In mid June 2013 we were forced to move from our corner unit two bedroom condo on the sixteenth floor, the one with a 270 degree view of Los Angeles county, including Catalina Island, the bluffs of Palos Verdes, the historic Queen Mary, Shoreline Village, the Santa Monica mountains, Signal Hill, glimpses of downtown Los Angeles, and sights clear down to Saddleback Mountain in south Orange County, where every day I could say to the ocean, I see you. No bugs, and barely a shadow of a neighbor. Riding with someone in an elevator was a rarity to be met with uncomforatble silence or sighs. My only known neighbor Hector, a wine and house music aficionado, was a great guy, but even then our conversations were always in the car garage, passing in the hall -- always random, and always short. And we LIKED him. The building was rife with convenience, as evidenced by the door service, mail boxes, by the garage WITHIN a garage.
It was that summer that the delusion we would ever recover from the real estate fallout was dropping its final veil. Even if we were to stay in the condo for another ten years, we wouldn't come close to touching the principal, and we were so far upside down we could see Australia. We had to walk away, and the dream of the penthouse in the sky, above it all, dissolved into the hard, hot concrete streets of Long Beach.
But wait, once we had a different dream. We had, early in our marriage, dreamt of loft life. Living like artists and bohemian children of American post-manufacturing lore, literary hard-case slumming, and starving NYC eras gone by. We weren't always yuppies dependent on ocean view living. We liked the grit and the grime of old buildings, the adventure of living in a structure suited to and created for a purpose now forgotten and in decay. There had to be an authentic place we could feel more alive within, and for a smaller fee. We wanted less, but also more.
We found our prized pig in the shape of a 1930's warehouse-cum-apartment-cum-loft/studio nestled in one of the admittedly lower class pockets of just shore-adjacent Long Beach...Long Beach, California. It has this way of being everything a beach city could be, and at the same time dashing your hopes for an emerald city by the sea into a million little roach-sized pieces. A tour of Long Beach is a confusing roller coaster of oohs and ahs, punctuated with quite of bit of ughs. There is a long history of architectural and suburban grandeur and abuse, not the least of which is and was the admission of monstrously oversized apartment buildings in lovely craftsman and spanish bungalow-lined neighborhoods. There are areas that also seem to be ghettoes of the American low-income and high-violence variety, and decrepit Section 8 legacy. The strange thing is that the prized California coastline is less than a mile away. We didn't want to be those white, privileged jerks oozing into a rough neighborhood with glassy eyes full of gentrification, but we couldn't help what we were. And we wanted to live with real people, sometimes.
Our adorable confused little brick warehouse is our last gasp of young-adult, alternative, living/working space dreamery. We found it on Craiglist, after having searched for an authentic loft space, which is harder to do than one might think, as new construction is now listed as "loft," because "loft" is now a design term, and not an honest description. We didn't want a condo that looks like a loft, we wanted a loft that would serve as our living space, if possible. The ad sounded addled: 3200 sq. ft., one bathroom two bedroom apartment, one bathroom loft, warehouse space. Um, what? Four blocks from the beach? This we had to see.
After calling the property manager, we set up a look-see. And there she was. A 3200 sq. ft. brick warehouse with redwood trusses, with the entrance off an alley. Hidden behind a separate four-unit apartment building that faces the street, the warehouse is all but cloaked in obscurity. On one side sits a hideous overpacked box of crammed apartments, and on the other is an unpeopled General Electric substation, then a dive bar. From the alley the warehouse looks like the back entrance to a garage, or a workshop. There is a rolling door that accommodates a car to pull into the warehouse space, as well as a regular sized door. This is the front/back door, we call it.
The whole place was vacant, aside from the dead remnants of a couple of larger sewer-sized cockroaches, to which the PM said, "it's not perfect." If you imagine the warehouse as a giant rectangle, which it is, cut the rectangle in half, and then cut one of the halves into one third with an adjacent two-thirds, and there you will have three spaces: the largest one is the warehouse, open clear up to the ultra-high ceiling, with trusses exposed, the second a two-bedroom apartment with a living room, kitchen, and one full bath (with an excruciatingly low dropped ceiling to create a more cozy space, I suppose, and hide a forced air contraption), and finally a smaller open-to-the-ceiling studio space with a full bath, kitchenette, and a loft that rests above the master bedroom. It did exist! Confounding as the inner workings are, it was here, close to the beach, and for let less than a dollar a square foot. Legitimately zoned as live/work space, it provided us with a 60/40 work/live space, with 60% of the rent a business expense.
We were intrigued, inspired, and a little nauseous.
If we signed up, this would be the worst neighborhood in which we had ever lived. Two white kids from middle class suburbs, it had been a leap just to move to Long Beach, but the high rise-iness of our new construction condo, and our concierge, and our in-house gym and sauna, had made the transition a soft one. I recall driving down the street I now call MY street, and wondering when I would be mugged for the first time. I marveled at how Long Beach careened from million dollar ocean front property to scummy flop-house apartment cracker boxes with barred windows and dying weeds for landscape. There were award-winning architectural creations right alongside community blights, without warning. There are neighborhoods to this day that I don't traverse on foot. Long Beach is insanely diverse, with it's ethnicity profile split into thirds: one-third white, one-third black, one-third latino, ten percent other (mostly Asian). We have a Cambodia Town in Long Beach, as well as The Museum of Latin American Art, a museum of Pacific Islander art, an Aquarium, a museum of whatever art, the moored and decrepit relic The Queen Mary ocean liner, the dome that used to house Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, some of the richest oil fields in Los Angeles county, and our own harbor. All spanning more than six miles of oceanfront.
We debated. We tried to find anything with the same adventurous appeal, or even something that just seemed like a better fit. Nothing materialized, and the clock was ticking. We returned to the warehouse for another, more serious appraisal. There was carpet in the apartment and studio, and this just wouldn't do. There was no way I could live with carpet, even new carpet, in such an old building. My hope was that the cement under the carpet could be polished, but really, we weren't even sure that the owners would agree to take the carpet out, much less polish and seal any concrete. But after we mentioned it, they pulled out all the carpet in the place. Quickly! We were pleasantly surprised, as we hadn't even a glimpse of a contract yet. There was concrete underneath the carpet, but as it is an old ass building, the cement is covered with black vinyl tiles; best case scenario it would take a lot of work to scrape them off with a machine, worst case they were adhered with asbestos, and would be even more costly to remove. We suggested just installing hard flooring, not really wood, but a composite that looks like wood, that could easily flow through the apartment, through the kitchen, and into the bathroom. They agreed. And suddenly, the apartment looked a million times brighter and lighter.
We noticed that two of the interior walls in the apartment were brick, but were covered with siding. We weren't sure if this was for insulation purposes, or what. We asked what was behind the panels, and the PM said he didn't know. We explained that if there was just brick behind them, we would love to have it exposed. He sort of hemmed and hawed, but said that he would have his crew look behind a corner of it, and see what was there. We weren't hopeful, and we drove away. Within a minute, we received a call that the brick was behind and intact, and we rushed back to find the crew taking off large panels and revealing 1930's brick. Amazing.
They also put hard flooring in the studio, and in the loft. We were incredibly impressed that the PM was taking all our suggestions and how good the place was shaping up. Still, we were scared. Living off an alley? Living in this pocket of slum apartments and rickety old houses? Graffiti and trash, no yard, or views?
But that loft life. It called to us. Then there was the matter of having sixteen years of stuff in our garage. If we moved anywhere else we would have had to rent a storage just to contain the years' worth of collected stuff. Nailing down the warehouse allowed us to simply move all of our stuff into the vast space, and dismantle and organize the collection at our leisure.
The day finally came, and the clincher was a reduced rent due to the fact that we were going to have to purchase all new appliances, washer and dryer, oven, and dishwasher. We signed a two year lease, opened our arms to the grittier side of the beach town.
We said hello to alley life.
