The depths just get deeper at 300 N. State Street. According to the verified complaints of an East Tower resident (and backed up by police reports), earlier this month during a raucous late-night “party” (yeah, that’s it), one low-rise floor unit owner forcibly ejected from his apartment a woman naked from the waist down. The woman proceeded to knock on doors around and around the circular hallway, crying and begging for help until building security and the Chicago Police Department arrived. If you know anything about Marina City (Kimmelgate, anyone?), you already know this is just the tip of the iceberg…
The unit owner in question is familiar to most who live here, as much for his 40-something Elvis Presley pompadour as for the skimpily clad women he’s often seen with in the elevator. At a public meeting earlier this spring, he spoke out on behalf of several independent candidates for the Marina City condo board (I sat next to him and shook his hand). Just before his possessions were put out on State Street for nonpayment of his assessments.
According to his neighbor, he’s back in his unit and continuing what is allegedly a years-long habit of late-night, drunken yelling and screaming, occasionally involving scantily clad females who, er, don’t live in the building.
Emerging from his apartment upon the arrival of the CPD on the night in question, clone-Elvis finally tossed the humiliated woman’s belongings out of his apartment (a short skirt, a metal purse, and high boots with glitter — draw your own conclusions). She told the officers Elvis was a “crazy motherfucker” who had spent his night “smoking weed” and had “other stuff”. Reports were filed with the building and the CPD.
But it doesn’t end there. Two nights later, the same CPD duo were back on the same floor when neighbors called to complain about yet another knock-down, drag-out party-cum-verbal altercation in the individual’s unit. Ignoring police orders to cease or be arrested, clone-Elvis proceeded to verbally abuse his neighbor, including ridiculing the death of one of the neighbor’s children — at which point he was carted downstairs by the CPD, and the complaining neighbor told in no uncertain terms by a CPD officer to call 911 every single time there’s a problem from now on.
And just to add a little Kevin Bacon to the story, readers who recall last month’s building fire in West Tower will probably not be surprised to learn that one of the burned-out parties formerly lived with clone-Elvis in his East Tower apartment. The roots of crazy run deep and tangled in Marina City.
Now I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that whack-job unit owners flinging half-naked hookers (tell me otherwise) into residential hallways at 2:45 in the morning is not exactly what Bertrand Goldberg had in mind. There are many good, upstanding people living in Marina City. But as I scribe this story listening to yet another group of drunken revelers screaming at the top of their lungs off of a Marina City balcony at 10 o’clock at night, I find it harder and harder to understand why anyone would want to take out a lease in this building, much less a mortgage.
Unless you’re looking for a little free tittie action on your way to the garbage chute.
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Read more about Marina City in my Marina City archives.
Read about the (unrelated but equally disturbing) Gary S. Kimmel prostitution scandal at Marina City in my Gary Kimmel Scandal archives.
Categories: Marina City
Mike
I’m an #OpenlyAutistic gay, Hispanic, urbanist, Disney World fan, New York native, politically independent, Jewish blogger in Chicago. I believe in social justice, big cities, and public transit. I write words and raise money for nonprofits. I’ve written this blog since 2005. And counting...
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The Yankee Hotel Foxy-trot
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