Apartment
Note: I no longer reside in the Pink Warehouse. I lived there from June of 1998 until June of 1999. This page is retained purely for archival purposes.
Charlottesville's Pink Warehouse holds a lot of history for Charlottesville. Most of it I don't have a clue about yet, because I haven't spent enough time digging through old records at the library. More recently, however, it has become famous for being the site of the first-ever Dave Matthews Band concert. The Pink Warehouse has been a home to many artists and local impresarios for years.
Perhaps it's the pinkness that attracts people. Perhaps it's The Pink Warehouse's location: smack downtown. Or perhaps it's the funky, weird, old apartments, with 13' ceilings, ancient wood floors and exposed beams. Maybe, still, it's because the landlady sprinkles the huge staircases, hallways and apartments with interesting antiques and artwork. It certainly is a magnet.
It sure pulled me in. In June, my friend Noah McMurray and I moved in, having inherited the apartment from Jeremy Linzee, a friend and previous tenant.
One especially popular apartment, known as The Library (for obvious reasons) has been the home of many interesting folks. (And me.) The Library is on the third (and top) floor. It has three deep, tall south-facing windows that provide a view of Monticello and the surrounding mountains. Train tracks run immediately behind the building, so freights slowly rumble by every few hours.
The ceiling of The Library is 13' high at the entrance, and arcs down to about 11' high at the back wall. Bookshelves line every wall, filled with thousands of rare, classic, and ancient books. All of the classics are there, including complete works of Shakespeare, Tom Wolfe, and those authors of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (There are three sets.) Also on the shelves are hundreds of books on southern literature & history, British explorations in the late 1800s, and a 1929 New Orleans telephone book. Coolest of all, there's the 20th copy every printed of John Muir's "1000 Mile Walk to the Sea."
In the bathroom is one of the hippest things about this apartment: a claw-footed bathtub. It doesn't get much spankier than that.
The whole place came furnished with all sorts of weird furniture, including an amoire that weighs at least 500 lbs. Four of us couldn't get the thing to budge. A table from some library rummage sale serves as the kitchen table. I initially disliked it, up until we had six people sitting on it and playing cards. "What other table," I asked myself, "would be able to handle that?" Plus, if we were so inclined, we could store books in the shelves on either end of the table.
The pink warehouse view. Running from right to left is South
Street, and the street that disappears on the lower right
corner is 2nd Street SW. Monticello is to the left and up
the mountain. The Downtown Mall is 180° in the other
direction. My apartment is on the opposite corner from the
one that you see here, which affords me a view of
Monticello Mountain
and the mountains to the south.
This is the view of the apartment from the entrance. The
bookshelves on the right side obscure about 1/6 of the room,
which is closed off to form my bedroom. The bookshelves on the
back left wall obscure another 1/6, which is Noah's (my
roommate's) bedroom. To the right, off-camera, is the kitchen.
To the left, also off-camera, is the bathroom.
This is a shot from the left side of the above panoramic
view, shot to the right. The beams in the centre of each image
corrospond. On the right side of this image, are the bookshelves
that segment off my bedroom.