Space Ninja

You might find yourself in the concrete-walled, graffiti-scarred staircases of Neuberger Hall. Or contemplating the grimy facade of the Ondine residential hall, a grim stack of studio apartments one campus critic characterizes as “straight out of Moscow 1956.” Portland cops have logged nearly 60 calls to the Ondine since New Year’s Day 2003, for everything from disorderly conduct to rape.

– Willamette Week Online | News | COVER STORY | PSU’s New Look

Whoo! I used to live there! Go Ondine! What they don’t mention is that Ondine catches fire roughly once a week. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or intentional, but there’s actually a fire department on the back side of the same block, so all they have to do is drive around the block.

I wish I had taken more photos of the apartment when I lived there, sharing a tiny studio apartment with Aaron… It measured 20 feet by 11 feet. It was incredible. We re-organized the furniture about once a term in a vain attempt to gain a foot or two of floorspace, or increase privacy. The cinderblock walls kept the place from getting too hot in the summer, but we never needed to turn on the heat in the winter, because our two computer monitors heated the entire room perfectly well.

The windows didn’t open all the way (popular opinion was to prevent suicides), but at one point, we strung an ethernet cable out our eighth-floor window down to a friend a few floors below to play multiplayer games, such as GTA (the original one).

We shared a kitchen (more of a galley, really) and a bathroom with our “suitemate” Ralph, who was from California, and wore a jacket anytime the temperature dropped below 70. Because the bathroom was shared, you had to walk in and lock both doors, to prevent people in the other apartment from walking in on you. Sometimes you or your suitemate would forget to unlock the other door, but it was never really a problem, because you could unlock from the outside it with a screwdriver.

We climbed up on the roof, once, to watch some fireworks (must have been for the fourth of July)… we went out onto the fire escape on the eighth floor, and climbed up to the roof on the fire escape ladder - seven floors. The climb up was fun, but the climb down was a bit freaky, especially when we found we were locked out of our floor’s fire escape. Lucky for us, a nice smoker let us into the ninth floor fire escape, so we didn’t have to climb all the way down to the ground.

Ah, in a freaky way, I miss Ondine tower. Not that I would live there again, or even go back to visit.