104 W Sydney Street
Lake Dorothy
SimsHost subscribers can click on the image to download.
The download is delivered from The Sims 2 at SimsHost.

WARNING! Huge download! 9.7 megabytes!
This lot will expand to 36 megabytes in your game.

Caution: This lot has not had game hacks cleaned out of it.

Of all the community lots I've built, my sims enjoy this one this most; so I thought I would share it with you.

It has quite a story to go with it, which I will add in a little while. (I just don't have the cranial calories available at the moment to write another illustrated story.) But I need to tell you a little bit about the unique features of this lot.

104 Sydney Street includes: The Frankton Arms Hotel, where your sims can spend the night, use the showers, and do all the other things that they will do in their beds at home. A full working kitchen where you sims can serve their best meals to the whole neighborhood. A clothing and food store, of course. Custom bedding and leather sofas.

AND, on the second floor above the shops, it includes a full-service brothel where your sims can earn quite a bit of money by hiring ladies to take care of customers. I was surprised when one of my sims pulled in more than $4000 in one day. You will need the DMA Sims hookers to make the the brothel work.

The download was so huge that I cleaned out the little park where the sims enjoyed gathering to play chess and swing and tried removing most of the furnishings from the dance club. That didn't help much, so what you see is what you get.

Here's a little preview of the detailed views.


Entrace to 104 W Sydney Street

Another bit of caution: With the kitchen and the Frankton Arms Hotel, your sims could stay downtown indefinitely. However, if you keep them there too long, the game will accumulate too many memories without saving and eventually crash. I recommend limiting their stay to one night at a time.

Stay tuned for the whole story!

The Town of Lake Dorothy
View Facing West

I've just started playing this neighborhood. I'm following some rules that someone suggested a while ago: I don't use the money cheat at all and there are only two player-made characters in the neighborhood. Except for the two original citizens, all the denizens of Lake Dorothy come from game-created NPC's. (I'm still not playing the straight out-of-the-box game. I have a lot of game hacks installed without which I would not be interested in playing The Sims.)

Lake Dorothy and its environs are named for two of my most favorite places in the whole world. Lake Dorothy is the largest of the alpine lakes in the Cascade Mountains. You can reach it in an easy hike (two or three hours) from the nearest trailhead, located on a logging road off of route US 2 near the town of Gold Bar, Washington. In real life there is no town on Lake Dorothy and never will be -- it's in the U.S. National Forest, and winter snows more than 30 feet deep would make building permanent structures a daunting engineering challenge.

Most of the streets, though, are named for places around Lake Wakatipu, a huge alpine lake located in the Remarkables Mountains on the south island of New Zealand. Near Queenstown, Lake Wakatipu is bordered on the west by a fantastic escarpment somewhat like the lake in the EA neighborhood template named Alpinloch. To my eye, sunrise on the escarpment on Lake Wakatipu competes with Mt. Rainier and Mt. Kilimanjaro as the most beautiful view you can see from ground level anywhere in the solar system.

Lake Dorothy in Washington State has a similar, albeit smaller, escarpment. In my iniquitous youth I climbed the Lake Dorothy escarpment, but the Lake Wakatipu escarpment was created for men even more foolhardy than I.

The Frankton Arms hotel is named after the town of Frankton, New Zealand, which is located on Lake Wakatipu just down from Queenstown on the Frankton Arm of of the Lake.

In the game, you can only see the escarpment reflected in the lake in the neighborhood view. The Frankton Arms Hotel is just peeking into frame near the bottom of the image above.

FWIW, this community lot is located at the corner of W Sydney Street and N Frankton Road in my game.

Now, getting back to the community lot located at 104 W Sydney street, let's look at the ground level.


104 W Sydney Street: Ground Level

This is a 5x3 community lot, with the long dimension running along the street. In the upper right corner, you are looking into the basement of the Frankton Arms Hotel.

Just down and to the left of the hotel is the community kitchen. The kitchen is outfitted with the full suite of household kitchen appliances -- two sets of them! It also has a standard household telephone so you can invite other folks downtown as well as the Sim Logical teleporter painting.

Right now the only eating place is the three outdoor picnic tables, providing seating for twelve. My sims seem to be happy with this and it keeps the dirty dishes consolidated in one spot.

You can use the telephone to call a maid or hire the DMA Sims live-in NPC's, and they will help keep the mess under control. You have to call them every time you visit the lot.

I've found that the more goodies there are downtown, the more sims will show up. I've had as many as 16 sims in that huge public pool at the same time.

The inevitable clothing shop and grocery are conveniently located near the entry point on either side of the breezeway that leads from the street to the public park.

I used one of my favorite move_objects tricks to mount the outdoor lamps on the wrought iron posts that support the second story above the breezeway.

The large facility near the bottom of the image is the dance palace. Most of its furnishings are missing in the download.

The public potties are accessible by going through the clothing store or through doors near the Frankton Arms Hotel.

I like to put benches near the spot where the taxi will pick up the sims. It's a way to keep them bolted down so that they don't miss their ride.

Now, note the staircase behind the grocery. Those stairs lead up to a very peculiar place.

Interlude, Downtown Lake Dorothy

Christy Stratton stopped by the grocery store on her way back from the beauty parlor. She takes time out from running errands to chat with George McCarthy, the grocery clerk. She knows George has a crush on her so she tries to be nice to him. Besides, his attention does great things for her ego.

While they are chatting, George glaces out the window. "Wow! There are new some girls in town!" he says. "Do you know them, Christy?"

"Well, yes, I know who they are--"

"Great! Could you introduce me to them?" Ever the hopeful teenager, George looks at her with big puppy dog eyes.

"Um, George, there's something you should know," Christy says.



"There's a brothel right above your shop, and those girls work there!"

"Uh, you mean--"

"Right," she says. "They're hookers."

"Well, I never!" says George, his mouth agape.

Christy chuckles. "And considering what they charge, you probably never will, George! But take heart, young man. There are lots of nice teenage girls in town -- and some not so nice -- and besides, it doesn't cost anything to look!"



Sure enough, when the time comes for the hookers to take a break, they head for the swimming pool. The grocery store has a large window that looks out onto the community pool. George has always enjoyed watching his neighbors through that window, and now the view is even better!

Oh, look! There's Meadow Thayer, talking to one of the neighbor kids. George has had his eye on her for a long time! The view has really become more interesting!

If only he weren't stuck behind this cash register... but alas, he is. Oh well, maybe Meadow will come in for a bottle of milk or something.

That little story brings us to the second floor!


104 W Sydney Street, Second Floor

You might find some better use for the area above the shops. In a normal downtown, this would be space for offices or apartments; however, since sims have little use for offices and apartments aren't worth much in a community lot, I used it to play with the toys from DMA sims.

That's how I discovered that the sim who calls in the hookers gets credited for the money they earn. In a neighborhood where I'm not allowing myself to use any money cheats at all, this can be a significant source of income.

The clothing booths are the hookers' work stations. When they're not resting or playing (or taking care of business), the stand in front of their clothing booths and wait for customers to come to them.


Ready for Business, but the customers aren't paying attention

The two love tubs and four beds on that level are the tools of their trade and can't be used by other sims for anything else. They will also take a client into the clothing booths, for a price equivalent to about three days pay for a grocery store clerk.

They don't use the bathrooms, and don't eat or sleep, but they do need the showers. And they do enjoy the swimming pool.


Frankton Arms Hotel

In the background you can see the first floor of the Frankton Arms Hotel. The hotel has three rooms on this level and four upstairs, all outfitted with normal beds and bathrooms.

The sims you are controlling can use the beds at the hotel. If there weren't a bug in the game that causes it to crash when you spend to much time on a community lot, your sim could stay downtown indefinitely. All the while, income from the brothel would flow into the family's bank account.

This lot is designed to use the NPC servants from DMA sims, too. That's one of the key reasons for having a normal telephone in a community lot, and there are several in this lot.

After I made the downloadable package, I converted the two back bedrooms on the hotel's first floor into a dorm for the NPC servants. That lets the servants get some rest when you have your playable sims staying overnight.

I tried putting the servants' room on the hotel's second floor but there was too much confusion getting up the stairs. Some of them didn't make it up the stairs so they stayed up all night. That left them exhuasted during their normal working hours so they were sacked out instead of helping keep the place tidy during the busiest part of the day.

It's important to hire the house manager, Jessica Wells. She will shoo the servants to bed at 11:00 PM so that they get a good night's rest. She also will patrol the whole facility and call the maids to clean up where it's required.

And she can cook! If you tip her, Jessica will serve a group meal. If you have your sim cook a meal, you'll suddenly become very, very popular and just might not get to eat your own cooking, so it really helps to have Jessica around.

104 W Sydney Street, Third Level

Just to add to the confusion: The hotel is built on a foundation so its second floor is the third level of this lot.

The only thing of interest on the third level is the second floor of the Frankton Arms Hotel.

In actual game play, this area doesn't get used much. Obviously you're not going to build a model of the MGM Grand Hotel in The Sims, but I just didn't like the idea of having a hotel with only three guest rooms even if only one of them is ever used at any one time.

The level above the brothel has a lot of usable space but I haven't thought of anything to do with it. One possibility would be to use the second floor area for an arcade and move the brothel to the third floor of the shops.

This lot is a great place to take a date!

Hart Stacks took Prof Heidi there, proposed to her, had sex twice in the hot tub and once in one of the double beds, plus the Hookers cut him in on their business! Needless to say, it was a Dream Date!

miros1 wrote:

This lot is a great place to take a date! Hart Stacks took Prof Heidi there, proposed to her, had sex twice in the hot tub and once in one of the double beds, plus the Hookers cut him in on their business! Needless to say, it was a Dream Date!

I knew there was a reason to build a hotel on a community lot. I just didn't expect it to turn out to be a pay-by-the-hour kinda place!

Somehow, though, it just seems that it could put a damper on the evening if a guy were to say to his date, "Excuse me for a bit. I have to go check up on the hookers I hired."

Nah, the hookers just put his share of the money in his pants pocket while he was in the Luv Tub.

I love this lot. But till I got more RAM (I had a Gig!) I couldn't play it, with or without the ladies of the night.

So I took a major liberty and cut off the whole top floor then it was just about playable. Haven't tried it since I got another 512 but it should be better.

wonder if DMA sims have updated for OFB yet? Good way to get together a stake for a small business...

That reminds me that I haven't reinstalled the DMA Sims toys in months. They got shuffled out when I went around with Nightlife. I've not played any of the households where they played a role so I've just not thought to update them.

They seem to be OFB incompatible... Hope they get updated soon!

Yes - as a subscriber I get an email when they update... waiting impatiently!

OOH! Please post here when it's fixed!

sure will