Free weed

Ran into our old upstairs neighbor yesterday. We sold our loft in his building and moved here (2 blocks away) 18 months ago. He had some interesting news to share with us. The ground floor condo in the building was sold in March ostensibly to transform what was an appliance shop into a residential condo. They heard the hammering and machines but they rarely saw the owner. (It's a fourplex building) Anyway, next door, there was a fire last week and the firemen came and put it out and then came to their building to make sure no fire had spread. (It hadn't but there was a good deal of smoke.) That was when they discovered a hydroponic plant operation in the basement with a thousand marijuana plants. The firemen confiscated the bags of finished product and cut the tops off all the growing plants and turned off all the machinery. The owner of the unit was (surprise, surprise) not around.

The police picked him up the next day.

A couple days later, a terrible smell started to permeate the building. A rotting smell. An instant gag tickler. Enraged, the other unit owners went down the fire exit and axed down the inside door to the ground unit. The plants were rotting and the room was stiflingly humid. Mold covered all the corners of the walls. So they had to dispose of all this stuff to get rid of the smell. In the end, they had 39 trash bags of plant material. A little nervous about the contents, they called the city to tell them what they were putting out to be picked up.

But when the trash people arrived, only 3 bags remained on the sidewalk.

Gotta love this neighborhood.