The horror..

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gsa
ass engineer
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Joined: Thu Apr 22, 2004 5:43 am
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The horror..

Post by gsa » Sun Dec 11, 2005 12:25 am

On Friday I went to look at a prospective studio space on the second floor of a 150 year old pharmacy building in the beautiful downtown square area. I hadn't known previously that there was commercial space available up there, but my fiance noticed a For Rent sign on the front door and I called right away (I love the character of old buildings), So anyway, we meet up with the landlady who takes us into the downstairs pharmacy through the back entrance to the upstairs rental unit. The stairway and the huge landing area were one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen, architecturally.. bits of exposed brick, that GORGEOUS old, creaky hardwood flooring thats probably original 1878. There's a huge skylight in the ceiling, too. So at this point, as I'm looking around in awe, my heart is racing and I'm saying to myself, "oh my god, I've hit the jackpot.." Just the sound that the place was making with our footsteps on the floor was enough to make me giddy..

Then she unlocks the door to the rental space.

The first thing I see is ugly, ugly beige/black speckled vinyl or linoleum flooring thats straight out of 1972. I cringe and look up to the sight of a narrow little hallway that has four or five numbered doors. At some point in the last 30 years they had comparmentalized the space into a bunch of freaking 9x9 (I'm not exaggerating) units! You couldn't even fit all three of us in any one of those spaces comfortably.. Half of them had horrible, stain-covered carpeting that was probably from the same era as the hallway flooring. Every trace of brick and wood was covered up. Acoustical drop-ceiling tiles came down to about three feet above our heads. Every single unit was vacant. No one in their right mind would rent one of those things, if only for the sheer tininess of them all.

It's a dirty rotten crime that someone would do that to what I can only imagine was, if the adjacent area was any indication, an incredibly beautiful space that had heaps and heaps of character. Are there really people who prefer what I just described to what the space once was? Was everyone just out of their heads in the 60s and 70s? I'm finding this stuff all-too-often, unfortunately.

I'm positive that there will continue to be no interest in this space, so I'm hatching a scheme to go back to the lady in the spring and ask her if I can gut the place if I sign a lease. I'm hopeful that whatever once was can be recovered to some extent..

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