We lived there in the early to mid 1990s (in the apartment just below the second row of bays on the front of the building). Drunken partiers would stop beneath our window on weekend nights after closing time to have arguments.
When we moved in, the building across the street that now houses the City Market was a closed storefront that had sold artificial limbs. Mayor Vera Katz lived across the street from us in a Victorian house. Music Millennium and Quality Pie were still on 23rd. Durst's Thriftway (now a Trader Joe's) and the Stadium Fred Meyer were our primary grocery stores, but that did not rule out visits to the Northrup Food Center, ran by an elderly couple who smoked at the cash register all hours of the day under flickering florescent lights. The building that houses Wildwood was an office that had a giant philodendron plant which wrapped around the entire inside of the building. After it closed, the plant was there for years, brooding in silence like something out of Little Shop of Horrors.
One morning we woke to our bed moving back and forth, like we were eggs sliding in a frying pan, to the sound of a mountain of bricks grinding up against each other. When the "Spring Break Quake" finally ended, we joined the rest of our semi-clad neighbors standing at the window, wide eyed, as hundreds of car alarms blared from every direction.
We moved just before the American was converted to condos. The fact that we no longer lived in the McMenamins triangle (bounded by the Mission Theater, the Blue Moon and the Pub and Pool) was alone enough to allow us to make our first house payments.
