Wining and Buying

There are several ways to get a free glass of wine in this city. You can attend one of the various “ladies nights” and be ogled by drunkards like a monkey in a zoo, or you can drop by a newly completed condominium project for its opening reception. One pleasant Saturday afternoon, in search of gratis Shiraz, my girlfriend Mary and I got dressed up, slipped on heels, and motored downtown to Minneapolis’ historic Whitney Hotel, where there was a reception to show off the building’s new loft conversions. Sure, I’d been toying with the idea of upgrading from the condo I currently own, but the Whitney, at $450 per square foot, wasn’t remotely within the realm of possibility, so long as I wanted my new home to measure more than, say, 250 square feet. I had been promised “real-estate porn,” however, and that is something I quite like.

We parked a half-block away, in the self-serve Portland Parking Ramp (later responsible for eating Mary’s last twenty-spot). As we approached the front entrance we were greeted by a half-dozen flannel- and denim-clad gentlemen who handed out fliers alleging that some laborers on the Whitney project had been overworked and underpaid. Their small protest was timed to coincide with the upper-crust showing I was about to crash.

Once inside the hotel, now called the Whitney Landmark Residence, Mary and I carefully pulled off our shoes (per the herd), so as not to fudge up the freshly laid hardwood. Playing potential tenants, we breezed through two model units—they were sprawling with high ceilings, and draped in all manner of romantic tapestry. Finally, Mary and I located the reception-area spread. There, we contented ourselves with melted brie, stuffed olives, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and peppered crackers. Near the buffet, representatives from interior design studios and fancy plumbing shops had set up trade-show displays and were doling out business cards. (You buy the condo at $450 per foot, but fundamentals such as bathroom fixtures are left entirely up to you.) Among these design-industry aesthetes, the norm was black suit jackets, blunt-cut hairdos, and pointy-toed shoes.

“Who buys these things?” I asked the Whitney’s chief financier, the nice fellow who’d invited me to the party. He said it was mostly suburban empty-nesters and the occasional trust-funder. As the room filled with potential buyers—by now funneling out of the models and sidling up to the buffet—there was a swelling current of contemporary-casual wear. Eyeleted, Ann Taylor sweater sets and Liz Claiborne-style chinos were the favored attire among women; for the men it was golf shirts and khakis. They were still stocking footed, all.

We left the party within forty-five minutes and walked out the front doors, only to find that the teamster rally had grown ten-fold. A few women had joined the fray; I locked eyes with one weathered-looking character who had long, frizzy hair and a royal blue baseball jacket. A party bus had parked nearby and rolled down its windows, flooding the scene with an ambient 93X broadcast. First Street was clogged with pickup trucks and work boots. “These are my people,” I said to Mary, in all seriousness. I felt a pang of guilt for having crossed their picket line. I grew up in a devotedly union household, and was raised to sympathize with welders and machine operators, to understand that the deck is stacked, that the rich get richer. But because I’d managed to claw my way to a more comfortable socioeconomic rung, something of me remained inside—in and among the Whitney’s exposed heating ducts.

Two days later, the clash of cultures still bothered me. I emailed the financier to ask how the protest had turned out. “The union stuff was mostly a non-event,” he wrote. “Other than people maybe mistaking it for a tailgating party.”

—Christy DeSmith