––What was the worst feature of the apartment?

Cohen: The worst feature was also the best, and that was the loneliness that seemed to breathe it. I had almost nothing with which to appoint the three rather generously proportioned rooms. In the kitchen, I took a door from its hinges and laid it on milk crates: that was my table. In the corner room, I spread a futon on the floor by the three large windows: that was my nest. In the middle room, I put my computer on another milk crate, and a cushion on the floor in front of it: that was my desk. I had no television, little money, no friends. I lived on peanut butter crackers, apples and milk. The time I spent drifting through those rooms, alone with my thoughts, was both maddening and glistening.

Ferris: They refused to give me a full year's lease.

Mattison: The worst feature of our apartment—which was rickety but spacious and convenient, with four bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom, all off a long hallway—was that it needed to be renovated when we rented it in June, and when we returned in September, the renovation of the bathroom was just beginning.  During the whole month of September, while we scrambled around trying to teach and write and study, we had a series of workmen invading the bathroom from early in the morning until night on weekdays, and for much of the month we had no shower.  I remember walking into a friend’s party and asking her if I could please take a shower.  After a while my roommates and I talked about nothing but bathrooms.  The nearest bathroom in a public building was blocks from our apartment, and we’d trek there in the morning, or take our toothbrushes and head for the library.  Of my three roommates, the boldest and most elegant, Renie, perfected the art of dressing up in heels and nylons and quietly entering the school across the street to use the teacher’s bathroom there.  Meanwhile, a friendly but painstakingly slow series of old-world craftsmen of various nationalities glued tiles on the bathroom floor, one by one, and installed slightly nicer fixtures than had been there before.
We complained to the landlord, but it didn’t help.  We’d barely noticed the landlord’s name when we rented the place, but we belatedly realized that he was a lesser member of an old, distinguished Massachusetts family.  His brother was the governor, and his mother was a bigshot at the UN, and his ancestors had been around for centuries.  At the end of the month we had a decent though ordinary bathroom, and we felt we should pay less rent or no rent for the month, but the landlord—though we’d learned he was on the Fair Rent Commission—insisted.  Renie put on her high heels again and consulted a lawyer, who said, “You mean you girls [he may even have said ‘You little girls’] intend to take on the Xs of Massachusetts?”  We gave up and paid the rent.

Packer: Pigeons roosted on the ledge outside my bathroom window.  This window looked onto a grimy airshaft, and the pigeons were there at all times, sighing and twittering and emitting a stink that made it absolutely impossible ever to open the window.  They were, in a word, gross.