After cross-country move, CT apartment stank, leaked, had sinking floors: renter. What the city did.

In July, Billie Bakhshi and her family drove dawn to dusk for five days from Nevada to her new home in Connecticut, anticipating her son’s wedding and a new life.

She had signed the lease on her Clemens Place apartment at 9 Sherman St., in Hartford’s West End, “sight unseen,” paid the security deposit after being told how beautiful her three-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment would be. The building is just blocks from the Mark Twain House.

The apartment turned out to be a nightmare, she said. The city had to get involved and an order to make repairs was issued, records show.

Bakhshi, her husband and two adult children, both of whom have autism, moved in in July. “We arrived on a Sunday and they met us at the door and walked us up to the fourth floor. And that’s when we saw everything that was wrong.”

Based on what she had been told, Bakhshi said she had no reason to believe the $1,850-a-month apartment would be in such bad shape, with black liquid dripping under the sink, a leaking roof and sinking floors.

Her oldest son and his fiancee had moved into another of Clemens Place’s 42 historic apartment buildings before she had gotten there.

“He’s got a lovely fiancee, and they’re involved with New England valley theater, and he relocated here to be here with her,” Bakhshi said. “He moved into Clemens Place right across from the leasing office. And this is pre-pandemic. It was nice, it was clean. It was park-like on the outside. There was a lovely farmers market right there, just to the side of them, every week.”

They’ve since moved out because her son’s fiancee tore her ACL and needed a first-floor apartment, she said.

“So they moved to West Hartford, but we figured with all these rent scams and everything, it’s best to go with a place that we know is OK. They promised us an air-conditioned unit. They promised us hardwood floors and happily took our security deposit and took our application money. And we figured OK, this is going to be great. It’s going to go fine.”

She said the leasing agent didn’t provide photos because there needed to be some repairs. She was told the previous tenant had abandoned the apartment “and they need to do some fixing,” she said. “They promised us — I have it in writing — that it would be 100% ready.”

It was far from ready, she said.

“I’ve had a maintenance supervisor come up and say, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, we’ll get to it, we’ll get to it.’ Never came back,” Bakhshi said. “And there have been countless phone calls and emails and they just ignore them.”

Finally, she called the city’s housing code enforcement office and an inspector gave Clemens Place written notice and 30 days to make repairs.

Listed in the notice of violation are a sinking floor in the living room and a sinking ceiling in the kitchen, a need for a new garbage disposal, a need for repairs and painting of the ceilings in the bathroom and master bedroom, a need to level the bathtub, grouting needed around the bathtub and repairs needed to the doors in the bedrooms, among other things.

A few days before the notice was set to expire, “I got back in touch with them,” Bakhshi said. “I said they haven’t come out. They haven’t even called me. Nothing. I was like, what do we do at this point? He says let me call. So call we did.”

The code inspector returned for the reinspection. “And of course the stuff largely isn’t done,” Bakhshi said.

“So now that he’s given them three extra days, now they’ve come back and said, well, we’ll do it after the holidays. The leak in the ceiling is finally done; they fixed the roof. The kitchen sink is no longer leaking foul fluid that made the entire apartment stink. But it’s gotten to the point where it’s like, you shouldn’t have to fight this hard to live someplace decent.”

Clemens Place (Mark Twain is a pseudonym for Samuel Clemens) is composed of 42 apartment buildings and 640 units off Farmington Avenue, which last sold in 2020 for $60.5 million, according to the Hartford Business Journal. Many are on the National Register of Historic Places.

The owner, Clemens Place CT Limited Partnership, based in New City, N.Y., could not be reached for comment.

“I’m not clear whether the owner of this place even knows that this is how his managers are doing,” Bakhshi said. “It’s a weird situation where either … the corporation knows and they don’t care or they’re unaware that the property management is doing their tenants like this.”

A person answering the phone at the Clemens Place management office said, “We can’t discuss any tenant information with anyone besides the tenant.”

Besides the problems with the apartment, Bakhshi said she doesn’t feel particularly comfortable in her West End neighborhood.

“Since we moved in, someone has broken into our minivan,” she said. “Someone broke into our mailbox and stole all the mail and we had an attempted break-in through my son’s room, which is on the fire escape, and, mind you, they promised we had a balcony. They didn’t tell us it was a fire escape with access from the street.”

There is also a large issue of unhoused people in the neighborhood with one person who tends to sleep in the lobby of Bakhshi’s building, she said. Also, a body was found in the parking lot recently, “which they kind of neglected to tell us, of course,” she said.

So far, management has repaired some of the most egregious problems, Bakhshi said.

“They have tweaked the roof so that it’s no longer leaking,” she said. “They patched the … places where the plaster fell and that was in multiple rooms. They replaced the garbage disposal, which eliminated a leak under the sink. And they’ve done some small tweaks on the doors.”

The front door is not fixed yet, she said. “If you had a screwdriver or you had anything that was thin that you could slide into it, you can open the door. You don’t need a key,” she said.

All of this is a quarter mile from one of Hartford’s major tourist attractions, the Mark Twain House and Museum.

“We actually went to take the tour a couple weeks ago of the house,” Bakhshi said. “And you look at what the neighborhood used to be like and you see what you’re dealing with now, and it’s just like, wow. I wasn’t under any illusion it was like Gilmore Girls because I moved my son in, but this, compared to what I saw four years ago — night and day. I would not have moved here if I had known this is what we’re moving into.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com.