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.”

Some residents in the chat attempted to justify the woman’s actions due to the possibility that selling fetish content online could be her source of income. Others are less, er, sympathetic. “I wish we had cameras in the stairs to discourage this kind of behavior and hold people accountable,” says the second resident. “In a beautiful, historic neighborhood in the nation’s capital, there should be higher standards of living.”

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