Think twice before you move into Groton Lofts apartments or any other apartment owned by Towne Properties. When I first moved into my apartment, there was dust everywhere, and OLD dust. I mean there was dust in there that was probably as old as the building itself. It took me days to clean out all the dust in my apartment. The blinds on the windows do not work. The few times I tried to lower them down, the blinds literally fell off the wall, and it took maintenance about 2 weeks each time to fix it. So that says a lot right there about the quality of the maintenance in this building. The kitchens are super tiny, so if you have lots of dishes and utensils, you will probably have to store most of them. All of the appliances in the building are old and outdated. The hot water heaters are only big enough to hold hot water for one person. If both my wife and I had to shower, one of us would have to wait an hour or so for the hot water to be back. The ovens don't have an oven light on them, and they don't heat up to the temperature they are set to. The dishwashers constantly break and flood. The washers and dryers on each floor never work properly, and there is only 1 washer and 1 dryer per floor, both of which are very small, with 8 to 10 people on each floor. So if you like hiking up and down 6 flights of stairs to try and find an open washer and dryer, have at it. A lot of times too, people leave their clothes in the washers and dryers, long after they have finished washing or drying. So it makes the simple task of doing laundry even more difficult. I actually paid to dry other people's clothes a few times, just so I could use the washer. The temperatures of the washers seem to be random. I lost some good clothes because the washers used hot water when it was set to cold, and my clothes bled all over each other. The dryers always take 2 cycles or more to dry, so make sure you always have lots of quarters if you are moving in here. Some of the residents pour bleach all over the washers too, so be careful where you set your clothes, or you will get bleach on them and ruin them. My wife lost some very expensive running clothes because of this.
If you like peace and quiet at night when you sleep definitely do not move in here! There is a bar on the first floor downstairs that gets very noisy at night, and is very easy to hear, because all the windows at Groton Lofts are VERY THIN. Also, due to the EXTRA EXTRA THIN SINGLE PANE windows, at night time, you will constantly be woken up to the sound of VERY LOUD motorcycles, ambulances, police cars, gangster cars blasting gangster music, and fire trucks. To top it off, if the people riding the motorcycles get stopped at the light on 7th and Race, they will do their best to make sure that you hear them by constantly revving their engines, no matter if it is 2PM or 2AM.
The area where Groton Lofts is located is very unsafe, mainly due to the drunks at the bar on the ground floor, and because it is right beside "Over the Rhine", which is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. If you read the news in Cincinnati, you will constantly read about people being shot or stabbed in that neighborhood right next door. There were many times while I was living there when I would hear bums/prostitutes fighting outside the bar downstairs. There was a time when some prostitutes, who were standing outside on the corner of the building, actually tried selling themselves to me. There are also lots of fake bums that beg for change that like to hang out in front of the building. I can't even count the number of times I had someone hassle me for change. And, while I was living there, a week or two before Christmas, someone broke into the apartment's basement, where all the residents' storage lockers are, and then broke into someone's storage locker, and stole all of the Christmas presents that were inside it. The couple whose locker was broken into had a small child who had Christmas taken away from him. What did Groton Lofts do about it? Nothing. They changed the lock on the main entrance, when the lock wasn't even the problem. The person was just let into the building. The building needs security cameras and an on duty security guard at all hours. The parking garage is also very unsafe. During the couple years that I lived at Groton Lofts, I saw about 6 car windows that were smashed out, 1 of them being my wife's.
The swimming pool on top of the Gramercy building is a joke. It has a metal bottom, and always feels like its 100 degrees in the middle of summer. So, if you already feel like you are 100 degrees, jumping in the pool will not cool you off. It almost makes you feel even hotter. It is also extremely crowded for its tiny size. It is like swimming in a can of sardines.
The rest of my review can be read at http://www.apartmentratings.com/rate/OH-Cincinnati-Groton-Lofts-1663546.html read more