Okay, You Guys Are Too Hard To Fool
Quiz time: which of the following remarks about the possibly-soon-to-be demolished Anberay Apartments, described here [PDF] in the February Planning Commission minutes included in a Monday memo to the City Council, was made by an actual resident of the building?
- “[T]he Anberay building, with its gorgeous brickwork,
overlapping balconies, and enticing courtyards, was important to her … the Anberay building was a bit of charm and grace from the jazz age that should be preserved and enjoyed.” - “[T]he Anberay building was a beautiful building that has gracefully housed generations of Ann Arbor students, allowing comfort and conviviality … a perfect model of urban habitation.”
- “[T]he charm and beauty of the Anberay was non-existent … the heating of the building was inefficient and the basement smelled extremely bad.”
Oh, I’m sure you’d find the smell beautiful, if you just gave it a chance. And nothing spells Jazz Age charm like shivering through February!
posted by TPM on May 10th, 2007 at 1:32 pmhmm, interesting.
i had the displeasure of living on south forest for many years and i often walked by the anberay on my way to and from campus. someone that i knew eventually moved in there and i visited a couple of times, so i kind of recall what its like.
i do agree with many of the residents in the survey that the anberay is easily the nicest looking building on that block and probably the only one with any sort of historical value.
i’m sure the building probably is dilapidated inside, but what student apartment isn’t in this town? that’s what landlords do: they open the apartment up, and just coast on maintenance for a few decades until the place is so trashed that nobody will move in. then they clean it up.. a little.
so i don’t think that the anberay is a uniquely blighted building that is in need of remediation. its probably no worse than my current pit, err, ann arbor apartment.
and i’m sure there are bums, but c’mon, you can’t walk ten feet in the south university area without running into a bum. but i think that is more a function of the large proportion of discarded cans and students with more money than brains that can be found there.
i do think ann arbor needs cheaper student housing of higher quality and adding new buildings and more units are nominally a good thing, but why do they have to plow down the only building with any character to do it? there are so many shitty looking buildings in that area, why not get rid of them? university towers? the galleria? the in’n'out? good time charlies? ricks?
not like i particularly care about ann arbor anyway.. i’m counting the days until i’m out of this dreadful place… but its sad to think that they’re going to tear down that lovely looking old place and replace it with another totally featureless ten story brick monolith like they did on the corner of state and washington. oh well. enjoy your bland, faceless city, ann arborites.
posted by stc on May 10th, 2007 at 1:36 pmOddly, I’ve spent hours at a time in the Anberay basement. When I was living there in 1992-1993, I bought a huge collection of 78 RPM records at a garage sale (enough to completely fill a van) and put them in the common area of the basement as there wasn’t enough room in the apartment. My girlfriend carpeted our storage area and put in a couch and an overhead light; I set up a 78 player and we hung out on the couch, playing all the records and keeping the interesting ones. A fond memory. I don’t remember it smelling bad at all.
I wonder what happened to the records we left there…
posted by Kim Scarborough on May 10th, 2007 at 2:41 pmI remember an opium den (speaking of jazz age charm) in a basement storage area of the Anberay circa 1996. Maybe the smell in question is ligering opium residue and the patchouli stink of the hippies who supplied us. We might’ve listened to a few old 78s while stoned, but my memories of that time are understandbly hazy. There also was a time I was dating a woman who lived in the northern front groundfloor apartment. One night her ex-boyfriend climbed into her apartment and threatened us with a toy gun. Good times. Good riddance.
posted by E-V-Brown on May 10th, 2007 at 4:00 pmWhat the hell?!?! They can’t get rid of Melrose Place!
posted by Speedy on May 10th, 2007 at 4:59 pmstc stated my opinion on the whole matter far more eloquently than I could’ve.
So I’ll just second his/her post. Especially the part about other, more demolish-worthy buildings in that area (please, God, do something about Rick’s…)
posted by Jen on May 10th, 2007 at 6:47 pmI think the basement smelled from everyone peeing in the basement apartment stairwells. Poor design.
posted by Ypsidweller on May 10th, 2007 at 9:07 pmIt smelled bad in the fifties, too, when I went to parties there. And not just the basement. Time for it to come down.
posted by from a REAL oldie on May 10th, 2007 at 10:12 pmAlso to agree with stc, although that last paragraph is a bit overwrought.
posted by Nitro on May 12th, 2007 at 8:21 amLet’s also not get to overwrought about the issue of odors in buildings. You might think that once an odor permeates a place, that it becomes a structural characteristic, and demolition is the only answer. That’s not the case at all.
Just for one example, my daughter attends an Ann Arbor public elementary school that was built in the early 1950s. Being there as a parent from time to time, I had noticed that the men’s (boys’?) room near the front entrance stank. The room seemed perfectly clean, yet a strong odor persisted that didn’t have any obvious source. It was really intolerable, yet it felt like a long-term, baked-in characteristic of the room, which never changed from spring to fall or from year to year. My daughter advanced through the grades, but that room always smelled the same.
Then, one day, the odor was totally, 100% gone. Someone had done a perhaps more thorough than usual cleaning, and the odor that had permeated the place continuously for years was no longer detectable — and I have a pretty sensitive nose.
I think this particular argument for destroying a useful and historic building like the Anberay has a bad odor.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on May 12th, 2007 at 12:53 pmNot so sound like a fogey here, but that is a really attractive building… one of the very few pre-war apartment buildings in the city, actually. Whether it’s been maintained well by the current owner is another matter entirely. 97% of buildings in the city are more worthy of being torn down that the Anberay… it’s the only example of an historic courtyard-style apartment building I can even think of in Ann Arbor, off the top of my head.
posted by Brandon on May 13th, 2007 at 5:02 pmI wonder why people don’t want to repair stuff anybmore.
posted by LittleB on May 13th, 2007 at 6:03 pmanymore. sorry.
posted by LittleB on May 13th, 2007 at 6:04 pmWhy didn’t I think of this several days before.
David Boyle
posted by Anberay Is Odor Rated. on May 14th, 2007 at 6:16 pm