The 20th Century in a Building

In the early-1990s, my painting company bid on a lucrative government-subsidized housing job. The catch, which I didn’t fully understand going in, was that the 1920s-era apartment building was a halfway house for mentally-challenged individuals in the process of transitioning from supervised facilities to independent living. Portland building codes had caught up with the old structure—which was fitted with ancient exterior fire escapes—and required that a sprinkler system be installed in every apartment and on every floor. Those codes also required that the entirety of the system be primed and painted to match the ceiling.

One can only imagine the horror of a fire in this old building without a sprinkler system. There was a kitchen in every unit, and the people who lived in the building had a range of mental illnesses. The work itself was easy—climb a five-foot ladder, apply a quick-dry primer the length of the piping, leaving the sprinkler heads unpainted, and then repeat with ceiling paint. Each apartment took about an hour, and each hall and stairwell took the better part of a day.

We rarely saw any residents on the job. They were notified we were coming, and many of had gained employment, and so were gone all day. But the rooms themselves yielded clues as to who lived in them. Some were neat, everything in place. Others showed evidence of hoarding behaviors—we could hardly get the ladders placed. A woman opened her door and the stench was awful; we notified the maintenance manager that we were bypassing that unit. Turns out her toilet had backed up for weeks and she was afraid to mention it.

One early morning while working in a stairwell we heard a commotion on the main floor, lots of anguished yelling. One of the residents was rebelling—his apartment was on that day’s schedule. Once inside we saw that the walls of the entire apartment were papered with images of gay porn. One apartment on the ground floor was grim; a mattress on the floor, no décor, a sink full of dirty dishes.

Having painted many older homes and buildings, we were accustomed to seeing trimwork—crown moldings, baseboards, doors and door frames, windows and cabinets—slathered over the years with multiple coats of enamel. So thick were the layers of paint, some undoubtedly dating to the lead-paint era, that cabinet doors could hardly close, and sash windows were a struggle to raise.

The job wound down and there was only one top-floor unit remaining. The maintenance manager informed us to hold off, that a mental health professional would be present for the painting in that apartment. When the psychiatric counselor arrived, we went in and met the resident, “Theo,” a bespectacled fortysomething man who greeted us warmly, and sat on the top of a bunk bed of his meticulously clean bedroom during the painting. We couldn’t help noticing the array of Star Wars models and action figures, including an expertly-painted model of the Millenium Falcon on a shelf in the living room.

We also noticed that unlike all the other apartments, the trimwork in this unit was unpainted. The fine joinery and natural patina of the original woodwork was intact, as rich and handsome as the day it was installed. While loading up, I asked the maintenance manager about it. Typically, with multi-unit residential turnaround, apartments get fresh paint every two or three tenants. “Wow,” I said, “that wood is beautiful, how has it escaped being painted out?”

He told me that representatives of the governmental agency that purchased the building 11 years before were just as surprised as me was by the apartment’s unpainted trim. “Theo was our first approved resident, and his family specifically requested that apartment.”