Last week I brought you breaking news about Maple Terrace, the boho-turned-yuppie-sellout apartment building at Maple Avenue and Wolf Street. A bunch of old tenants moved out in 2001 when the building changed hands and plans were laid for luxury condos, but a few decided to give the place a second chance in the past couple of years. Now, they're getting the hell out of dodge--again.
"The condo-conversion intention resulted in terrible treatment of the existing tenants," one recently vacated tenant wrote to Unfair Park. She's moved into Maple Terrace two separate times, first in 1998 and again in 2005. Now, she's outta there for real. "They seemed to have the idea that you should still pay top dollar to live in the crumbling fa�ade of what was once a great building. Plumbing was brutal; leaks incessant."
She says she moved in last year at the prime rental rate of $1350 a month, then when she recommended another tenant who rented an identical space, they got it for $200 a month less. "Maybe I'm bitter," she says, "but it just left a bad taste in my mouth." She says tenants balked at the management's next move: to jack up utilities during new construction. (Reps for Maple Terrace didn't return calls for comment.)
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"They gouged the tenants for utilities while they were building the model," says the tenant of the ad-smattered trailer out front. She says the bills were "outrageous" and "more than the most expensive of the summer." What was their compensation? Ten-dollar gift certificates to the Stoneleigh P. I guess if you can't force the crazy hippies out, you can at least hope they die from heart disease. --Andrea Grimes
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