Workers pulled heavy chains around the façade of a massive three-story building. Sweat stained their colorless shirts and dampened their ill-fitting overalls. Shapeless felt hats obscured men’s crevassed faces that resembled characters from the Great Depression-era photographs. They used carabineers to clip the chain links to worn-out horse harnesses. Their horses, both tired and underfed, pounded their hoofs steadily against the cobblestone.

Earlier in the day, the same workers dismantled the white Corinthian columns from the building’s front entrance and removed the streetcar wires to clear the way for the transfer of the structure three blocks north. Finally, when all preparations were complete, a foreman gave a signal to his men. They grabbed the bridles and began to pull. Horses strained and moved the building off its foundation with a deafening screech and bursts of broken plumbing. Gaining momentum slowly the beasts dragged the massive wooden frame across the University District light rail tracks and up University Way…

* * *

“How did you say they moved this thing?” asks Caleb, looking up from a sidewalk to the Monarch Apartments building. It seems even taller from its current elevated foundation on Brooklyn Avenue. Constructed for an esteemed fraternity sometime around 1904, the building still greets its visitors with a weathered refinement of its original front entrance: those Corinthian columns. Though their pure whiteness has long turned grey from dirt and their size cut nearly in half during the move.  Over the years I have noticed the many glances of wondering passers-by trying to guess the purpose of our building. At the moment it contains 15 awkwardly-constructed units – bathroomless studios and one-bedroom apartments outfitted with rattling refrigerators and cranky tenants.

“I have no idea,” I say staring up at the facade. “I am not even sure when they moved this thing. Or why.”

We look at the building a while longer – at its irregular window patterns, crooked rotten stairs and peeled paint on the window frames. I spent the last five years of my life dwelling in the dark cave of apartment #5. Caleb moved into #C two years ago and then abandoned it for #A, where he plays his guitar, reads dog-eared poetry books and accumulates photobooth self-portraits taken at a college bar across the street.

We both suffer from sentimental bouts of affection toward our creaky old home. It is partly because of this tender sense of unofficial fraternity we became inspired to put together the Monarch Review last September.

“Did you find out why they call it the Monarch Apartments?” Caleb asks. It has been my assignment to write up a historic preface about the building, a preface that is still in the works five months after the publication was launched.

“No,” I say keeping my theory to myself – in the past others found ridiculous my idea that the name is inspired by the pattern of the façade windows. Although if you stretch your imagination just a little bit, you will see what I mean – the first floor windows are the wing tails, two top side windows mark the tips of forewings and the core makes up the thorax and the abdomen.  Those others replied by saying “if you stretch your imagination just a little bit harder it will turn the big blue box of our apartments into St. Basil’s Cathedral.” I don’t listen to them.

“Darcie didn’t tell you?” Caleb asks.

“Nope.”

“Well, then what the hell did you talk to her about?”

* * *

Darcie Richardson, the building’s owner, did not know the origin of the name “Monarch Apartments”.  She inherited the building from her father, Dio Richardson, and then shortly moved to California, where I reached her over the phone.

Darcie took over Dio’s responsibility after his age prevented him from carrying on with small repairs and other tasks necessary for the apartment building landlord. A few Monarch tenants, who have managed to remain in the building over the past 20 years, still remember Dio with reverence. They say that he would have known the answer to the question of the building’s history. But he is dead. He died a few years ago after spending his life maintaining several rental properties around Seattle. One of his former tenants, Andrew Binion, refers to Dio as the last of Seattle’s extinct breed of self-styled landlords, who steered the fleet of their apartment buildings through the good and the hard times of Seattle’s tumultuous history. The Monarch was his flagship.

“My dad put a lot of time into that building,” Darcie told me.

Indeed, Dio himself came from a line of Seattle real estate developers. His mother, Dorothy Richardson, moved to Seattle in the very early 1900s and began buying up property scheduled for demolition to make way for the growing city infrastructure. Men referred to Dorothy as “crazy smart”. After the Beta Kappa fraternity moved out of the building for a larger, newer facility several blocks away, Dorothy acquired the building and moved it several blocks north.

I asked Darcie about how they moved it, but she was unsure. “My father remembered it being moved,” she said. “At first it became a boarding house, and then it turned into an apartment complex. The property has been with my father for the past 45 years and he wanted to gear it towards students, though not officially.”

When Darcie was six years old in the 1960s, she remembers visiting the Monarch.

“There were a lot of cats in the building, lots of rainbows on the walls. It was very colorful and very derelict at the time. I really remember that as a kid. I think it may have been turned into a flophouse in a way. It was a real maze.  The building is still a maze. There have been so many people that have come through the doors and so many interesting things have happened there. So many people tried to make changes to the building – from subtle changes to painting walls in very bright colors. A long time ago, during the depression, my grandmother had someone living in the basement because there was no place else to live. “

* * *

As I describe my conversation with Darcie to Caleb, the building’s front door opens. Between the two Corinthian columns appears Steve Cox, one of the Monarch’s longest residents, followed by a shivering Chihuahua.

“Did you see what they did to my truck?” Steve yells, pointing to his pick-up with a flat tire. “God, people are such assholes!”

He grumbles some more about the University Way hooligans who tag buildings and slash tires in the alley behind the Monarch. Then he runs out of steam ranting and asks down at us, “Why are you guys standing here on the sidewalk anyway?”

“We are trying to figure how they moved this building,” Caleb says. “Nick here thinks they used chains and horses to drag it up the street.”

Steve smirks and looks at me through his John Lennon-styled glasses. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he says and chuckles. “They had cranes in the ‘20s, you know. They hooked this building with a crane, put it on a platform and moved it up here.”

Steve walks down the steps, which creak and bang, looks once more at the slashed tire of his nearly-dumpable pick-up truck and shakes his head: “Sometimes I don’t know why I stuck around here as long as I have.” He looks back at us and smiles.

Welcome to the Monarch and The Monarch Review.