Departments Article |
Suburbia: Behind the Orange Door
The explosion of storage units across city and state means you can now stow away more stuff than ever that you don’t really need — like a dead body
By A.J. Daulerio
- Photo by Paul Pugliese
THE STORAGE FACILITY plopped in the middle of Montgomery County looks like a lifeless catacomb of faux Army barracks, if Army barracks had orange doors. Coasting across the blacktop and speed bumps, we weave past the closet-size five-by-five units and the super-size 10-by-30s, ample enough to stash the Hummer and a few beach chairs.
My girlfriend, Kathleen, and I have rented one of the small ones to store a bed, a dresser, a couple years’ worth of dusty boxes of clothes and pictures, and one rickety wicker bookshelf. There’s no escaping the depressing aura — this is a place where old stuffed animals and clutter-causing bedroom furniture come to die, or in our case hibernate for a couple months. We stop in front of our unit, Number 270, a tiny metal tomb that our beat-up old mattress and shredded box spring will call home for a month, until the lease on our new place starts.
With the cadence of a beat cop reciting a Miranda warning, the manager on duty — a rotund, goblin-looking woman — begins rattling off a list of forbidden activities as she unlocks the door. “You cannot live in your storage unit, you cannot use the storage unit for band rehearsal, you cannot run an illegal business out of your storage unit. … ” She continues on about items that can’t be stored: Chemicals. Food. Pets. People.
People? “Is it really necessary to tell everybody this?” I ask.
Goblin Lady looks up from her clipboard and shakes her head. “You have no idea.”
My girlfriend, Kathleen, and I have rented one of the small ones to store a bed, a dresser, a couple years’ worth of dusty boxes of clothes and pictures, and one rickety wicker bookshelf. There’s no escaping the depressing aura — this is a place where old stuffed animals and clutter-causing bedroom furniture come to die, or in our case hibernate for a couple months. We stop in front of our unit, Number 270, a tiny metal tomb that our beat-up old mattress and shredded box spring will call home for a month, until the lease on our new place starts.
With the cadence of a beat cop reciting a Miranda warning, the manager on duty — a rotund, goblin-looking woman — begins rattling off a list of forbidden activities as she unlocks the door. “You cannot live in your storage unit, you cannot use the storage unit for band rehearsal, you cannot run an illegal business out of your storage unit. … ” She continues on about items that can’t be stored: Chemicals. Food. Pets. People.
People? “Is it really necessary to tell everybody this?” I ask.
Goblin Lady looks up from her clipboard and shakes her head. “You have no idea.”
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Posted by | Feb. 22, 2008 at 1:46 PM