Metro Pulse/Gamut/Living in the Sterchi

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A first person account of life in Sterchiville

by Jack Mauro

All my life, I've been close to hip without ever actually being in it.

In my blindly eager youth I lived in New York's West Village. That was, and is, a hip neighborhood. But my building was the shame of Bank Street: derelict, scary, and always a few days away from authentic slumhood. So hipness wasn't mine. Then there was Florida. You'd think a state boasting too much sun, college girls going mad annually, and the official Home of the Backstreet Boys would be cool. It isn't, though. No matter how many halter tops flap in the springtime.

I lived in Pittsburgh, too. Pittsburgh is quite an interesting town, with much to recommend it. But it never was and probably never will be hip, or cool.

But now, at last, as the nearing golden haze of my autumn years hits my eyes like squirts of grapefruit, I've arrived. My address is cool, hip, and fashionable. My residence is to Knoxville what the Dakota has for decades been to New York's Upper West Side. It is the Sterchi Lofts. Bow, peasants.

This very newspaper recently profiled the Sterchi and all the many expectations placed upon its concrete and steel shoulders. We are no ordinary edifice. We are hot stuff. Just the other day, a TV team glared gruesome yellow light into the windows of the poor bastard on the second floor at six a.m., as part of their casual interviews with a tenant or two on their way to work. A friendly construction worker—they are still very much here, phantoms in flannel, as lots of work needs doing—told me last week that they were sprucing up for a mayoral visit. The styrofoam padding in the elevators was ripped down so that the mayoral nose not be knocked out of joint by a disregard for mayoral sensibilities. All that's been missing is a crack from a bottle of champagne to the keypad box by the entry. With klieg lights, and Sharon Stone.

One wonders, though, how any single apartment building can live up to the civic burdens placed on the Sterchi. Speaking for myself, I don't think I've got the drive to do my share in all the gorgeous consumerism we tenants are damn near required to manifest. Somehow the notion got around that we Sterchians, urbane and presumably upscale, will in short order spin out a downtown vortex into which new and jazzy restaurants, funky shops, and dry cleaners will be drawn. Our needs must be met, and met within a couple of blocks. I rather feel like I'm supposed to be a member of a benign street gang, prowling the streets in Armani jackets, pushing to the pavement little old ladies in our search for daring theater and really good pesto.

But that is at best idealistic supposition; at worst, fantasy. My lease said nothing about my having to impact on the neighborhood in a smartly bohemian way, and I'm not about to try. I can't even see, with these damn golden years blinding me.

To the meat of the matter, then: What's it like, actually living here? Pretty damn cool.

The seasoned apartment dweller will know whereof I speak, right away. For we know neighbor noise, and we know it well. Reasonable or pricey, modern or antiquated, the apartment building with soundproofed walls and floors is our blue rose; we seek but rarely find. Then too we face the legacy of the used fixture: bathrooms and kitchens of generations long gone are our weary inheritance, and we claim it with sighs and cans of Comet. It doesn't matter how clean the previous tenant and/or management was. You will find a decomposed lemon, somewhere. The Sterchi got my skirt up over my head as soon as Leigh Burch, feisty and congenial proprietor, mentioned the sound engineers brought in for the renovation. Two of 'em, no less. By the time he got to the new porcelain fixtures and the kitchen appliances glistening like peeled eggs in their freshness—my words, not his—he had to direct his remarks to the floor. I had gone fetal in ecstasy.

As of this writing, I've been in for three weeks. My apartment is nearly finished in terms of chairs, tables, and foofery. Incorporating Victoriana and brushed steel, the look is best described as somewhere between Captain Nemo's salon in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and most any room out of the video game Myst. The dimmers are on the lamps and Kroger is in the cupboards. I can spit on the Old City from my windows. It feels like home. We are pleased.

OK. Now for what's strange. Those of you at all familiar with my—ahem—writing know that place has all sorts of power in my psyche. Well, this joint is a buffet feast for such a nature. Not the probably compelling Sterchi past, mind you. Rather, two elements very much of the present.

There is a distinct star chamber aspect to the Sterchi, doubtless born from all the publicity. And it has a singular effect on those of us politely nodding at one another in the elevators or at the mailboxes. That is: I don't think any of us is quite sure which of us holds the celebrity status we all sort of expect from our fellow tenants. There's an unsettling 'Are you somebody?' in the eyes, now and then. Decidedly a Nobody, I nod all the more humbly.

I was in fact told during my initial tour that three UT professors had selected identical units on three successive floors, a verticality which put me in mind of Russian nesting dolls. Whatever my own take, management was evidently pleased with this scholastic coup de hostel. Then I hear the word 'symphony' whispered not long after, in reference to the occupations of other residents. Egad!, I thought. A kind of camera pan over windows revealing violins being played and fat books being devoured passed before my eyes. This is heady company. Better tell Mr. Burch that I write, and keep quiet about the busboy stuff.

Secondly, we have the in utero state of the building itself. I was by no means the groundbreaking tenant. People were moving in as early as the first week of December, and some pioneer souls took temporary lodgings in finished apartments on lower floors till their own, designated flats were completed. Even now the upper floors are in various phases of readiness, paint cans adorn the corners of hallways like planters, and the construction phantoms move about like spirits doomed, not to make good on cruelties performed in life, but to atone for uncaulked pedestal sinks.

Yet we recall that the Sterchi is no run-of-the-mill renovation. The building is intentionally in the style we used to call 'industrial chic', back when the Backstreet Boys were Backstreet Toddlers in unhip Florida and Manhattan's Soho was clearing out the bums. So I wonder if the others here—New York Times critics, Philharmonic conductors and the rest—are as mildly befuddled as I am in regard to just what, exactly, we're waiting to see finished. The exposed pipes and ducts are supposed to be exposed. Right? Yes. The cables on the hall walls snake this way and that in plain view because they're meant to. All of them? Well....probably. And that interesting assortment of small slabs of cement in the wheelbarrow, in the corner? No. Most likely, that is just old-fashioned debris. But we are, most of us, accustomed to finished surfaces. We may have opted for industrial chic in our heads, but our hearts keep waiting for bland, Eisenhower plaster walls over everything. Thusly are we not merely East Tennessee celebrities. We are—or at least I sometimes feel like—a squatter with keys and digital temperature control.

About the Sterchi style: one of the gentlemen wrestling with the seemingly insoluble problem of connecting my cable looked up and around and asked me when they were putting my ceiling on. It's on, I replied. His jaw nearly hit the cement floor my lease prohibits me from painting. "I don't wanna offend you, but it looks like sheeeet," he opined. I considered explaining the aesthetic of factory fixtures as blended with scrolled cast-iron and the odd Bombay piece. Then I thought better of it and wrote out the check.

Ah, but it's still cool, here. Sanding and installations and all sorts of noisy things are being done by the construction ghosts, still. One accepts that. But there's a wistful quality to it, as the hammering I've so far heard resonates from several floors away. Metal striking metal from a distance, I swear, is downright poetical. (I may of course hear it all as less sublime when it nears me, but I don't want to think about that.) Then the silence of late afternoon is strangely broken by the hushed sweeping up of the day's work, a rhythmic and somehow sad whisking in the halls by evening. Odd, too: I went down to check my mail early Friday night; six or seven electric stoves were arranged on the sidewalk and no one seemed to be carting them in or up. Like Santa, the deliverer had sped away. There the stoves stood, like robot topiary in the gentle dusk. Is that hip, or what?

Besides these admittedly unusual attractions, we have new people moving in all the time. I've got ten bucks in the tenants' pool says Sharon Stone will be taking the 12th floor rear loft.