We moved into a one bedroom at Parkside Manor about a year ago, and it has served us well, but for various reasons, we won't be renewing our lease. I'll start with the positives. The apartment itself is spacious and comfortable, and it has a pleasant layout with nice hardwood floors and lots of closet space for a building of this vintage. There's always plenty of available parking close to the building.
Now for the negatives. There's no ventilation fan in the bathroom - instead, there's a large
...screened vent in the wall that connects to the outside...and the bathrooms of the apartments on the two other floors. Between this, the hardwood floors, and the shoddy 1970s building materials, you can hear EVERYTHING from adjacent apartments. I'm talking being able to hear the actual words being spoken in conversations upstairs, or knowing what's on TV based on the very clearly audible theme song emanating through the ceiling.
The property manager is very friendly and personable and seems to be dedicated to dealing with maintenance calls promptly when he receives them personally. However, he manages another property, where it seems he spends the majority of his time, and many more times than not, the phone here goes unanswered, sometimes for several days in a row. The voicemail box has been full and unable to take new messages for the entire duration of our lease. We've scheduled appointments for maintenance calls with other people who've answered the phone and had nobody show up until days late, if at all. This wasn't a huge problem for the small issues, like a broken soap compartment door on the dishwasher. Much more of an issue for the leak in the bathroom ceiling that took weeks and weeks to be addressed. (Turned out that it was never actually fixed the first time, and there's a new, worse leak now, which again would not have been a problem if the person I spoke to on the phone had actually shown up for the appointment we scheduled.)
To sum up this essay of a review, if it was possible to give a 2.5 star rating, I think that's what it deserves. Our experience here has been far from terrible. The issues we've had are not unexpected in a building of this age, and we recognize that inattentive management/unresponsive maintenance is a problem almost everywhere. That being said, we're looking forward to the possibility of a better experience at our next place.
Max of 1.