Downtown Digs : The Flats Apartments Are Short on Room, Long on Waiting List

Ramona Cowley wakes most mornings to the gentle murmur of voices and the chink and clink of dishes and flatware being shuffled onto tables in the outdoor cafe below.

The rich aromas of thick, black coffee and spicy Cuban breakfast sausages waft up the 20-foot staircase that leads to her landing.

The fountain in the middle of the traffic circle--where Glassell Street and Chapman Avenue meet--bubbles and gurgles, the sound of the splash of falling water carrying easily into her apartment through huge, double-hung windows.

Cowley lives like few others in Orange County ever have--or ever will: In a real city apartment, in a real downtown.

She sometimes flinches as a horn blows or an impatient motorist races his engine in the circle, or as a metal chair leg scrapes discordantly across the sidewalk below her bedroom window as waiters and waitresses at the Felix Continental Cafe bustle about, readying the outdoor tables for the early trade.

But mostly she just smiles and accepts the noises as just another part of her morning serenade.

The 28-year-old bookkeeper is a resident of the Flats, an unusual apartment community carved out of the top floor of what used to be Ehlen & Grote Company, a general store.

When new in 1904, the half-block-long brick building was turn-of-the-century Orange’s answer to the urban mall. Now it is one of the oldest commercial buildings in the historic Orange Plaza. The ground floor and the copious basements have been given over to some of the city’s mob of antique stores, and upstairs is the Flats.

You may have seen the place from the outside.

The bright orange awnings, dark brown window trim and white-glazed brick facade of the old building’s second floor invariably grab the attention of motorists circumnavigating the circle, shoppers scouring the plaza’s antique stores and diners enjoying the fare and open air at one of the cafes in or near the plaza.

But while many have seen the building, relatively few have seen the surprises within. Those who do usually either love it or hate it, and those who love it often enter their names on the seemingly endless waiting list of people who want an apartment there.

It warrants a look inside--through the South Glassell Street doorway tucked discreetly between two antique shops, up the carpeted stairwell, through the glass security doors equipped with an electronic locking system that provides Flats dwellers--about half of them single women--with what recent arrival Lisa Acuna calls “a really welcome sense of security.”

The system requires visitors to ring the flat of the person they are calling on to be admitted, discouraging both the curious and the larcenous.

At the top of the stairs, about 20 feet above street level, is the first surprise.

Instead of a labyrinth of dark hallways pocked with faceless doors, there’s a 1,200-square-foot lobby, softly lit during the day by two huge, old-fashioned glass skylights. It is comfortably furnished with sofas, chairs, end tables, an antique drugstore scale and a family-size, round oak dining room table.

The nine apartments have 8-foot-tall windows that face onto Glassell Street and open onto the lobby, as do several of the interior bachelor units. Each door is topped by a transom and has a window of bubbled, hand-poured glass in the top half--a hangover from the days when the apartments were offices and the names of the doctors, dentists and accountants who occupied them were painstakingly lettered in gold leaf on the glass panes.

Apartment numbers are painted on the walls in an orange and cream graphics scheme that reflects the early 1970s, when the Flats opened for business.

Unit 15 is Ann Fox’s. Unit 6 is David Parnell’s.

They are typical residents. And that makes them examples of another of the Flats’ surprises. It is not just a bunch of apartments, it really is a community.

Fox is a widow who admits to being “late 50-ish”; Parnell is in his early 30s and single. Her place is done in antiques, his in plywood. His hair is longer than hers.

She was the banquet coordinator at the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant in Studio City until three years ago. Now, to keep busy, she works at a local antique store about a three-minute walk from her door.

He is a professional window washer.

They couldn’t be more different, but both consider themselves part of a family.

“When you first see this place, you think how neat it is and how it would be great to live in such an unusual place,” Parnell said. “Then you see how all the neighbors up here interact, and that makes you love it.”

In a typical apartment complex, friendships among residents, if they form at all, center on the pool or the recreation room and often are left there. People move in and live for a while and move out and no one misses them.

At the Flats, it is not like that.

The units are small, the place is self-contained, and, except for a 900-square-foot deck, it is all indoors.

“It’s almost like we all live in one big old house,” Parnell said. “The difference is that we all have our own rooms we can go to when we want privacy.”

For Fox, privacy is important. She doesn’t often participate in the almost communal atmosphere--shared dinners at the oak table in the lobby, open doors and a lot of cross-hallway visiting is common. But she is one of the gang, quick to share a fresh-baked cherry pie or to whip up hors d’oeuvres for the annual Christmas party.

“I love it here,” she said. “It’s comfortable, it’s warm. It’s cozy. I’ve had a lot of big, beautiful homes, but with my husband gone and my sons grown, I wouldn’t want to go back to any of them. I’m here to stay.”

Other residents sing the same song.

But that’s not really surprising, said Charles Ebert, who with partner Bob Smith bought the old Ehlen and Grote building in 1972 and created the Flats. “You have to get along if you want to stay. It’s too small for anything else.”

And that’s another surprise.

While the building evokes images of spacious Victorian apartments, units at the Flats are tiny.

Each of the 18 bachelor apartments contains one combination kitchen, dining area, living room and bedroom, a postage-stamp bathroom and an even smaller closet, all crammed into about 160 square feet. The dozen “big” units are two-room apartments of about 360 square feet.

One saving feature--the units all have 10-foot ceilings, which open them up considerably and make them feel much larger than they are.

Another is that rents are, by Orange County standards, more than reasonable. They range from $350 a month for a bachelor unit to $505 for Cowley’s “penthouse”--so called because it is the only one of the flats with three windows and has a fabulous view of the plaza and the park in the middle of the traffic circle.

Fox lives in one of the two-room apartments and swears that it is not confining.

For overnight company, she keeps a spare mattress under her quilt-bedecked double bed. A small drop-leaf table at the windows overlooking the shops on Glassell Street can be expanded to seat six.

“I often have four or five people up for cocktails,” she said, “and I’ve had as many as 10 for dinner. It’s cozy, but it’s comfortable.”

A long board laid across the sink and kitchen counter area converts that section of wall into a bar or a sideboard for serving dishes. The fact the everyone congregates in two small rooms has never been a problem, she said. And when she’s not entertaining, it’s just the right size.

Over at Parnell’s bachelor flat, the small size is more apparent. But he has a window that looks out on the sun deck--a fact he appreciates quite a bit in warm weather--and he’s right on the way to the mezzanine-level recreation room. He keeps his door ajar a lot and says it feels more open and spacious that way.

Like everyone else, Parnell has access to a ground-level storage area and to a locked bicycle room. He can rent parking from the city--which charges $10 a month for a permit to use the open city lot behind the building--or from the nearby Satellite food market, which charges $5 a month but doesn’t guarantee a spot during the annual Orange International Street Fair over Labor Day weekend.

To make best use of the limited area in his apartment, Parnell built a platform bed, and he sleeps about 7 feet off the floor. A desk and table occupy the space beneath and a small “loft” area above the kitchen area serves as a storage space for camping and sports gear.

As in all the other units, even the penthouse, the kitchen is really a kitchenette. But it is equipped with a small, apartment-size stove with a four-burner range and has a refrigerator. Parnell, Fox and other residents say they have no problems cooking for themselves or for a gang.

A drugstore, liquor store, dry cleaner, market, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, restaurants, parks, churches, clothing stores and more all are within walking distance of the apartments.

Despite the small size of the apartments, the lack of many modern “conveniences” and the fact that the owners have never advertised a single apartment for rent, there has never been a vacancy in the 19 years since the Flats opened.

And at the current turnover rate, the last person on the 125-name waiting list in resident manager Chris Mackel’s care finally will get a call sometime around the end of the decade.

If that person takes the apartment, odds are it will be one of the least desirable flats, one of the windowless bachelor units in the interior of the building that current residents refer to as the holding cells.

And the lucky soul will be thankful . . . and will immediately put his or her name on the list for the next available two-room unit.

After all, “where else can you get all this,” muses resident Martha Winslow, who moved to the Flats because it reminded her of the Greenwich Village walk-up she lived in as a young girl in the early 1950s.

“And the people here are real, not like all those plastic yuppies at the beach,” she declared.

But most of all, Winslow said, there’s atmosphere.

“When I walk down that staircase and out into the plaza and see the fountain and the people sitting at tables having coffee, I keep expecting to see Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron come waltzing up to me. You can’t get that in most apartments.”