A Penny Drops

[akirlu]

Huh. Monterey and Montreal mean the same thing. Wonder why it took me this long to notice?

It's kinda cool the way a lot of the old apartment buildings around the University District and elswhere around Seattle have names. The Starliter. Escolier. El Monterey. (Hence my ruminations on various cities called Mountroyal.) It seems like the frequency of named apartment buildings was far lower around LA, and I don't remember any in San Jose. Do apartments have names in your town?

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes for the greater Mpls area, and our apartments in Hayward and Concord (Bay Area) did, too.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I think Lucy may be right that it's partly a function of the vintage of the buildings. Los Angeles has an unfortunate habit of building cheaply and then knocking down anything that's more than a decade old, so you see fewer older apartment buildings relative to the total. And in the part of San Jose I grew up in, apartment buildings just weren't that old.

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

Isn't that the truth! But the condos they are building everywhere you look now do have names.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

If the apartment buildings date from the 60's or before, yes they usually do have names. After that, it's less common. Well, until they become condos, then they usually get a fancy name.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I think you're right that vintage of the building plays a part. Certainly the older the building, the likelier to have a name, in Seattle.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Monterey and Montreal mean the same thing. Wonder why it took me this long to notice?

I had the same sort of epiphany some years ago (hmmm...before ElderSon was born, so it was a LONG time ago) when I realized where in the Cordwainer Smith universe Meeya Meefla was.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Meeya is presumably Mia, but Meefla?

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

It helps to spell it as Miami, Fla ;)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

*groan*

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

See, that's the kind of thing I love about Smith's stuff

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It would drive me buckfuck, if that's typical. It's bad world-building. It only makes sense as a visual / auditory play on an abbreviation -- there's not a sensible reason why it would exist as a place name. To me the disruption of coherent background is not worth whatever weak thrill one would get from figuring out what the author was doing. Deeply annoying.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Well, Earthport and Meeya Meefla are said to be in the southeastern part of what used to be the United States, so the name makes sense.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I always liked "Tinnis Sea", but I don't think that was one of Smith's.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Huh. Monterey and Montreal mean the same thing.

Dublin and Blackpool are another pair.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I think I knew that du or dhu means black, but I still never would have caught that one. Doesn't Irish Celtic usually put the adjective after the noun?

[avram]

Most of the buildings on my block have names, including mine.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, do tell. What is your building called?

[avram]

We're in the Abraham Lincoln Annex. Behind us, around the other side of the block (on Eastern Parkway, which was intended to be Brooklyn's equivalent of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue), is the Abraham Lincoln. We think our building was built as servants' housing for the rich families in the other one.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Dunno if you've noticed the new apartment building on the Ave north of 47th called Lothlorien. I think there's a Rivendell going in somewhere too. Waiting for the Last Homely House ...

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I knew about Rivendell -- in fact, if you click on the "Click Here for Other Apartments in the University District" link at the Wilsonian site, you'll see that Rivendell is owned by the same group -- but I had not seen Rivendell at all. What a hoot. It's a pity it's UC Irvine, rather than UW, that has a dorm complex called Middle Earth.

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

I know I've seen buildings in San Jose with names, but I'll have to pay attention to what they actually are. I can't think of any right now.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It wouldn't surprise me that there are some around the older downtown area, and it may just be a function of the single family residence domination of the area, but I don't remember seeing any in Willow Glen. Then again, maybe it's a question of what sort of stuff I noticed as a kid.

[kateyule.livejournal.com]

Yes, don't they all? Typical categories include the pseudo-Luxe (Windsor Towers, The Regence), the mashup (LuDon, Melwood) and the all-nouns-all-the-time dogpile (Crestwood View Plaza, Briarcliff Manor).

I've always assumed that it has to do with business licenses.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There are named apartment complexes in San Jose, but perhaps not a lot.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Manassas only started having apartment complexes in the 70s and they didn't have names. Now, all new developments do (I live in Rolling Oaks, which is hilly and does have oaks) and the new condo development a few blocks away is "The Courts of Historic Manassas." Now, like all Manassas, they're building on battleground, but otherwise, there's nothing Historic about them. They are a block out of the Historic District aka Old Town, but they aren't building in historic style.