Mary D.
Yelp
The Garrison Square Apartment complex has an excellent location, bordering on Back Bay and the South End. It's an easy walk to restaurants, mass transportation (Green, Orange, & Commuter lines), groceries, Symphony Hall, and the Boston Public Library. The apartments have interesting and diverse floor plans, most with wood-burning fireplaces and small balconies or patios.
Although Garrison Square touts itself as a "luxury" apartment, it is not! Nonetheless, there is a lot of potential here to make this a true luxury complex, but at present, it lacks much of the ongoing maintenance, amenities, and cleanliness of a luxury community. While Garrison does charge the rental fees of a "luxury" facility, the overall environment, services, communications and management are just average...not luxury!
The trash room is often over-flowing and unpleasant. There are a minimal number of recycling bins, and those too are often overflowing (that is, if you can get into the trash room to get to them). The underground garage is crammed with small parking spaces, occupied by large SUVs parked down there. Garrison should be less greedy and make the spaces a bit larger, which could probably be accomplished by just eliminating one space in each row.
The staff members at the concierge desk are friendly, but the services provided are not those of what you'd receive in a luxury building, and there is not 24x7 concierge coverage. When present, the concierges spend most of their time moving and storing the volumes of packages delivered into the small lobby by UPS, FedEx, etc. The concierge desk is often unoccupied while they work in the basement to store the packages.
To give the impression of having a "coffee bar" at Garrison, a coffee machine ($1/cup) was installed in the small lobby. It is often broken and rarely used, except by the short-term guests who stay at Garrison, as there are several apartments which are rented out on a night-by-night basis. These short-term visitors can be noisy as they come and go during late hours, as they are often there on vacation, while the "real" residents of Garrison are attempting to get some sleep before going to work the next morning. The security of the facility is rather weak, but there has been some progress on upgrading the locks and surveillance of the buildings (which was promised over a year ago, but work just recently began on this). Information is gathered, and a credit check is preformed on residents prior to moving in, but the short-term guests come and go freely, without signing in or registering with a photo ID, as would be conducted in a hotel. Seems like a bit of a gap in ensuring a safe environment at Garrison Square, especially since there is no concierge on duty late at night.
Garrison Square often gives the impression of being managed with a small budget, as simple services (such as cleaning the lobby daily) are not part of the routine. They also need to decide if they want to be a hotel or an apartment community. Currently, they are trying to be both, and it just isn't working. For the money, there are better (and newer) rental options in Boston.