The Strangest Place I Ever Lived in Seattle

If you’re like me, you’ve imagined Seattle’s future as one giant homogeneous apartment complex. The Showbox is long gone. All those quirky little neighborhood homes—they’re gone too, as is that rickety old powder-blue rooming house dubbed the Monarch, where I used to live in a subterranean room underneath the building’s stoop. Inside my place, the floor was one part blue wood, one part chipped checkered tile. It gave off a moldy odor in the summer and every time someone in the building flushed, I heard it. I lived there for five years, from about 2010 to 2015. The rent was low (about $450 a month; it’s much more than that now), and many of the Monarch’s spaces were filled with artists, writers and musicians looking for a cheap place to stay in the city; we’d often drink on the stoop until 3 am and smoke cigarettes in the same spot when we woke up in the morning.