Centennial Tower
Seattle, Washington
An Editorial
This site details our experiences with Centennial Tower Apartment Building, located at
2515
4th Avenue
Seattle, Washington
98121
The building is presently managed by:
APEX Realty Management, Inc.
4020 Lake Washington Blvd NE
Kirkland, WA 98033
This site contains and includes our opinions.
Purpose of this site:
There are few issues more central to the human experience than the concept of HOME.
Psychologists tell us that humans have certain needs. At the top of the list are these two: To survive and to procreate. In order to accomplish either, a stable, safe and livable home is of the greatest importance. When all the world is out to get us, where's the one place on Earth we can retreat to, to seek comfort, safety, rest and peace? Home. Indeed, there's no place like Home. International wars have been waged, won, and lost over the concepts of "home". Millions have sacrificed their lives to protect their home. Untold hundreds of thousands have gone to jail or are in prison currently because they violated the sanctity of home. Tens of thousands have been killed, rightly and legally so, by a homeowner defending his home.
The concept of home is intensely emotional. A person's home is of the utmost, the utmost importance to the very survival of that person, and there's not a government, society or people in the world which doesn't recognize that fact.
Much of the population of the United States lives in apartments. Unfortunately, the very concept of the apartment experience means that the resident is more or less at the mercy of the good will of (a) his/her neighbor, and (b) his/her landlord. When good neighbors go bad, there is often some recourse. You can call the building manager; you can call the police; you can call building security (if available). These remedies may or may not work to restore the peace, safety and sanctity of your home, but at least you can try them and see. This leaves the resident feeling as though there is at least a chance that his problem will get solved, and that the security, livability and value of his apartment home may be kept intact. The sanctity of one's home, regardless of its arrangement, location or construct, is of paramount importance. Few apartment managers even begin to understand the trust which is placed in them when they contract to provide space in which someone will make their home. Managers handle the responsibility with varying degrees of success. Some managers don't handle the responsibility at all. And some managers are such a clear and blatant detriment to the well-being of their apartment community that they should be evicted themselves.
This site endeavors to help the millions of apartment dwellers avoid problems in the communities in which their apartment-homes are located, and to understand what kinds of problems can occur when bad managers are in control.
Carl Carilao; Doorman (aka Quickdraw)
This website contains and includes our
opinions
APEX Realty Management, Inc.
4020 Lake Washington Blvd NE
Kirkland, WA 98033
On 2-2-04 we placed a notice on the bulletin board [in the lobby of Centennial Tower] showing the url of our website which describes our experiences with Apex Realty (see above).
That notice was removed early in the day [by an unknown party], so we posted another. That was also removed within minutes. In fact, this was repeated six times on 2-2-04. Since this is illegal (see the website for details), and since management had been warned by our attorney that this was illegal, we naturally wanted to know who was doing it.
A building employee hinted that we should look in the direction of the doorman, Carl Carilao. On 2-3-04, to firm up our suspicions, we approached Carl and handed him a copy of our new notice which offers a $500 reward for the conviction of the person responsible. I approached it as if Carl might like to make $500 for catching the evil-doer.
Carl instantly turned white at the sight of the reward, and turned away, [and] would not speak. This isn't proof. But it's an indicator, to be taken into consideration with other indicators. If we can document this activity on video tape we will post the file on the Internet. Please understand that Carl, as an employee of Apex Realty, is also a representative of that company, and to an extent, Apex is liable for his actions [crimes] and mistakes.
We're going to bring you up to speed with regard to this man:
(1) Carl knocked on our door about three weeks ago and wanted to know if he could use our computer. We have been polite to Carl over the years, even when it made our ears bleed to do so. Apparently he mistook that show of simple manners for friendship. We are sorry we gave him that impression. I asked what was wrong with the computers in the office, and he replied that he didn't want "those busy-bodies" to see what he was doing. He said that every time he used a computer in the office, the girls were always trying to see what he was doing. I regret that my sense of manners got the better of me and, finding no good excuse to refuse him, I let him in. I closed out the programs I was running and let him have at it. He pecked away for perhaps ten minutes, thanked me, and left. His actual movements on this computer are recorded, and can be brought up and printed out if need be. I don't believe he was doing anything we should be concerned with. The bottom line is that while we are polite to a fault with everyone who is polite to us, we are not this man's friend and never have been. He is not an individual we would invite into our home. His request and his visit were intrusive and made us uncomfortable. He did ask as he was leaving if what he had done was "okay". We said yes---but also vowed to be quicker on our feet next time to keep it from happening again.
(2) Carl makes derogatory remarks about Correna. While we feel and believe she is of the poorest possible quality as a human being, it is not Carl's place to call her names. If he wants to provide us with some piece of information that will further our cause, he would have been welcome to do so, in a calm, polite, businesslike manner. It does no one any good, however, to call the woman "Queen Bitch" in front of the tenants, and to rant that he doesn't think he can continue to work for "that [$%#@%] woman". No matter how ugly our battle with management becomes---and trust us, it's just beginning---it is still inappropriate for Carl to do this. We don't know if Carl will admit this. If not, there's one sure way to get to the bottom of it: Polygraph, polygraph, polygraph. How we love those machines! It's a virtual certainty that we'll end up taking one and posting it publicly. You may wish to advise Carl to think and answer carefully before denying the above.
(3) This issue with Carl is the one that offends us the most. Since Carl has been employed here he has made it a point to try to take us aside (we call it ambushing) to tell us stories of his prowess in one field or another, imagined or real. We've been inundated with stories of his heroism as a sea captain, how his crew loved him, how he makes $10,000 a day at sea, and on and on and on ad nauseam. We don't know if the stories are true and we don't care. I was a sea captain, and Carl's tales never had the ring of truth to me. But who cares. This is a lonely doorman who's barely five feet tall who's trying in the only way he knows to forge a connection with someone. We understand that. We're sorry we cannot reciprocate. Our gripe is that many of his stories describe his alleged prowess with guns. Carl has told me more times than I can count the story of how someone tapped him on the shoulder while he was rapid-firing some exotic gun or other on the firing range. The story changes from time to time, but the gist of it is that Carl feels this behavior (assuming it even happened or that Carl has ever been to a shooting range) was tantamount to a challenge, and so he was justified in spinning around and drawing down on the poor guy. The inflection is always that Carl is such a high-strung killing machine (a la Barney Fife) that to touch or otherwise interrupt him while he's firing is to invite instant death (why, his reflexes are so finely honed that he may kill you before he even knew he did it). Sometimes the story has him drawing down with the pistol he was shooting with, sometimes the story is that he reached into his "briefcase" and quick-as-a-rabbit jerked out some other Clint Eastwood type piece and drew down with that. Other stories portray him pulling guns on other people for reasons that make sense only to him (at least not to us). We've listened politely, blood pouring from our ears, for years to these stories. But we can't take any more. We don't want to hear one more story about Carl's gunplay. And yes, as always, we'd be more than happy to take a polygraph. Please.
(4) On 2-3-04, after we handed Carl our "$500 Reward" flyer, we hung back by the mailboxes. After about 15 seconds, apparently when Carl thought we had gone, he made a derogatory remark about us under his breath to another tenant who was sitting at the adjacent table [a veritable fixture there], and gestured with his hand. The other tenant laughed and laughed. Once again, this is bottom-of-the-sludge-barrel behavior we will not tolerate. Period. This is unprofessionalism (look it up in Websters) in the extreme, and smacks of a hillbilly mentality that seems to permeate this management company.
(5) We're also tired of Carl's constant racial slurs about poor old James, the other doorman; and Carl's references to how many unwelcome advances from the building's ladies that he must dissuade.
In our opinion Carl is a man who plays both ends against the middle. He is so desperate for recognition that he will suck up to anyone and everyone, hoping for a pet or a scratch from either side. We've indulged him because we were polite. Because of our treatment by this management company we're not nearly so polite these days, and it will stop now.
2-4-04
CC: Puckett & Redford, 900 Fourth Ave. #1400, Seattle, Wa., 98164; Internet posting
We know for a fact that Carilao had been "helping" to sort the mail (your mail) in Centennial Tower for a number of years. Every time we saw him doing it he seemed particularly gleeful. We felt that he did this in order to gain knowledge about the private issues of tenants, which he could then use as gossip-fodder with the staff. For reasons we won't go into here, we got tired of it and stopped it as follows. Either Correna wasn't even aware of it, or was possibly allowing it to recur (as a means of getting her own intel about tenants?); either scenario speaks volumes for her incompetence. We do not believe Correna didn't know about it. One would have had to have been blind, deaf and dumb not to have known. Oops---
Postmaster
Seattle, Wa. 98111
We live in a unit at 2515 4th Ave. in downtown Seattle. As you know this building has experienced copious amounts of mail theft over the years. It is our understanding that no one except a USPS employee may handle, sort or deliver mail.
We need to bring to your attention that one of our doormen, Carl Carilao, routinely assists the mail carriers in handling, sorting and inserting US mail into the tenants’ mail boxes. We have seen him do it on numerous occasions, and he has referred to it on numerous occasions.
We have no reason to believe Carl is responsible for any mail theft. However, in the spirit of trying to minimize any possibility of mail theft, and in the spirit of minimizing delivery mistakes, we do not believe it is ethical or legal to allow non-Postal personnel to handle our mail in any way. In fact, we see no reason why this doorman need be in the building’s mail room at all when mail is being sorted and inserted. We realize that this doorman is close friends with one of the male carriers, but, we still do not believe that’s an excuse. Besides, our doorman should be tending the door.
2-5-04
