I've heard a lot of stories about the history of our building. I've heard it was a hat factory, a firehouse (the downstairs neighbors have shower stalls and barracks style bathrooms), and one neighbor tells me about a man he knew who built his own plane in it, assembled it at the airport, and invited the neighborhood to come watch him fly it.
I eventually found out that it originally used to be a munitions depot. It was built by the government to house the munitions in the back warehouse (now the AK Press building) with the offices and barracks in the front warehouse. Ours!
This morning I was drinking my coffee thinking about what parts of our space might be originally from that period, figuring the support beams were for sure. I was wondering about the visible layers of paint on one of them, and that's when on an exposed piece of the wood under all the paint I saw something was written in a simple but classy hand: Goner.
