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About This Series:

Armory Square Apartments — known informally to Windsor residents as the Block — can't be described without describing the people who live here. In truth, the story of the Block is many stories — their stories.

The Valley News set out to tell some of those stories beginning in the summer of 2006. Over the course of a year, staff writer Peter Jamison and staff photographer Channing Johnson spent time with some of the Block’s residents, listening to their thoughts about the building’s future, and their own. The series Another Day at the Block is about what they saw and heard.

The stories, while they feature a number of the Block's residents, focus on events that took place in the life of one family over the course of two months in the summer of 2007 — two months that were especially eventful both for the family and the building. The series was reported with the subjects' understanding and consent.

Nightmares and Daydreams

Story by Peter Jamison — photographs by Channing Johnson

Chapter One

Windsor — Julie Rowden climbs the stairs to her third-floor apartment on a cool summer's eve. The steps are dappled with red spots. One is so bright, so thick, that it might be a splash of paint. She has just fetched her mail on the ground floor, and a friend she passed told her what happened: A young man was stabbed last night on the balcony and trailed his blood behind him as he staggered down the stairs.

Now Julie retraces his steps. She is not escaping, as he was. She is coming home.



Home, for Julie, is the Armory Square Apartments complex, originally built between 1920 and 1922. There is still something beautiful in its crenellated brick facade, which folds in and out for an entire block like an enormous accordion. The four-story building of nine connected sections was constructed as worker housing, and industrious, well-paid young men from the National Acme Manufacturing Co. — which employed 1,600 men in Windsor before closing its factory in 1933 — once filled its halls. The building was nicknamed the "Namco Block."

The workers left, but the name stuck. For decades, Windsor residents have simply called it the Block.

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