need to know
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In the summer of 2025, Virginia Worthington moves into her dream New York City apartment with three friends.
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When she got inside, she noticed a crack in the ceiling, but didn’t think anything of it at the time.
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As the weeks went by, the crack began to grow, but when he finally emailed a repair, it was too late.
Virginia Worthington was looking forward to summer in New York City, but what she didn’t know was that the short stay would be marked by a quintessential NYC experience: apartment trouble.
After completing her finals at Auburn University, Worthington, 22, moved to NYC for a summer internship. He and three of his college friends moved into a fully furnished loft apartment with two bedrooms and one bathroom.
Worthington and a friend, Merrin, moved into a first-floor one-bedroom, but she now tells PEOPLE that they “never imagined how bad a decision it would be.”
Virginia Worthington
Crack in the ceiling
“About a month after we first moved into the apartment, we noticed a small crack in the ceiling from an overhead light fixture,” she says. “It was, very slowly, progressively getting longer and longer as the days went by. But in a way, it was like watching a child grow, you don’t know how big they’ve achieved until you look back at a picture of the past because the daily growth is so minute it’s almost undetectable.”
“We were really concerned until we realized the roof was starting to bubble,” says Worthington.
She says the ceiling didn’t look “wet,” but instead “looked like something was weighing down from above.”
Virginia Worthington
After the roof falls
Eventually, they reached out to the building’s management and maintenance, along with photos, with the email subject “Urgent!”
On the same day the roof collapsed, she received a response to fix the repairs. Therefore, all the inhabitants went to work hoping that it would be fixed by the time they returned. However, this could not be further from reality.
“We came home from work to a roof that had started to crumble over our bed,” shares Worthington. “We all went straight to work – moving everything we could out of the room before the inevitable collapse.”
“We could see our roof cracking and coming down pretty quickly, so I decided to set up my phone and film in case anything happened,” she continues. “When we were about to remove the furniture from the room, Merrin and I heard a cold murmur from the ceiling and ran out the door in complete disarray.”
Worthington is thankful they weren’t asleep when this happened, because the two women saw a large brick fall from the roof onto the bed, where their heads would have been.
“The ceiling plaster was so thick and heavy that we couldn’t get it out of the way to close the door so the smoke wouldn’t enter the whole apartment,” Worthington recalls.
Worthington shared a video of her fall on TikTok, which has garnered 2.4 million views.
They later discovered the ceiling was moving, and instead of fixing the ceiling, maintenance crews plastered it until it “became so thick and heavy that it collapsed, this time not from water damage, but from the weight,” she claims.
“We had a horrible experience trying to get help from our building and help from our property manager,” she claims. “Our building superintendent was sent over to help. He told a lot of conflicting stories about how it happened at first, then backed off after we pressed more.”
Virginia Worthington
Worthington’s room under construction.
“A bag of jewelry was left in the room, because we couldn’t get it all off before it collapsed, and we sent him to get it. He came back with the bag, now covered in dirt and plaster and dirt, laughing at my devastation,” Worthington recalls.
The company that rented them the apartment covered their hotel stay while the roof was being repaired. Once that was fixed, the women were able to return to the apartment for the remainder of their sub-par – but they kept an eye on the ceiling the entire time.
Read the original article on People
