moving into Methodist Manor

Our condo rules must have been written about the time the place went condo.  I don't know what that session would have been like.  I'm sure most of the rules make sense, you can't have 900 people deciding to do whatever they want with their units.  At one time I remember they outlawed bbqing on your balcony.  People kept dumping live coals down the garbage chutes and starting fires in the garbage pile.  You would hear the fire engines go whoop whoop whoop, and then just as the sound was the loudest it would stop abruptly and then those poor firemen would come piling out of their engines and into the building.  I say poor firemen because the elevators were shut down and they'd have to clomp up our narrow stairways with their heavy coats and their equally heavy fire-fighting crapola, and then trundle back down again when it was discovered that some balcony bbqer had a martini or two too many and had dumped live coals down the garbage chute.

Though I am no bbqer I felt bad for the guys who got shut down.  To some people bbq is the greatest thing in the world.  They have their expensive doodads and silly aprons and there is nothing like meat charring under God's blue sky.  Probably one of the reasons they bought their unit (we call them units) was so they could bbq and now they were eating cold bologna out of the fridge.

I don't know if a more bbq friendly board was elected or if they found a better way of dealing with hot coals but the ban on bbq was rescinded.  There is an unpleasant whiff when they first fire up their bad boys, but other than that, it doesn't bother me at all.  There is another rule where you can't enclose your balcony, which I favor because if people started enclosing their balconies willy nilly the place soon would look like a half eaten cob of corn.  A thoroughly and fastidiously eaten cob of corn in much more attractive.


I think a civil law would always trump a covenant restriction.  This restriction on Methodist Manor is not unlike those covenants the city used to enforce where you couldn't sell your house to a black person.  Back in the bad old days of the early sixties some Gage Park residents tried to set up something like those covenants, but I don't think they trusted each other enough to make it work.

I wonder if the case in Methodist Manor is a more comprehensive issue.  Are great numbers of non-believers clamoring to walk the blessed streets of Bay View, or is it just this one woman?  If it's the latter and I was advising the board I would just let this one slide, whereas I think Beagles would be for barring her until and if the rule was repealed.