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Relationships were made there, children were born there and people died in there. Maintenance was always there cleaning up the aftermath. It was in Rochdale that I learned the smell of a dead body, days old, behind a locked door. The older fellow had died of a heart attack in his sleep. Nobody knew he was dead until Garnet, one of my more experienced maintenance personnel, smelled something unusually foul in the Ashram. Older people came to Rochdale to be part of the new movement. Most of them wanted to be with young people. All were welcome. The Maintenance Department was created out of necessity. An 18-story commercial/hotel/residence high rise tower has a lot of systems that need to be maintained, regulated & serviced according to preset codes established by the federal, provincial & municipal governments. The heads of maintenance knew nothing about these codes or the proper way to run a building. We had no idea that a long-term budget was needed. Nobody understood money needed to be set aside for expensive maintenance projects. Nobody knew how to prepare the building for these projects. Everything the maintenance department did in repairs was in emergency mode. Scramble to find only enough money for band aid repairs. These systems include; 1) climatic controls (including heating & cooling, windows & doors, ventilation), 2) transportation & access (elevators, stairs, fire doors & access doors), 3) health standards (garbage removal, general removal of all rubbish & unhealthy conditions, maintenance, care & cleaning of all general areas, all public & shared private washrooms), 4) building standards (internal maintenance, condition of apartments internal doors installed properly with door closers & latched doors where necessary, elevator condition inside & out) 5) fire regulations (safe exits, no flammable piles or debris, fire hoses complete, extinguishers, Siamese water connections in order, hi pressure water pumps in working condition, door closers, + many etc.) Unique to Rochdale was the different style apartments in the different wings. There was the west wing, central block and the east wing. It was built as an apartment hotel. Permanent west wing apartments and temporary central block and east wing rooms. The west wing had one Zeus, a large two-bedroom apartment facing north. It was situated on the most westerly end of the hall. Six Aphrodites, reasonable one-bedroom apartments made up the rest of the wing. Three facing the south and three facing the north. The central block housed the main mechanical and the building transportation systems along with the Ashrams. The elevators were public access in the north and west of the block. The living quarters took up the east and south section. The Ashram had three double rooms and four single rooms. The rooms were in an “L” shaped hall with the rooms on the east and south window sides. The group washroom was on the north side on the inside of the “L”. The Ashram lounge and kitchen were on the north east of the block. The east wing housed six Gnostics on the north side and five Kafkas on the south. There was also an entrance to the Ashram lounge in that hall as well. A Gnostic had a double and a single room plus a shared kitchen and bathroom. A Kafka had a single and a double room and a shared bathroom, no kitchen. The single and double bedrooms in both the Gnostics and Kafkas had the windows, bathrooms and kitchens were windowless. Today there are training courses for maintaining a building. But in the early 1970s there were no such education programs. Nobody that took the Rochdale maintenance head position or worked in the department had any training whatsoever. We learned as we found the problems and overcame them. Each of us took over the position as we climbed through the ranks, the man in front usually quit to maintain his sanity. I was the second head to keep the position for more than ten months. Add to this lack of training the fact that the building was never finished according to contract. There appears to have been nobody responsible for checking the systems after construction, most finalizing papers were never signed. As a result of this lack of responsibility, several important parts of the mechanical system were either improperly installed or not installed at all. The garbage chute for example, was put in upside down, allowing garbage to catch on the inside rim of the chute sections. Other examples are; the motors for the building ventilation system were installed backwards and the impellers for the air conditioning system were not properly sized. The building itself was a conglomerate of reasonable quality & cheaply made materials and workmanship. It also had some internal structural defects that gradually showed themselves. They appeared in the forms of leaking water, flaking walls, faulty plumbing, faulty building systems, etc. The heating system was so poorly installed it used to blow radiator pipes and put the building in peril on a regular basis. Of course, this only happened on the coldest nights of the year. The grand topper of poor construction was the 2nd floor lobby floor. One night in 1974 it snapped and created a 6” rise on the east side as you came up the main staircase to the patio lobby. The strange thing was, it only affected the lobby floor and did not extend into the rooms either side of it, the ceiling was not damaged, neither was the 1st floor ceiling. When it snapped nobody was on the floor to witnessed the event. Nobody was injured and no mechanical or electrical damage occurred. It was near the elevators but they were not affected. Rochdale was a place where people got together and lived. The life in the building was constant and would spontaneously erupt as a door opened or as you walked around a corner. There were parties in the elevators and babies being born in the Free Clinic. Parties in the hallways and sometimes an argument as well. Unlike many apartment buildings today you got to know who lived on your floor and inter floor travel was the norm. The building was an integrated community. Previous Exit Next |