Dear PoPville

“Dear PoPville,

At the beginning of April, I started smelling something foul in my apartment, or more accurately, my nice Cleveland Park condominium. I have lived in this unit for 17 years, and amazingly have never smelled anything from any other unit, no fish, no trash, no smoke, no nothing. Paradise. I keep my home very clean for a lot of reasons but there is never any standing trash, pizza boxes or anything else. Vacuum 1 or 2 times a week. Run a tight ship. No animals. No smoking.

This smell in my apartment was bad, and it continued for at least 15 days the first time. I reported to management and I quickly deduced this has to be coming from the unit underneath me (we have the exact same layout, so I’m 100% above that unit), which has been abandoned for months as I had discussed with the manager before. I went down to T1 level, I’m on 1st floor, and as soon as I got into the hallway I was overwhelmed with a powerful smell of chemicals, but underneath that, the same nasty stale, almost smoke-like smell that was in my apartment. I put my nose next to the crack in the door and took a big whiff. Almost got sick of the powerful nasty smell that smelled just like it did in my unit. I almost got sick breathing in the foul air in that hallway, it was that bad. This is not a hard connection to make. My unit smells bad for the first time in 17 years, underneath me is an abandoned unit, and it smells bad in the hallway in front of that unit and there is this chemical smell seemingly to mask that nasty smell.

I should also mention, within a day, my throat started to be very sore, my eyes were sore. Within 3 days (more…)