{ a burst of light }: Poem On Your Blog Day!

As will be seen, this is handled.

The New York Times > Technology > Google’s Sale of Its Shares Will Defy Wall St. Tradition

“Google is not an icebreaker for other companies to follow,” said John Shoch, a partner at Alloy Ventures. “It’s a polka-dotted zebra.”

This explains a great many things, possibly including the story’s noted judgement that Google does not love Wall Street.

I checked out the 1978 book on Anhalt from the public library and wanted to tie up some loose ends and make some corrections.

First, Anhalt did erect some Mediterranean-style buildings. The book specifically notes that El Monterey was not among them, however.

Second, the book cites “thirty” buildings, but does not provide a detailed census.

Third, my citation of the Canal Market to the west of Montlake is not supported in the book. Since there’s no comprehensive list of buildings, I could still be right, but the book doesn’t mention it in the section on Anhalt’s early commercial architecture.

Fourth, I attributed the design elements to a single pattern book. Apartments by Anhalt cites several by name.

In Where’s the Beef?, Mena Trott mentions that on Tuesday, SixApart invited the first fifty public beta testers on board for MT 3.0.

I gotta pay better attention, ‘cuz I was one of those fifty. I just filed the email, thinking I’d get around to it later (I have several semi-completed technical projects underway and SIFF press screenings start on Monday). I guess I will make time to set up the app.

One of my concerns was my desire to segregate my current implementation of MT from the beta, in case of unexpected nastiness, especially at the database level. I will spend some time on that topic, probably for publication here, next week, amid the other projects.

The Big MetaFilter User Survey | Results: “Most incessantly scratch their crotch and burp too, no doubt.”

I’m tracking a Movable Type posting problem in the MT Support Forum, and thought I’d post about it here.

The bug appears to be an interaction of ecto (or, I suppose, mt-xmlrpc.cgi) with Markdown. It seems that Markdown is choking on a specific replacement string.

When that string is fed in from ecto, it reliably generates a Perl crash on my server, which prevents the rebuild or post action from completeing. Subsequent attempts to rebuild that entry, or others from the blog to which the problem entry was posted, will fail as long as Markdown is called in the rebuild.

An acceptable temporary workaround is to either disable Markdown by removing it from your plugins folder or to turn it off under the ‘format’ dropdown in the individual post-editing UI in MT.

Oddly, I was able to rebuild the entire site with Markdown disabled and subsequent rebuilds from the browser did not lead to the Perl crashes, but to in-browser error messages. Using ecto again experimentally immediately led to the Perl crash.

The site this is happening to is not this one. It’s a different project that’s not ready for prime time yet, so I have the luxury of really trying to isolate the problem.

I’ve dropped a line to both the author of ecto and the author of Markdown. Adrian, who is behind ecto, doesn’t think it’s his app, and given that it’s interacting with mt-xmlrpc.cgi, I can see where he’s coming from.

I haven’t yet heard from John about Markdown, but hope to soon.

New Beginning, by John Longenbaugh, previews Jason’s upcoming April 30 show and the new CD.

My old entry Time Travel Spam has attracted the wrath of ” the Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human, Dr. Gene Ray!”

*sniff*

I feel special!

Yesterday, I took a quick look at the beginnings of Frederick Anhalt’s time in Seattle, and how he came to be a builder.

I learned the story from two books, both hard to find and long out of print.

The best-known work is the Seattle Department of Community Development edition of “Apartments by Anhalt,” which I understand to be a reprint of a 1930 advertising circular. It’s been some time since I saw this book, and as I recall it also adds background material.

The 1978 publication date may reflect the 1979 recognition of two of the Anhalt buildings as historic landmarks.

The book was also reprinted in 1982.

The other book, Built by Anhalt, is a biography. Published in hardback in 1982, it’s based on a series of interviews given by Anhalt specifically for the book. This is my main source; shortly after moving into our apartment I came across a copy in a used bookstore. Currently, a neighbor is borrowing the book – when I get it back I’ll check my facts.

Both of these books are exceedingly hard to find in local used bookshops.

Picking up where I left off, after working with the Loveless architectural firm, Anhalt grew disenchanted with the stucco exterior and Spanish colonial style that is the signature for these buildings. In the book I cite, he notes that the architecture is well suited to a sunny and dry climate but poses maintenance problems in the Pacific Northwest.

He settled on the Tudor style, which in the twenties was also quite popular. Unfortunately, I can no longer recall which building in the neighborhood is his first, but it was successful. Rather than selling the building or having built it for a third party, Anhalt retained title and acted as managing landlord for the building.

As soon as the building was rented, he took the capital and used it to begin another. As I recall, he had some difficulty getting banks to loan him the money because of his unorthodox business plan. His intention was to build a large number of buildings over a short period of time to service the high-end urban rental market, providing full-service maintenance on the buildings and charging premium rents.

His insight was that if he conducted a long-term building campaign, instead of a series of disconnected projects, he could hire very skilled craftsmen on a salary basis and move them from site to site as well as using them in a maintenance capacity. With this in mind, he worked with an architect, selecting structural and decorative elements from an architectural pattern book intended to provide British Victorian builders with architectural elements for the country manor trade. Generally speaking, these architectural elements in the Anhalt buildings have been scaled down by anywhere from a third to half the size they appear in genuine medieval or Tudor revival buildings. While sometimes complicating the interior spaces of the apartments, this also has the unexpected effect of making the apartments appear larger than they are, especially when viewed in a photograph or without furniture.

His initial capital shortages, however, led him to construct the first few buildings as inexpensively as possible. Many of the buildings he’s responsible for feature textured, or ‘clinker’ brick. He claims that these bricks were discounted and his initial use of them was an economizing measure. One of the cheapskate features of these older buildings is a total lack of sound insulation inside the buildings. We live in the last building Anhalt constructed without it, and believe me, we miss it.

The first building that Anhalt constructed under the fully-realized ‘luxury apartments’ business plan is the building that faces the Safeway parking lot at the top of Capitol Hill at the intersection of 14th and John. Built on a small lot, Anhalt was able to rent a large tent to cover the entire property while the building went up, and he posted guards to keep the curious out. He did all of this as a publicity stunt, and the tent, and speculation thereon, was duly reported in the local media.

He publicized the grand opening, and by his account, the line to view the completed building stretched to Broadway – a distance of several blocks. The building was completely rented by the end of the first day, and Anhalt had a long list of people waiting for his next building.

This changed his access to capital, and he began planning much larger buildings – the four buildings near the north end of Broadway represent the fruits of this planning. Before they were constructed, however, many of the rest of Anhalt’s smaller buildings were completed. I’ve never seen a map or comprehensive list of the structures, but I know of at least eleven, one of which is in the University District, and I believe there are several more.

The buildings at the north end of the Hill are the last four that Anhalt constructed in this period. In addition to the two buildings at the north end of Broadway visible from the front door of the Deluxe, (look across the intersection to the east, beyond the service station) there are two – or two and one-half – more buildings on the downslope of Belmont, including the building that Anhalt designed to include his private residence.

The extra one-half is a very large multi-story building just upslope from the first of these. This building was initially planned by Anhalt to be his largest, if I recall correctly (and I might be off base geographically). He was forced to sell the land before construction began because after the stock market crash of October 1928, the depression set in. The large building retains many Anhalt touches, presumably a consequence of his ex-employees, but internally the apartments are very run-of-the-mill nineteen-twenties homes.

Which brings me to the topic of the interior architecture of the Anhalts, something I’ll tackle tomorrow.

Anita requested pics of our home in response to an earlier post, something I’ve declined to do out of a concern for geographic privacy – we have had plenty of burglars already, thanks very much. While I’m sure our recently-updated security system will help, break-ins in our neighborhood remain an issue, so please forgive me for being chary.

In the past I have deliberately avoided discussing our apartment because of this issue. However, it is a topic worth tackling, both anecdotally and architecturally. I’m not up to a full-on dissertation on the topic of Fred Anhalt today, alas. But I can lay out the facts briefly.

Frederick Anhalt came from Montana to Seattle early in the 20th century as a junior butcher. While pursuing his trade, he fell into contracting and helped facilitate the design and development of several ‘suburban’ markets and groceries. The Canal Market at 219 Fuhrman E., on the skirts of the Ship Canal on the downslope from Capitol Hill, is said to be an example of these projects.

Successful in these endeavors, he began to get more requests, the most prominent resulting project being the remodeled Eastlake Romio’s (alas, no image Googled up to the surface), which Anhlat descibed in his biography as a building originally erected in the 1880’s. If verifiable, that would mean the building is one of the oldest remaining in Seattle, largely settled in the 1860s. Seattle residents will recognize it as the turreted building on the Capitol Hill side of the University Bridge drawbridge, in the shadow of I-5.

After the remodel, in which the building came to resemble a Norman castle in miniature, Anhalt put two and two together and began to pursue work as a builder. As I recall he worked with the other exponent of craft apartments in Seattle of the day, the Loveless firm. This is the builder responsible for most of the Spanish-Moorish nineteen-twenties apartments in Capitol Hill and the University District. The finest work of the firm is not in that genre, though. It bears the Loveless name and houses both shops and housing across the street from the Harvard Exit Theater, at the north end of Broadway. The building also houses Bacchus, a delicious greek restaurant the features amazing murals executed at the time of the building’s first tenancy, illustrating a Russian folk tale. The paintings were executed for the initial tenant, the Russian Tea Room, one of the interesting legacies of the post-revolutionary era for the neighborhood: Capitol Hill was a hotbed of White Russians, and their influence on the architecture of the neighborhood is considerable.

Tomorrow: What Fred did.

LINKS

HistoryLink: Frederick Anhalt

The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest feature, 2002.

Better Homes and Gardens: October, 2003 feature.

MISCMedia: Clark weighs in, October 2000.

During Anhalt’s life, two books were published relating to this aspect of his life and work. I’ll see what I can dig up on those webside.