3.4. Pacific Avenue Apartments
This remains one of my proudest achievements in kitbashing.
Ever since I saw the reference photo above, I knew I had to model the light-colored block of apartments. Although this was taken in Hoboken, Jersey City had loads of them as well, such as the ones below at the corner of Hoboken and Baldwin Avenues, which remain virtually untouched to this day.
DPM's Reed's Book Store was the obvious starting point, although it was much more difficult to pull off than expected because the front wall of the kit isn't perfectly square! It took six kits and a lot of filing and fitting and fudging to make it work, although the end result was worth it.
The first step was to merge six building fronts into one. Although this was made much easier by a micro-table saw, the fact that DPM kit parts vary in thickness and sometimes are not even square did add a degree of difficulty. I cut the double-windows out of the bottom row to make entrances, and used the door frames from the storefronts to dress them up, in keeping with prototype practices.
Next came the tedium of trimming and installing the bay window parts—all 36 of them. Once that was out of the way, I installed a trim strip along the bottom of the wall, between the building and its foundation; this strip was actually the leftover cornice caps with the faces ground off. Entrance trim pieces were cut out of the original store entrances; stairs are Cornerstone modular parts.
The foundation walls were scrounged from an old Pola freight house.
