— छह हज़ार पच्चीस —
This was quite the eventful weekend, mostly because of the event I attended with Shobhit on Saturday night, and I already
posted about separately: the "SIFF Industry Event" we went to at the top of the 440-ft, 41-story Arrivé Apartments. You can read about it a bit in my blog post from yesterday; or you can click through all the photos to read their captions, as I captioned
all 62 shots in the photo album on Flickr as well.
The only other thing I'll mention here, which I did also mention in the few of the captions, is the location of the Arrivé tower, which happens to be on the same block I first lived on in Seattle when I first moved here. This makes four notable buildings (to me personally, anyway) on that one block in Belltown, between Blanchard and Lenora and between 4th and 5th Avenues:
•
Lee Court Apartments, in which I lived on the second floor between 1998 and 2004 (the year Shobhit and I moved in together). Danielle helped me find that studio apartment, for which my starting rent was $695 if I remember right; that web page now says the rent is $1,495 a month for a studio; that's a 215% increase over 28 years—inflation alone would have made that starting rent $1,407 today, so that's actually surprisingly in line. Anyway, I took
two shots from almost directly above Lee Court leaning over the side on the east side of Arrivé's east terrace on the 41st floor. Lee Court is on the northeast corner of the block, right in front of the Monorail track that goes up 5th Avenue. My apartment on the 2nd floor was the second unit back on Blanchard from the 5th Avenue side, which meant I heard the regular passing of the Monorail from there, as well as other passing buses and regular city noises.
•
Cinerama, now (and since late 2023) known as
SIFF Cinema Downtown. Cinerama first opened, on the corner of 4th & Lenora (the southwest corner of the block) where the building still stands today, in 1963; when I first moved to Seattle, and to that block, in 1998, it had been closed shortly before I moved there. Paul Allen had bought it and set about renovating it, however, and it had a Grand Reopening in 1999. The first film I ever saw there was a reissue of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an amazing experience I will never forget. It closed for a fourth renovation in February 2020, bad timing if ever there were any; it was announced to be closed indefinitely as of May 2020 and did not open again until SIFF purchased it (to totally justified excitement and fanfare) in 2023. I still don't see movies there anywhere near as often as I used to, both because of my AMC membership keeping me going to their theaters, and the fact that SIFF Cinema Downtown prices are at a premium higher than even other SIFF theater venues. Anyway, SIFF Cinema Downtown is in two of the shots I took Saturday night:
on the approach to Arrvé from 4th Avenue after Shobhit and I walked there from home; and
from almost directly above while leaning over the south railing of the 41st-floor tooftop terrace.
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The Martin Apartments, a 255-ft, 23-floor residential high-rise on the southeast corner of the block that opened in 2013—nine years after I moved out of Lee Court at the other end of the block on 5th Avenue. 23 floors is pretty short by high-rise standards, but it still qualifies; I have never been in that building, but I never would have imagined any high-rises on that very block during the time I actually lived there. Now the block has two!
• —Which brings us to
Arrivé Apartments, a 440-ft, 41-story residential tower standing in the middle of the west side of the block, on the east side of 4th Avenue and also next door to SIFF Cinema Downtown (which is wedged in the corner between Arrivé to the north and The Martin to the east). This one opened in 2019, and although it's one of
fifteen towers that were built exactly to the neighborhood's height restriction of 440 ft, giving the north end of Downtown Seattle a frustrating lack of variety or even artistry, at least it has a relatively distinct architectural look, especially on its rooftop (though that's harder to notice from the ground). Fifteen such buildings is a solid 27% of Seattle's buildings built higher than 400 ft, and I have long wished that developers would get more creative—but, all they care about is getting more high-rise apartments on the market. Very few of these 440-ft buildings are all that interesting to look at from the outside, but at least Arrivé is a bit more interesting than most.
It certainly had spectacular views, and the way I saw it, this was likely the one opportunity I had to go to the top of that particular building. I wasn't going to miss it.
— छह हज़ार पच्चीस —
— छह हज़ार पच्चीस —
As for the rest of the weekend, the second-most eventual thing to occur was also on Saturday, when I met with Laney for Happy Hour at La Cocina Oaxaqueña. I figured out only later that this was
our 20th time there since we started going to that place 11 years ago, in 2015. These days we go there at least once a year, and sometimes twice. We never get anything besides the "Quesadillas Fritas," one of our all-time favorite meals anywhere in Seattle.
Back in the early days, these were $5 on their Happy Hour menu, as were their Happy Hour House Margaritas. Both of them are now $9, but I won't begrudge them that; Seattle has an unusually high minimum wage which I totally support.
Happy Hour starts there at 3:00 in the afternoon, so I met Laney on Broadway at 2:45. Shobhit thought about joining us but opted for a long walk to make up steps instead. He said he might come by if we were still there after a couple of hours, but Laney and I actually finished after only about ninety minutes.
She and I went nearly a month without hanging out in April: we went to see
The Drama together on April 2, but did not see each other again until we went to Freeway Park for my Birth Week on Friday, May 1. She and Jessica had taken a vacation to visit her sister in Florida in the meantime. After that, though, I saw Laney again the very next day at my 50th Birthday Party in Olympia on Saturday, May 2; then we had our Happy Hour on Saturday the 9th. We're seeing another movie tomorrow night, and after that we're going to go check out the new Barnes & Noble together with coffee / hot chocolate as our "Happy Hour" on Monday the 18th. So we're pivoting back to seeing each other pretty frequently, at least through the summer before she heads back out on the road again. She's going to get busier through this month too, as she packs up her stuff and moves out of her apartment at Pride Place and back into her new van.
— छह हज़ार पच्चीस —
As for the rest of the weekend, it was characterized largely by shopping with Shobhit. I went with him to Lowe's after work on Friday, as he's looking for stackable planters to use on our balcony now that the scaffolding is finally coming down (nearly two years after they first started going up!). We did the same yesterday, when we went to University Village to do some grocery shopping at the QFC there which is so much nicer than the ones on Capitol Hill. He was going to go look at plants at Grocery Outlet afterward, but then he found a place at University Village that sells plant starts and he bought a bunch of them there.
This was all after I took myself to see
Blue Heron in the morning, an unusually early showtime at 10:05 a.m. (There were maybe 10 people in the screening room, the vast majority of them attending solo, just like me.) I didn't connect with it the same way most critics seem to be, but I still liked it okay.
We spent our Sunday evening as we often do, watching HBO shows:
Euphoria;
Rooster (the season finale; bummer, we'll miss that one);
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. And that basically did it for my weekend.
— छह हज़ार पच्चीस —
[posted 12:31pm]
