Oxford Village

Before my passion for life and learning was replaced by apathy, there was my sophomore year of college. I lived in and paid an unjustifiable amount of money for a cramped bedroom that I shared with a narcissistic roommate. Neither since nor before then have I had louder, dumber, more hateable neighbors. The bass from the music played by residents downstairs tickled my feet when I walked in my room barefoot. It was like living in a nest of different breeds of gadflies.

That year is a paradigm for everything I have been trying to regain.

Behind The Edge – the looming monolith of apartments in the newly developed Avenue North complex – is Oxford Village, about two blocks of three-story apartment buildings and the actual edge of what some call “Templetown’s” western boundary. From the outside, the apartments are fresh, clean beige stucco that contrast with the grimy, aged brick row homes surrounding them. Inside doesn’t offer much more character: Rooms are white-walled, the living rooms furnished with generic maroon sofas and chairs, and carpets matching the apartment’s exterior. The tiny bedrooms are mostly occupied by two desks and two beds.

That was the schematic for every $2,000-a-month apartment in Oxford Village, which translates to $500 plus utilities for about 100 square feet of personal space. 1609C was my home for sophomore year of college and the most expensive place I’ve paid for (unfortunately, an economist will tell you that nothing is overpriced) if one is to calculate a three-way price-to-square-foot-to-quality ratio.

Oxford Village was the first privately contracted student housing built for Temple students. As the size of Temple’s student body grew too large to be housed in the dorms on the landlocked campus, administrators saw private developers as a more feasible solution than building university-owned housing. The apartments sell themselves: Most leases are reserved within three days of being made available. For my three roommates and me, it was the choice that was physically closest and therefore most sensible to our freshman brains. If we had been willing to suffer a ten-minute bike ride to and from campus – which we now do – we could have rented a place twice the size of Oxford Village’s college-ready cubbyholes. But students are wary of leaving the 115-acre oasis of North Philadelphia and keep demand for inhabitable comfort blankets high.

Rent did not include tranquility. From next door came a near-constant din of drunken voices and low-grade rap, which necessitated either a bang on the wall or a knock on the door, or sometimes both. Eventually, the annoyances next door tag-teamed with the cacophony of construction from across the street where The Edge was being built, working in concert to prevent quietude from ever steadily existing in 1609C. The sound from next door usually reached its peak not on Fridays or Saturdays but on school nights – mostly those before I had early morning classes. Falling asleep, I would hear the thump…thump…thump of the bass of a Ludacris song vibrating through my white unadorned wall, followed by shouts from one neighbor to another. This usually prevented me from sleeping for at least half an hour. So I would sit up, reach over to my desk right next to my bed, pick up a book, flip on the metallic reading lamp and distract myself until I could sleep.

Sometimes the sounds bothered me so much that reading became impossible and I would observe my own room to bide the time until sleepiness overpowered the auditory jolts. My roommate had pinned a poster of Robert DeNiro from “Taxi Driver” grinning and pointing two pistols at the camera, which was the first sight of the morning if I woke up facing south. His Hindu-esque “Axis Bold As Love” poster hung over the lengthy side of his bed, under which was an assortment of shoes and books and other miscellany. I didn’t have room for miscellany. Under my bed were both his and my dressers, which always made me feel a little altruistic, like I was sacrificing my right to be lazy and throw items under my bed for his right to do the same.

Coming home would bring me past the future site of The Edge – first an empty lot and then an efflorescing structure – and usually, if it was springtime, a group of homogenous Abercrombie-clad boys tossing a football around. (They, along with their female counterparts who in wintertime walked to the local bar in spaghetti-strap shirts and jeans, comprised the lion’s share of Oxford Village’s residents.) I would pull open the heavy glass door and walk into my building, where I would pass the main office and hold my key card up to the electronic lock, sounding off a painfully loud buzzer letting me know I could enter – a sound that also shot down the hallway and into our room whenever anyone else entered the building.

But the noisy flaws of Oxford Vilalge take second place in my memory to the smooth faux-wood desk that held the white Macintosh on which I typed my first philosophy papers. I first read the Republic and Wordsworth and slept with my first semi-serious girlfriend while lying in the twin bed under a tan down comforter. It was my place of recuperation after days of psychadelia in the city. The slightly firm chair in the living room was where I began the first page of my journal while my Deadhead roommate watched the same episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force he had seen countless times before – something that became an expected element of the atmosphere in the apartment, along with the jam band music that could be heard down the hallway from his room. Twice, the main room was transformed into a den of vice, lit only by red Christmas lights that glowed onto our tapestry and provided enough visibility to light an opium pipe, while from behind us played music of unidentifiable emotion.

Now, in my senior year, I’ll occasionally talk to a sophomore who will tell me about what happened last weekend at their apartment. “Where do you live?” I ask, and they tell me Oxford Village. They must be scared of the city, I think. Why don’t they experience Philadelphia, move to Fairmount and live on tree-laden streets near locations other than a bar that caters to the lowest common collegiate denominator? And while I wonder that, I remember when I left 1609C one day to catch a bus to Washington DC, or read Guns, Germs and Steel in the nearby Chinese Laundromat and filled my brain with enough fuel to ponder for the next few days, or rode my bike in view of the Philadelphia skyline and gazed at it with curious awe, and I think of how ecstatic it was to feel that passion for life, and how today I would unleash a swarm of gadflies in my quiet apartment to get it back.