Alfaretta Apartments

Yesterday, the Stranger’s Slog posted about the number of “gorgeous old buildings” that are disappearing in the name of progress. Most of what was talked about was a building on Broadway, disappearing to make way for the light rail system, but one address caught my eye…

On Eighth Avenue and Seneca Street, the wrecking ball is halfway done leveling this old brick building….

8th and Seneca. I used to live at 8th and Seneca, in an old brick apartment building. I don’t suppose…

Yup, that’s it. The Alfaretta Apartments, formerly the Park Seneca Apartments, is going down. And to that, I say good riddance! I tried to post the following comment, but it kept running afoul of the Slog’s spam filter. Here, then, for posterity, is my reaction to the sad news of this gorgeous old building being torn down:

Oh, wow. Lots of old buildings might be worth mourning, but the Alfaretta, that building at 8th and Seneca? Just a poorly-managed shithole. During the years I lived there, I had to deal with two water shutoff notices from the city because the management hadn’t paid the water bill, an elevator that seemed to be broken more often than not, a renovation that seemed to drag on forever, with constantly shifting reports on when various services would be turned on or off, months without on-site laundry services, a few weeks surrounding the replacement of the water heater when there was little to no hot water at all in the building, and an often broken front door that had us occasionally having to have a drunk or drugged transient ‘escorted out’ after they went wandering the halls, or — once — started squatting in one of the vacant apartments.

Factor in the constant hassles from the Jensonia next door, whose residents seemed to embody all the worst stereotypes of Section Eight housing, which only stopped when the third fire in as many months finally did enough damage to condemn the building, and it’s a wonder I put up with the Alfaretta as long as I did.

That’s one old brick building I’m not at all sorry to see disappear.

My first indication that something was going on was hearing the sound of emergency vehicles from the street outside my window. Not an entirely unusual thing, but normally they’ll pass on by — hearing the blast of sirens combined with the compression of air brakes got my attention. Going to my window, I looked down the four stories to the street and saw fire trucks all over the place — one heading down the street to the west of our building (the Park Seneca apartment), another diagonally across the intersection of 8th and Seneca, a Fire Department blazer parked on the lawn of Town Hall, and I could see reflections from another set of emergency lights in the window of the building across the street.

As I looked up across the street at the people looking out their windows, I realized that one window had three women in it, waving to get my attention and pointing towards the far end of my building. Leaning out to look that direction, I saw smoke pouring around the corner of the building — not a good sign. Waving my thanks, I tossed on a pair of pants and went out into the hallway — but nothing seemed to be terribly amiss. No smoke, and none of the doors seemed warm as I pressed my hand against them working my way down the hall.

Starting to wonder if it was the Jensonia Hotel next door, I tried to slide the window at the end of the hallway up, only to have it fall off in my hands. A little startling, and I almost lost my balance, but once I set it down and looked out the window, I saw the source of the smoke. An old chimney on the Jensonia was belching out wave after wave of thick, black smoke. Obviously something had caught fire next door — not a happy thought, but happier than if it had been my building. I wedged the window back into place, came back into my apartment and sat back down.

Then the fire alarm in our building went off.

My lord those things are loud.

Quickly I pulled on socks, shoes, and a sweater, tossed my coat on, and headed back out into the hall, just in time to be passed by three of the firemen. “Where’s the fire?” they asked.

“Next door.”

“What?”

“Here — there’s smoke pouring out of the chimney next door.” I and another tenant who’d come out of his apartment showed the firemen to the window, pulling it back out of the casement again so they could see the source of the smoke. They radioed down to the rest of their crew, some of whom were already investigating the building next door, and I headed downstairs to the street.

Heading down the stairs, I had to laugh a bit. Seeing the ladder from a fire truck extended to the roof of your building outside your hallway window just isn’t an everyday sight (thank goodness)!

Out on the street, I joined a small crowd of other tenants who’d also evacuated. Most of them didn’t know what was going on, so I filled them in on what little I knew while we waited. After a few minutes, the firemen were sufficiently convinced that our building was safe after all to give us all permission to head back in. Unfortunately, the fire alarm was still merrily wailing away — the switch to turn it off is behind a locked door, and our on-site property manager has a second job and wasn’t at the building, and nobody had her emergency contact number on them. We all stood around watching the firemen assigned to our building pack up and maneuver their equipment out of the street (ever seen a fire truck parallel park before?) while they decided what to do next.

Eventually, the simplest solution seemed the best, and a few of the firemen went down to the basement to force open the door to the sprinkler system. A few moments later, the alarm stopped, and we all started filtering back in.

Before going back in, another tenant and I asked the firemen just what had gone on. It turns out that there was a small (but very smoky) boiler fire next door that sent smoke right up the old chimney. Because of the rain and slight breeze, though, it sent the smoke nearly sideways over our building, so that as they were driving up the street towards us it looked like there was a huge blaze coming up right from our roof. They figure it was probably when they hooked their hose to our building’s standpipe and started pumping water into it that our alarm got triggered.

So. That was my morning. How was yours?

Oh, this is good — our building has a 30-day shutoff notice from the water utility posted on the front door.

Not one of the tenants. The building. In other words, the leasing agency for the building hasn’t paid the water bill for long enough that under normal circumstances, it would be shut off, but as this is an apartment building, we’re given an extra 30 days to see if something can be worked out.

I’m thrilled about this one.

Update: Even better — I just tried calling the offices of Kauri Investments, our leasing agency, and couldn’t get anyone to answer the phone, not even a receptionist. Better and better…

Update: The following is the text of an e-mail I just sent to the sole Kauri employee with an easily accessible e-mail address on the Kauri website, after my failure in contacting anyone by phone.

From: Woody Hanscom
Date: Mon May 19, 2003 12:23:18 US/Pacific
To: kenta@kauri.com
Cc: parkseneca@speakeasy.net
Subject: Park Seneca Apts. water shutoff?

Kent –

I’m neither an investor nor a real estate professional, however I was unable either to reach anyone (even a receptionist) by calling the Kauri offices, and yours was the only e-mail I found for anyone at Kauri on the Kauri website. I do hope that this isn’t too much of an intrusion. I’m cc:ing this message to parkseneca@speakeasy.net, though I’m not currently sure who checks that e-mail account as it was set up under Melvin Kelly’s name, but he is no longer the building manager.

I am a resident of the Park Seneca Apartments, in unit 405, and this morning I found a notice posted on the front door of the apartment building alerting us to the fact that due to delinquent payments, we face having our water shut off in 30 days. I hope you’ll understand that I find this to be a fairly major concern. While I have fallen behind on bills from time to time in my life, when I do so, that affects only myself – not a 50-some unit apartment building.

In the year that I have lived here at the Park Seneca Apartments, I have had to cope with an elevator that seems to be broken more often than not, a renovation that seemed to drag on forever, with constantly shifting reports on when various services would be turned on or off, months without on-site laundry services, and a few weeks surrounding the replacement of the water heater when there was little to no hot water at all in the building. I have watched as many of my fellow tenants, equally or more disgusted with the difficulties encountered during the renovations, moved out. I chose to stay on, as I do enjoy the location of the building, its proximity to downtown and Capitol Hill, and as I haven’t wanted to deal with the hassles of trying to find another apartment and moving (not to mention attempting to move without the benefit of a working elevator). However, instances such as this shutoff notice go a long way to making me question the wisdom of continuing my residence here.

I sincerely hope that the current situation with the water bills will be resolved soon, and I (and my fellow tenants) will not have to deal with the severe inconvenience of not having water next month. My intent at this point is to continue living here, for all of the reasons previously stated. I did, however, feel that it was worthwhile to raise my concerns with the conditions I have been living with, in the hope that difficulties such as this will not be a concern in the future.

Sincerely,

Michael “Woody” Hanscom

Who knows if it’ll do much good, but hey, I feel (a little) better.

Four months ago, workmen started on a two-month project to renovate the apartment building I live in. We’re still waiting for them to finish.

We’ve had to put up with interruptions to every normal service. Electricity, heat, hot water, laundry — all of it has been cut off at one point or another. The laundry, of course, was one of the first things to go, so for the past four months, we’ve had to pay more money to go to a laundromat a few blocks away.

This week, I found out that the laundry facilities had finally reopened. So today, I started trying to do my laundry.

• One of the washers has its coin slot jammed. Okay, I can cope with that, there’s still two more washers.
• One of the other two washers occasionally decides to eat your quarters, but not start the wash cycle.
• One of the dryers won’t even take quarters — the slider doohickey is jammed. Again, there’s two more dryers to work with.
• The final straw? The original plans called for new electric washers and dryers. Plans changed at some point, so they put back in the old dryers. Gas dryers. In a ‘renovated’ laundry room with no gas hookups. End result? All the dryers are now ‘Air Dry’ only. Any guesses just how dry jeans get with ‘Air Dry’ only? Not at all. So now I’ve got jeans hung on the heater, over doors, over my shower curtain, and I’m just hoping that I’ve got at least one pair that’s actually wearable tomorrow morning.

I’m sick of this.

We’ve lost a good quarter of the tenants because of all the problems with this project. The only thing that’s really kept me here is that I don’t really have the spare cash to just pick up and find a new place. God, I wish I did, though….

Grrrrrr…. I woke up this morning to find a note slipped under my door telling me that the power to the building was going to be cut off again today, due to the construction/renovation work currently going on. Fat lot of good that note did me, though, considering the power was already off when I woke up. I’m just glad I didn’t oversleep, since I didn’t have my alarm to get me up!

Then, when I come home, there’s a note on the front door of the building letting us tenants know that the water will be shut off during the day tomorrow.

I’m getting so sick of this. Our building hasn’t had working laundry facilities for three months now, so we all need to try to find time to truck our laundry up to the nearest laundromat (open only until 9pm, and charging \$2 per wash). We had a full month without reliable hot water, which ended with four days without any hot water. The heat has been an on-and-off thing. Water is apparently still an on-and-off thing. We keep getting told that they’re “almost done,” that the construction work will be done “any time now.” We’re all sick of hearing that, and quite a few people have left the building because finding a new place was less of a pain in the ass than putting up with everything here. Ugh. Time for this to be done. Finito. End of story.

Anyway, if you’re a regular or semi-regular visitor here, and couldn’t get through, that’s why. No power to the building, no power to the computer, no website. Bleah.

Hopefully this really will all be done with soon. I’m more than ready for it to end.

Just got back home from picking up my keys for the new apartment. Pictures were taken, I’ll have them posted as soon as I can. Yay!

Okay, first ‘picture’ is up. I took a few moments to sketch out a rough floorplan of the apartment, so you’ll have some idea what you’re looking at when I get the pics put in. It’s a pretty rough floorplan, but I think I got it pretty accurate for the most part.

Not bad for a studio apartment — one main room, a full bath, full kitchen, and two closets, one of which is a full-size clothes closet, and even a little entryway space. I think the main room ends up being a little smaller than the single room I’m in now, so figuring out how to arrange things might be a bit tricky, but I’m sure I’ll find a way to get it all in there.

Okay — here’s as good of a tour through the apartment as I can do. Right inside the front door is a cool little delivery box, left over from when the building was originally built. Each of these boxes has two doors — one on the inside that you can see here, and another on the outside of the apartment opening into the hallway. The outside door is fixed closed now, but when these were in use, they were the drop-off points for milk, newspapers, whatever. The delivery person would open the outside door and put the goods in the box, then the tenant could take them from the inside of the apartment without ever having to open the front door. They don’t work anymore, but I thought it was pretty nifty. If nothing else, it’ll be a convenient place to store shoes.

Here’s two shots of the main room. The first was taken standing in the door looking towards the windows, and the second was taken standing in the corner by the heater looking towards the entrance. These should give a pretty good idea of the layout of the apartment. The landlord tells me that the overall floorspace is definitely larger than the place I’m in now, but since that takes into account the entire apartment, the main room itself is a bit smaller than what I’ve got now. I think the tradeoff is more than worth it, it’ll just take a bit of work figuring out how I’m going to get all of my goodies set up in here.

This is a shot I put together of the kitchen. It’s the sloppiest of the stitch jobs that I made tonight, but they’re a little tricky to do, and it should work. It seems kind of funny, but I think I’m more excited about this kitchen than anything else! A good sized sink with a drainage area built in to the right, and loads of cupboards and storage space! Plus, it’s a gas kitchen, rather than electric like the place I’m in now, so that should cut down on my electric bills (as will having a steam heater rather than electric heat).

All in all, I think I ended up with a pretty good deal. I’ve got the next two weeks to move in, too, so I don’t have to make a mad rush at anything. Too cool!

I’ve gotten a little more information on this possible move that I mentioned a couple days ago — and it looks like this could end up being a pretty cool deal. Melvin and I went over to his new building last night to take a look around and discuss some more of what he’s got in mind.

As it turns out, I was a little wrong on one of my understandings — it’s most definitely not a newer building than the one I’m in now, which is part of the reason that Melvin’s so excited about it. He’s got something of a fascination with older buildings, and I can kind of understand that after wandering around in this one for a bit. I don’t have any real way of knowing, but if I were to hazard a guess, I wouldn’t be surprised if this building dates back to the ’30’s or so, from some of the things I saw. I took a couple pictures of the outside of it while I was walking to work this morning and will try to get them added to this post after I get home from work.

Anyway, first things first. If all goes well, it looks like I should be moving over there to start residency in April (though there’s at least a possibility of making the move over a couple weeks starting in March). Melvin showed me all the open apartments, and I chose one on the 4th floor of the building. It’s still a studio apartment (the entire building is studios and one bedrooms), but it’s a much cooler studio than what I have now. The actual room is probably about the same size as what I have now (just more squarish rather than rectangular), but there’s a real full bathroom, and an actual kitchen! The windows don’t have much of a view — another apartment building across the street, the street below, and if you look off to the side a bit you can see some of the downtown skyscrapers — but that’s part of city life, right? The kitchen window does open out onto the fire escape, though, and that’s just cool (grin).

One of the neatest things for me is that the building hasn’t had a whole lot of work done to it to ‘modernize’ it. The elevator is great — it would hold about three people comfortably, has a domed roof, and is one of the old style elevators where the outer door is a normal swinging door that you pull open, and there is no inner door, just a grate that has to be manually slid all the way closed or the lift won’t operate. The kitchen has a huge sink with built-in drainage area to the side, tons of cupboards, and it looks to be all original from when the building was built. I don’t remember if my apartment had one of these, but one that I looked at had this funny little cupboard on the floor that was about two and a half feet high and locked closed — then I realized that it was actually the original icebox! Not a refrigerator, as there was no cooling hardware — just an insulated box. Cool.

What I think is one of the neatest things, though, is something that isn’t even used anymore, but it really adds a sense of age to the building. I’d noticed as we were wandering around that directly beside every door to an apartment was a small door, about a foot and a half wide and two and a half feet tall that also looked like it led into the apartment, but had been painted over and was obviously no longer used. I couldn’t figure out what they were for, until Melvin and I were in one of the apartments and I noticed a cupboard on the inside of the apartment that corresponded to the placement of this mini-door, and the cupboard had its own latching door inside the apartment. It turns out that this was the original delivery/mailbox for each unit! When the mailman, milkman, or whoever came by, they’d open the outer door and put the goods in the box. The resident could then come by and open their inner door and take the stuff out whenever was convenient for them — no need to open the outside door, the goods didn’t sit outside the door to be seen and taken by other residents, or anything like that. Pretty nifty stuff, even if it’s not too useful anymore.

There’s a bunch of other benefits beyond just ‘nifty’ factor, though. Last year sometime, the rates for water and waste went up. One of the ways some of the landlords around town (including the company that runs the Shannon Apartments, where I live now) deal with this is that rather than including water/waste costs in the rent, as is standard, they use some arcane formula and divide the costs among all the tenants, based on how many people live in each apartment (because apartments generally aren’t set up to be individually metered). Sounds reasonable on the surface, except that it hits everyone if one tenant or apartment is using excess amounts of water, or fills the dumpster and we need an extra trash run. Luckily, these new apartments aren’t doing that. Additionally, the Shannon Apartments are very electric-based — both the heat and the oven and stove are electric. The new building uses gas stoves and the old style hot water/steam pipe heaters for the rooms — this should drop my electric bill fairly drastically.

So, all in all, things look good as far as living there goes. There’s a few downsides — parking looks like it might be worse than where I am now (which is somewhat hard to believe), and I’m a bit further from Broadway (though closer to Downtown), but I think the pros outweigh the cons at the moment.

I also got some more information about what kind of help Melvin would need. It doesn’t sound like it would be too much — occasional help with some of the tasks around the building, which I don’t have a problem with. Admittedly, it does help that once we worked out a rate of pay, he’d just deduct from my rent for however many hours I worked. Additionally, one of the selling points he used to get the spot is that he wants to set up a website to help promote the building — and he knows I’ve got the knowledge and ability to do this, so I’ll probably be in charge of that. Could be quite fun, and possibly put a little more money in my pocket (or off of rent, depending on how we arrange it).

This all led to another possible side project bouncing around my brain. As long as I’m going to be putting together a website for the building, and I’m somewhat enamored by the age of the building itself, I think it could be a lot of fun to spend some of my off-hours doing a little work digging into public records to see if I can uncover any information about the building — when it was actually built, what it’s been used for over the years — and eventually get that up on the page. I found a page with starting points for just such a search on the website for the Seattle Public Library. Also, when I did a quick Google search, I came up with two bits of information. Buried in the midst of an article about confrontations between squatters and a landlord is a mention that at some point in 1999 the then-current (I don’t know whether it’s still the same) landlord, Wah Lui, had been negotiating with the Low Income Housing Institute to convert the building into ‘mutual housing,’ but he later reneged on the deal. Additionally, that wonderful old elevator is apparently serviced by the American Elevator Corporation, based here in Seattle. Neither of them are really ground-breakingly crucial bits of information, but still kind of interesting to find.

So, that’s everything I know about the deal for now. More when I know more, of course….