I've lived in my current NYC apartment, on and off, mostly on, for the last six years. On the way to the local bodega, there's always been this one building that's had people hanging out outside, smoking, chatting, usually looking pretty normal. There're people hanging out all over the neighborhood, I've always thought, so maybe this is just a particularly sociable building. But over the years, I started to see some signs of institutionalism in the building--starting with the "No Smoking Anywhere Inside" sign and then there were the awful pastels visible on the ground floor. My working assumption had been that it was a halfway house, and although I was curious, I kept forgetting to research further.

So I finally googled the address, and I discovered that this building around the block is a "Post Graduate Residence Center" for the "Mental Health Services" division of the NYC public health ministry. Further googling did not yield a definition of "post graduate."

Well, I haven't had any trouble yet. Let's hope for the best.