You wouldn’t know it from the street, but 209 Pearl has a lovely rooftop lake. Or at least it did until about midnight last night.
Yesterday, while the rest of you were enjoying lunch, Jesse and I closed on 209 Pearl. And, this evening, we got to work. The first order of business was to address the leaks in the roof, which had grown in severity over the past several days, by draining the small lake that had formed on the roof. I’m sure, come summertime, we’ll regret not having a nice cool rooftop pond to relax in after a hard day of floor sanding and toilet installing, but, right now we’re just happy to have stopped the constant dripping.
It turns out that it was just a clogged rooftop drain, which was awesome. There will, no doubt, be other, bigger, more costly surprises in our future, but this was a relatively easy fix.
Now it’s on to work with the architects on our construction plans for Landline Creative Labs… Wish us luck.
16 Comments
You’ve destroyed an ecosystem! You’ve robbed our avian Earthlings of their watery home!!!!
It also occurred to me that we got rid of a freshwater reserve that we’ll very much need once the end times are upon us.
From your neighbor at 302 N. Huron Street, good luck!!
Wishing you luck and good help. The mattress chair and table you found on the street will make a special place under a canopy on this roof that offers hours of surreptitious observation of all the action below.
Mark, A little history about your new neighborhood and my experiences there: Circa 1970 when I was going to Eastern, we used to go to first-run movies at the MARTHA Theater on Washington Street, just around the corner from you. Then the guy who ran the EMU Cinema Guild bought it and removed 3 of the letters from the sign, added a “1,” and thus created the ART-1 Theater, a porn house. So some of us guys checked that out as well. Very cheesy porn, but quite a novelty to us rubes back then. I missed “Deep Throat,” which also played there. Later it was converted into a strip club. I haven’t been to the latter iteration yet, though it’s been there for more than 40 years. Then, for 3 months in ’73 I worked at a radio station on an upper story of a building at the NW corner of Michigan and Huron. It was a Christian station, and angry listeners called in and berated me for playing gospel music they deemed as decadent because sinful drums were employed. Then there were two fundamentalist preachers who bought time and appeared daily to preach live sermons on the air. Their shows were a couple of hours apart, and they never met, but they listened to each other, and they had an ongoing heated on-air debate on the finer points of Christian faith. In later years I have enjoyed visiting Depot Town, which in the early ’70s was a completely burned out abandoned street with a single dive bar inhabited by a few down-and-out alcoholics, though it’s very nice today.
Hi Mark,
Is this space going to be all private offices, or will you have coworking space available, too? (E.g., communal tables, WiFi, access to printers, etc. for a fee — without a dedicated desk or office.)
That’s no rooftop lake…it’s a giant, open air urine trough!
Interesting.
Holly,
As of right now, we do not have plans to provide co-working space. I suppose anything is possible, but our focus, at least during this first phase, is on the build-out of our 12 individual offices. As we’re envisioning it, there will be common spaces and a shared conference room, but they will just be for the use of our office tenants. The good news, however, is that Back Office Studios should be launching at just about the same time that we do, and they’re going to be a co-working facility. Here’s a link:
http://www.thebackofficestudio.com/
Congrats! Lemme know when the sledgehammers start swinging and if you want me filming.
This is really outstanding! Congrats!
Thanks for your response, Mark. Back Office Studios is a bit pricey; that’s why I was curious if you were going to offer options. Regardless, this is a very exciting project and I wish you and everyone involved all the best!
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that building while waiting for the bus. I’ve always admired it. I am glad it is in good hands.
Water weighs 8 pounds per gallon. It’s a good thing you got rid of that water to lighten the loading on the roof. The stress relief will add to it’s longevity.
Lotus the radio station was WYFC youth for christ ….I knew some of the people that worked there Allan Holder, Duane Cuthberson, John Boshoven
Lexi, when I worked at the station for 3 months in 1973, it was called WYNZ, later changed to WYFC. Back then, the manager was a young guy named Tony Stubbs, who also headed a Christian rock band called the Stubbs Brothers and Karen. The only name that rings a bell is Duane Cuthbertson, who bought the station from Edgil Howard, who by then was already an old man. He was the owner of Howard’s Christian Bookstores, and he had operated the station, probably at a loss, to promote his guided tours of the Holy Land, which was one of his primary cash cows at the time.