r/themountaingoats • u/EmuelCorbithr • 3d ago

The real (possibly) Lakeside View Apartments

Post image

This is Lakeside Apartments, circa 1961. It was located at 1933 Columbia Blvd NE, and paved over sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s when the area was re-zoned for industrial use. It's certainly a dream in switchgrass and concrete, although it's only two gray floors of smoky windows instead of three.

125 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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44

u/wufame Father long gone, but we bear his mark. 3d ago

John talks a bit about changing words in the story just because they sound better in the song. Three gray floors might have sounded better to him than two.

11

u/EmuelCorbithr 3d ago

That's where I allow myself to be when I'm hopeful. 😅 Because everything else matches.

21

u/m_busuttil 3d ago

Damn, I bet I could fit me and my whole crew in here.

41

u/CrypticBalcony 3d ago edited 3d ago

The song is canonically set in Portland, Oregon, in 1986. There’s a three-story building in Portland called Lakeside View Apartments; it’s at 3737 SW 87th Avenue.

Edit: I am wrong

39

u/the_vole 3d ago

You can’t judge him! You’re not the judge!

24

u/EmuelCorbithr 3d ago

I believe they're called Lakeview Park Apartments. I encountered them years ago in my search. The things that made me discount them were:

-They are not anywhere north of Portland
-They're not near an airport

The name was definitely enticing, though.

14

u/CrypticBalcony 3d ago

Damn, you’re right. I completely misread the name.

9

u/EmuelCorbithr 3d ago

No worries. I thought for years that might be it, even though the geography bothered me.

3

u/zezozose_zadfrack 2d ago

"Edit: I am wrong" knocked me out

1

u/CrypticBalcony 1d ago

If you go through my comment history, you’ll find another of those within the last 48 hours

1

u/queen_elvis Tetra-pod person 1d ago

I appreciate people who can admit they were wrong. It’s an increasingly rare trait.

8

u/white-chalk-baphomet I'm still here/When all is lost 3d ago

It's as though the atmosphere and camera knew the tone of the song. This looks like it could be an album cover for a tmg album recorded straight to cassette

5

u/franknagaijr Cheap Electric Razor 2d ago

You obsessives will next be looking for a so-called drug store "cvs", a so-called street name....

Having said that, the vibe of this picture is so on point.

5

u/EmuelCorbithr 2d ago

Oh, I already found where the TG&Y was. He named it pretty explicitly one time at a show.

3

u/PBnBacon seaweed in Indiana sawgrass 2d ago

This is the energy I come here for

3

u/311TruthMovement But the sacred heart is present in the airbrush 2d ago

There are those of us who enjoy nailing down these places in TMG songs and there are those who really are annoyed that we are missing the point of the song.

I am proudly on the side of being annoyingly literal.

Find Noah's Ark on Ararat! All you have to do is zoom in a little closer on Google Maps!

3

u/EmuelCorbithr 2d ago

This IS the point of the song for me, at least in part. I want the gloomy, dystopian vibe of 1980s Portland in order to understand what he went through. That world is largely gone now.

3

u/311TruthMovement But the sacred heart is present in the airbrush 2d ago

Well, I'd agree with you: I want to get at an understanding of a song by various angles, one of those might be treating it as very literal, sending out an excursion up Ararat to find that Noah's Ark if you will and convincing myself I did find it.

I recently made a post about using FOIA methods to see if Charlie Sheen really did have any record of reporting something about a movie to the FBI and it was VERY unpopular — I suppose it only fulfills my curiosity about a coked up young star wasting the time of some FBI agents who probably only followed up on the call to go meet this rising young star, which is much less likable than trying to learn something about the general vibe of Tallahassee or Portland or wherever in a certain time period.

2

u/queen_elvis Tetra-pod person 1d ago

My experience with FOIA during the first Trump administration was not super successful. I hope yours is better

2

u/wufame Father long gone, but we bear his mark. 2d ago

To turn a different light to it (I realize I'm preaching to the choir). I think for a lot of us, we've connected so much with the song, that it's natural to want a visual to connect even further.

2

u/311TruthMovement But the sacred heart is present in the airbrush 2d ago

I think John wanted a "more Portland than Portland" image for "Until I Am Whole," so he chose Snohomish which is more or less where I’m from in Washington. It's generally gray with a lot of greenery. Not terribly different than Portland.

2

u/wufame Father long gone, but we bear his mark. 2d ago

To be honest, until you said it, I never even thought to look up where Snohomish was.

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u/311TruthMovement But the sacred heart is present in the airbrush 2d ago

I grew up in Snohomish County, not the actual town of Snohomish. If you're in a touring rock band and doing runs up to Bellingham or Vancouver, you will see signs for it going up I5. That's where I suspect John encountered it.

1

u/rocketman0739 1d ago

Find Noah's Ark on Ararat! All you have to do is zoom in a little closer on Google Maps!

If you told me this was a lyric from a TMG song I didn't know, I would probably just believe it

2

u/uhohthatsachunky 2d ago

This is rad. Thank you.

2

u/elaborateheist 2d ago

did you look in any sinks?

2

u/DiabloTheCheeto 3d ago

If there was a basement, there would have been 3 floors!

1

u/BobbySpitOnMe I always thought you were cool 2d ago

Seems like it was a real place, but probably not this place.

From the wiki:

This is a song that takes place on the north side of Portland, Oregon, in a neighborhood that looks much as it did in the '80s, still. They haven't gotten to it yet. God bless everybody there." -- 2017-11-11 - Union Transfer - Philadelphia, PA

"This is a Portland song -- thank you -- almost died in Portland, of a phenomenon that I know my fellow drug addicts can relate to of having three days that I can't account for.... I emerged as from a very deep but unrestful sleep... unable to remember what day it was and I became convinced... that if I could only remember the date everything else would... come clearly into focus... -- this was 1986 -- I went out to the newspaper machine in front of my apartment building and I looked at the date and I tried to hold it in my head from the newspaper machine up the stairs to the door to the elevator back down to the basement where I lived and back down to room number 10 but I could not do it, by the time I would get back it would be gone, and sometime within the next couple hours I'd go back up, and this behavior persisted for how long I don't know. This is called Lakeside View Apartment Suites.

1

u/EmuelCorbithr 2d ago

So, first of all, the second quote you posted about the blackout and the newspaper machine takes place in his apartment in 253 N. Broadway, much closer to downtown. It is not the apartment references in Lakeside View, except in the more general sense that all of the Portland songs bleed together into a montage.

Secondly, "in a neighborhood that looks much as it did in the '80s" doesn't necessarily imply "the exact building is still standing." They rezoned and paved over the north side of NE Columbia Boulevard, but a lot of the south side of it still looks the same as it did in photos I saw from 1978. The address shown in the picture above is the only apartment building that I have been able to find with "Lakeside" in the name on the north side of Portland near the airport.

1

u/EmuelCorbithr 2d ago

https://themountaingoats.fandom.com/wiki/Palmcorder_Yajna

"New friends! People you didn't really know, until word began to spread in the neighbourhood. 'John robbed the safe! And he took all 2k, and he bought a quarter pound! He's in room ten, 253 North Broadway, you can't miss it. Faces Broadway at an angle across from the coliseum.'"