The job seemed to happen overnight. "Like a covert military operation," says Ceci, an Antioch University grad student and nearby neighbor. "I woke up one day, and poof, [the purple paint] was gone, just like that!" remembers Tom Wagner, who owns the house directly across the street.
The new paint job for the apartment complex is stunning. If you've driven by it, or walked by it, you can't miss it. The shade is a deep florescent green, like a commercial dumpster, or a new type of tennis ball, or a beacon light, and it's everywhere. The cheap plywood siding is green; the trim is green; the handrail is green; the deck out back is green; the cables that bring in the TV and phone signals are green; and the sidewalk surrounding much of the complex is now green. "Oh my lord," thought Clifford, who hoped the new color would be a refreshing change. "What have I done?"
"I said, 'What the fuck is that?'" recalls Phil, a nearby neighbor, dragging on a Drum cigarette. "I was walking up the street, and Jesus Christ, there it was." One of the building's tenants, an Ethiopian man who barely speaks English, buries his face in his hands when I ask about the color. Wagner, the owner of the house across the street, was hoping it was just a cheap primer. "But after a few weeks, I kind of let the hope die," he says, sounding defeated. South on 19th, across the street from the green apartments and down a few houses, the reaction is similar. "It's hideous!" says Rema, who shares a home with Ceci, the grad student. "Oh, I kind of like it now," counters Ceci. "It's like a landmark. To my friends who've never been over before, I just say, 'Turn right at the green thing!'"
There is a house for sale next door to the green apartments. At 1916 19th Avenue sits a modest, two-story home with a landscaped yard. Perfect for quiet little families and their Range Rovers. And no one will buy it. According to Stafford Robbins of Gerrard, Beattie, and Knapp Realtors, the green apartment is making his job difficult. "Obviously, if it were a different color, more people would be looking at the house," he tells me on the phone from his office. "The market is hard right now, and that apartment isn't helping things. I mean, would you want to look out your windows in the morning every day and see that thing?" he laughs. But the green apartment problem could be easily solved, Stafford assures me. "Three or four giant birch trees would work wonders."
In the city of Seattle, you can do just about anything to your house or apartment--provided it was built before 1994. You can paint it with polka dots or burn a pentagram into the siding. Residential construction projects built after 1994 go through a permitting process where the design, color, and aesthetic are reviewed. Pre-'94, you're golden. "You could probably paint the city 99.9 percent green and get away with it," jokes Patrick Dougherty, design officer at the city's Department of Construction and Land Use.
London, the apartment's owner, won't reveal how he got the color. I track him down at the London Apartments, another complex he owns. He's working outside. London is probably 75, with a gray buzz cut and the huge, weathered hands of a construction worker. "I'm not interested in talking to you," he says. It's hot and I'm grumpy, so I follow him, repeating my inquiry. "All right, all right, I picked the color," he admits, exasperated. "I don't really like it; it's too loud. But damn," he says, his eyes narrowing on me. "It sure was cheap. No, go on," he says, shooing me away. "But what is the color?" I plead. "Where did you get it? How did you get it?" London walks away, shaking his head. I go back to the green apartments and pick a piece off the backyard railing for a sample analysis.
Charles Rogers, the owner of the Color Store on 12th Avenue and East Madison Street, is mystified by the paint-chip sample. "I don't know where they got that color," he says, staring intently through his bifocals at the green sample. Rogers searches all his paint charts (or color wheels, as they're called in the biz), and comes up with nothing. "It has a real saturation to it. I just don't know how they got those neon shades to come out," he says. "The closest I got is a Fuller O'Brien Green 5C13-6, but it's not really it. I'd check downtown." Rogers is referring to the downtown industrial district, along Fourth Avenue South, where a ton of commercial and industrial paint shops do business.
Sherwin-Williams is an industrial paint supply company on Fourth, across the street from a discount bakery store. The smell of paint and doughnuts fills the air. The paint staff thinks the color is a mismatch, a botched mixing job. Often, they say, paint companies mess up the colors, add too much yellow or too much blue, and screw up the whole batch. "We lose about $50,000 a year on mismatches," says Jason Walker, the Sherwin-Williams color specialist. Walker says his company sells mismatches all the time to landlords, painters, and companies, at steep discounts. One of his biggest customers is a Russian man who comes in every two months and cleans the place out. He buys the mistakes at 10 cents a gallon, and then ships them back to Russia.
"I think it's a cross between Green Grass and Irish Green that just got screwed up," says Walker, eyeing the paint chip. But Craig, another color specialist, disagrees. "No, that ain't no mismatch. Someone picked that color," he says. "It was probably some business like a gas station, or an industrial park that had a bunch of paint left over."
The exact color and where the hell Ernest London got it remain a mystery. Other paint shops speculate mismatches or claim it was an outdated industrial paint used for sewage plants and water towers. But neighbors and residents of the florescent-green apartment complex have grown accustomed to the anomaly. "I'm getting used to it," laughs tenant Clifford, "but I'm moving out soon anyway." Depending on whom you ask, the 19th and Cherry complex is a headache, a traffic danger from people turning their heads while driving, a real estate dilemma, or a lovely anomaly. Ceci, the grad student, even claims she's starting to like the green color. "I think it's making the neighborhood famous. It's one big performance-art piece," she laughs. "Besides, maybe it will depreciate this neighborhood a little bit. Seattle is getting too tight-ass."
