Dorchester House is a storied Art Deco apartment block in Northwest DC, noted for being John F. Kennedy’s first address in the capital. Fast forward a few decades and the building appears to offer far less glamor: a number of residents have complained about repeatedly finding urine and feces in the building’s stairwells. One resident told Cockburn he encountered excreta in the stairwell “daily during the winter.”
The waste is cleaned up “usually within a few hours after I contact the front desk,” says the resident, “but in rare cases it can remain for days. There is still some dried feces in one of the stairwells that has never been cleaned up.”
“I have to use the flashlight on my phone to avoid stepping in it,” he added. “When it comes to behavior and public decency in this apartment building, anything goes.”
What’s more, residents believe much of this to be human in origin. The first resident Cockburn spoke to blames “homeless people who stay in the stairwells.” Others suggest a more sinister culprit. “Recently in our building groupchat, people have shared that they have seen a woman urinating in the stairs while recording herself with a Ring light,” a second resident tells Cockburn. “Two or three people have corroborated that.”
