No. 723 – Head Down

Performer: Soundgarden

Songwriter: Ben Shepherd

Original Release: Superunknown

Year: 1994

Definitive Version: None

After the tumultuous Memorial Day weekend, I stayed in Columbus while Scott and his crew headed back to Muncie. That was for a practical reason as well as to catch up on a little rest. (Not quite 30, I was already feeling the effects of seeing Pink Floyd twice, the Indians once and the Indy 500 in the span of four days.)

Now that I was officially between jobs, I had to find an apartment in town. After I accomplished that, I would head back to Grand Blanc with Laura’s minivan to load up everything and move home.

When I decided to take the job at The Dispatch, there was no question about where I would live—German Village. After living on the cheap since I got out of college—and really not exactly living it up then—I was now making enough to get a decent apartment. Actually, I had been making enough at the Journal to have done the same while there, but I didn’t see the point in moving to a more upscale apartment if I were going to leave soon.

When I was a kid, German Village was kind of a dumpy neighborhood. Schmidt’s was there and a couple of other places, but the small, old brick houses were run down and it was kind of a bad neighborhood. Really, after you got south of I-70/71, which splits German Village off from downtown, it got a bit sketchy.

Then in the 80s, German Village underwent a massive renaissance. It became home to a huge gay community who went about rehabbing the entire neighborhood. I remember that a lot of gay jokes circulated about German Village during my college days, and even when I moved home, it still was a bit of an eye-opener if you said you wanted to live there.

But I was actually at the forefront of the next wave. Now that the gays had fixed up the place—and seen their property values increase nearly tenfold—they sold out and moved on to the Short North, and wealthy Yuppie couples moved in.

To me German Village represented opportunity. I would be living in a decent neighborhood about as close as you could get to downtown while not being surrounded by skyscrapers and parking lots. Bars and restaurants were all over the place. Part of the reason for wanting to move from Flint to a big city was to give myself a larger pool of high-quality female talent. Being in German Village would put me in the midst of that.

So, like I said, there was no question as to where I was going to live, in general. I just had to find the right place. I circled a bunch of addresses in the newspaper want ads and called to make a few appointments. Then after I got down there, I’d also just knock around a bit and see if anything else turned up.

I don’t remember much about the first place I looked, but it probably was a bit small and didn’t have much closet space, which can be an issue in German Village. But it was close to where I had lunch—a place called Lindey’s that I later found out was one of the best restaurants in the city at the time. (It’s still around; in fact, the family that started it owns the Bravo/Brio chain of Italian restaurants, if you happen to have one of those where you live.)

I can’t recall what I had, but I remember it was good. I also felt that this was a step up from my usual lunch fare of Subway. I could handle that. If I weren’t already committed to being in German Village, this would have sealed the deal. They have this good of a restaurant here? Where do I sign up?

Lindey’s, which I picked entirely due to its location relative to my apartment hunt, was just a few blocks from the next place on my list. It was for a two-bedroom townhouse with a brick fireplace on Frankfort Street.

And we’ll pick up the story there at another time.