
Most of the pictures of the very well preserved arena, which has also been used as a bullring, and the beautiful Maison Carée (square house), a Roman copy of a Greek temple, I had long since processed.
The Maison Carée in particular has remained one of my all-time favourite photo subjects. I did find this one shot of it that I'd mistakenly set aside. A lot of the shots I took were from a low angle like this, partly to show off the stone carvings on the ceiling of the porch, partly to eliminate the crowds of tourists crawling all over the site.
The first is St. James Court at 200 St. James between St. George and Richmond. It's one of the first places my sister Pat lived when she came home from doing her Masters at the University of Sussex.
It's also where Karen and I caught our first glimpse of the man who would become Pat's husband. This was in Max's child-scaring black beard period. We were just leaving Pat's after a brief visit to check out her tiny new digs, of which she was very proud. We knew this new guy was coming over, and guessed, rightly, that it was he we passed on the front walk. He must have wondered at the twice-over we gave him.
St. James Court was typical of apartment buildings going up in London in the 1920s - it was built in 1929 from a design by O. Roy Moore, the owner of the property and scion of a local family that had owned quite a bit of land in the neighbourhood. (This much I gleaned from an interesting document published by the city: St George-Grosvenor Heritage Conservation District Study )
On the other side of Richmond St., at the corner of St. James and Wellington, sits St. John the Evangelist Anglican church. It's the church our family attended when we were growing up and where my brothers and I were in cubs and scouts.
I never thought about it as a building when I was coming to it twice a week, but I think now it's a very pretty church. It was designed by a London architect, Charles F. Cox, and opened its doors in 1888. The spire was added in 1897, and the "church school building" - by which I assume they mean the building I knew as the parish hall, where our cub pack and scout troop met - in 1895.
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