Beware!
The General Scott is in a great location. Yes. Is IT great to live in? No.
The GS has 2 kinds of owners: those who see the place as their home and long for peace and quiet and then---there's the other group of owners who don't even live in the building but who use it, with the full blessing of the association board, as a very loud rental business.
You see there is a minority of absentee owners who rent out their units to college students and other transients who generally don't take very good care of the units and this means that every couple of years, when a renter moves out (and they do all the time), the unit will have to be...renovated. And the General Scott has virtually no rules or limits on how this is done. One small section on page 19 of the rule book briefly gets into renovations but the truth is that it's a free for all where these absentee owners come in at will, whenever they want, do whatever they want and as loudly as they want.
You will not receive a notice about noise. They used to do that but I haven't received one in eons. They don't care. There is no one keeping an eye on how long these projects take, or who is being disturbed, there are no reports on progress, you never have any clue when the latest renovation will finally be done and you will be given no completion date of any kinds. Not even a fake one!
In January of 2018 the unit above me was renovated...for 4 LONG NIGHTMARISH MONTHS! Twice I had to check into a near by hotel just to sleep. That's 120 days of jack hammering, drilling, scraping, and banging of all kinds, and sometimes starting very very early in the mornings.
I complained. The front desk did nothing. I wrote emails to the board president who didn't even bother to write back. I wrote a letter to the board. No response of any kind. I emailed the management company EJF who was in charge of day to day operations...nothing.
The lesson is: if you work at night or if you, for whatever reasons, need to sleep later than 9am...do not move in here. Even if you're a person who might think it's perfectly normal (since you're paying a mortgage) to be able to maybe take a nap when you want to in your own home---you will not be able to reliably at the General Scott. When the sun comes up the noise begins. You never know when the next hammer will be slammed into a wall near your unit. And once it starts it can go on for months with no one doing a thing about any of it.
In short, this building is constantly under renovations of one kind or another. The board favors these absentee landlords giving them full power to do whatever they want (including Saturdays).
You get no warning. No notice of any kind. You're just lying there one morning in your bed sound asleep and suddenly BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! That's how you find out about the latest renovation.
And the board allows this to go on, it's been going on for eons, it's going on right now in Unit 20 downstairs and has been for the last month. When Unit 20 is finished it will soon start up somewhere else in the building. It's endless and there is no oversight on these renovators, no control, most of the board are not even here during the day so they haven't got a clue what it's like.
And again when a renovation is happening there is no telling how long it will go on because the process is not transparent at all, the board makes no effort to warn you or to do anything at all to reign in the noise or the smell of polyurethane when the floors are sanded and resealed. And when you complain they do absolutely nothing.
For me it's been anything but fun. If on the other you are a day person...and you don't mind having no idea what goes on around and near your home while you're at work then by all means move into the house of horrors. But you've been warned. read more