Butler apartment community bonds over puzzles
Mary Ann Dellich couldn’t just stick to one piece at a time.
She worked on a 300-piece puzzle in the lobby of the 530 North Main Street apartment building in Butler for hours, and, even now, she could spend all night putting pieces together if no one stops her.
The difference now compared to several months ago is Dellich usually no longer is doing puzzles alone — the apartment community has come to her aid.
Now, completed puzzles that have been superglued and framed are placed around the common areas of the building. Puzzle pieces cover a card table set up in the lobby, while others are probably on the floor somewhere, preventing a puzzle’s completion because they blend in with the carpet cover.
It all started a few months ago, when Jill Hanford, resident services coordinator for the apartment manager Newbury Realty Group, released a survey to the apartment’s tenants asking what they would like to see in the building. The idea was to initially have residents place a piece or two each time they came through the lobby. However, people started spending more and more time working on them, which has made the apartment community more sociable, Hanford said.
“This was started because the table was here, people would come and go and put in a piece, but it has turned into so much more than that,” Hanford said. “Since they started doing the puzzles, you hear people laughing, people talking. Hearing them chatter and laugh, it really is nice, it brightens everybody’s day.”
Dellich, who has lived at the apartment building for about six years, said she enjoys having people to work on puzzles with — especially anything over 300 pieces — but she can still be obsessive, if left to her own devices.
“If I stay here too long, I’ll build puzzles all night,” she said.
Residents of 530 North Main Street Apartments work on puzzles at all hours of the day, but a “core group” of several tenants gets together on mornings to make big progress as a group.
On Monday morning, Feb. 17, five members of the core group were in the lobby working on a 1,000-piece Coca-Cola puzzle. The core group of Dellich, Debbie Greenawalt, Keith Simpson, Fred Slagel and Jack Kummer had the borders completed for the puzzle, and were each compiling pieces with similar colors in their individual parts of the table.
Slagel, who has lived at 530 North Main Street for 15 years, said that while a core group usually works on a puzzle together, anyone in the building is welcome to join in. The puzzles themselves have become great conversation starters, providing a basis for neighbors to introduce themselves as they hunt for pieces together.
“They were coming down in the evening, now they’re coming down and joining in,” Slagel said. “It’s brought down a lot more people that normally wouldn’t come down. They want to see what we’re working on.”
The members of the core group also aren’t ones to back away from a challenge — usually. The 1,000-piece puzzle Monday was a challenge, but nothing compared to a puzzle they worked on that had images on both sides, or “The Impossible Puzzle,” which has 1,000 pieces, no edge pieces and a few pieces thrown in that don’t actually belong in the puzzle.
“We started and then put it away,” said Greenawalt, who has lived at the building for 18 years. “We worked for hours and only had eight pieces. We put it back in the box, we didn’t have the patience to deal with it.”
Residents of the building contribute puzzles that can be used by everyone, and one tenant even works at Saint Vincent de Paul, where she gets puzzles for cheap, Slagel said.
And once each puzzle is completed, Slagel glues the pieces together and has them framed, or they are given away to other people who might enjoy them.
Family members of tenants have gifted puzzles to the apartment, and then residents have gifted puzzles back to family members, like when Greenawalt gave a campfire puzzle to her brother and his family, or the group made a puzzle as a birthday gift.
“We had an animal one and a little boy, 6 years old, had a birthday, so we fixed it for him,” Dellich said. “He wanted the animal picture.”
Kitty Neidinger, regional manager for Newbury Realty Group, said 530 North Main Street residents already had been organizing group activities among themselves, but the puzzles added a new level of community to the building.
According to Neidinger, residents host potluck dinners, music nights and movie nights, but the addition of puzzles in the common areas have led to the lobby being more active in the daylight hours.
“The demographic of this community is all age ranges, so we’re pulling everybody in,” Neidinger said. “It was going to be one puzzle we would put out, and when you came to see Jill, you find a piece, put the piece in the puzzle. It just became this whole big thing and it is so much fun to watch.”
The framed puzzles populating the common areas also brighten the vibe in the building, Neidinger said, because they stand as physical representations of the apartment community.
“To be able to watch the residents come together and have this commonality of putting one piece in to putting together these fantastic pieces,” Neidinger said, “the puzzles themselves have become a piece to a much bigger puzzle.”
Even outside of puzzle time, the activity has led to constant conversation and jokes between the usual “Puzzleteers,” who tell each other stories of their puzzle dreams or late-night thoughts.
“We have a good time,” Greenawalt said. “Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and say, ‘I know where that piece went.’”
Slagel said he has had several moments of fun friendship with the other regular puzzlers, which have arisen from searching hours for a single missing piece.
“One day, Debbie comes back and her and Jack look and it was one of the darker pieces and it was lying right on the carpet,” he said. “They texted me to come down right away, I was wondering what was wrong. And they had the piece laying there, they wanted me to be the one to put it in.”
