My building is not very tall but it is wide, with wings folding out from the lobby like a parliament. Legally speaking it is a co-op; our landlord converted it in the 1990s in a real estate ploy, then bought and sublet nearly all the shares. When quarantine began, the world shrank to the building’s size and everyone became a mad housewife in their cabin fever. There were frenzies in the tenant WhatsApp thread: a package thief, tacos for 2L abandoned in the lobby. Chimney swifts were spotted on the roof of the haunted 19th-century institutional building — now a Seventh Day Adventist school, someday slated to be dwarfed by condos — across the street. Once someone saw turkey vultures. “Sure it wasn’t management?” someone else asked. It became clear that if rent continued to drain from the apartments, the neighborhood would wash away. We formed a committee and slipped flyers under doors. They came back covered in complaints. Upstairs a patch of black mold was growing in a baby’s room; it measured less than a square foot, so the housing inspectors couldn’t be bothered. I desperately wanted to learn everyone’s problems and names.