Belltown’s Plastic Palace Closing After Three Years:
The End of the World (Pizza)
Article for The Stranger, 5/24/96
“We’ve seen a lot of changes in this neighborhood,” Aaron Cone says while sipping a Coke outside the pizza stand he runs with his brother Adam. “It’s a different town than it was three years ago. We’ve seen a lot of friends move away, out of town or to other parts of town. Places like the Dog House and the old Last Exit are gone, places where we held some of the early meetings to plan this place.”
Adam Cone nods in agreement from a ’50s molded fiberglass chair on the sidewalk. “In a place like ours you really get to see the characters that make a neighborhood. A lot of them are gone. A lot are going. It’s strange to feel antiquated in your own back yard.”
After three years and untold thousands of slices, World Pizza departs Belltown on Friday, April 26. The closure leads directly from long-standing disputes with the Cone brothers’ landlord, the Bethel Temple evangelical church across the street. But it can also be seen as a sign of changes in the neighborhood, as condo developers eye nearly every lo-rise building in sight for elimination. “When we asked about the chance of moving into another building nearby, (the property manager) said he didn’t expect anything on that block to remain standing in a few years.”
That kind of mega-capitalism is a long way from the DIY entrepreneur spirit of the Cones, two would-be artists who’d gotten into food-service work to pay the bills but hated working for other people. Deciding to strike out on their own, they each took two jobs (including a stint making collector prints for Dale Chihuly), saving up a total of $6,000 to use in starting their own place.
In late 1992, Adam (then 23) and Aaron (then 20) found a former accountant’s office in a side-street storefront on Lenora. The rent was reasonable, and it was within a late-night stroll’s distance from the Crocodile, the Vogue, the Weathered Wall, and the future Sit & Spin.
Over the winter, the Cones slept in their pizza-stand-to-be, behind papered-over windows. By day, they built it into a mini-palace of plastic furnishings while learning from experience about the inticracies of restaurant construction and health permits. Finally, in May 1993, World Pizza premiered with the first of its five semiannual private parties. The party, and the place, were instant hits. Diana Ross and ABBA blared from a boom box. Slices were inhaled seconds after arriving from the oven. Good Italian red wine was emptied by the case. Overheated Belltowners quickly expanded the party from the cramped space into the sidewalk, drawing police complaints that eventually got back to the church landlords. Despite their spoken reservations and occasional eviction threats, the church people continued to rent the space to World Pizza on a month-to-month basis.
While the parties earned no income, they instantly established World Pizza as a “scene” place, a friendly place with what Adam Cone calls “a real atmosphere.” For the first year or so, it stayed open weekends until 3 a.m. to cpature the after-the-bars business. The Cones worked seven days a week, adding hired help as they could afford to; eventually building up to a staff of nine. They even offered delivery in the neighborhood for a brief while, until Adam took an order to a Moore Hotel guest who greeted him in the nude, apparently hoping Adam was the female clerk who’d taken the phone order.
The menu was kept simple, to ensure efficient service from the compact kitchen. A meat pizza, a veggie pizza, and the house specialty, potato pizza. Whole pies made to special order. Standard soft drinks and drip coffee. Home-baked sugar cookies. Lemonheads and Red Hots candies.
Adam describes the scene at World Pizza, on a good night, as “an energy, a nervous energy.” A lot of young lovers, punkers, Vogue fetish-night patrons. A few fights. More than a few late-night patrons who’d nod off halfway through their slices. Young brides on girls’-night-out wearing penis necklaces. A few old and neo hippies who’d come in, confused by the name and perplexed when it turned out not to be a whole-earth kind of joint. A lot of what Aaron describes as “people who weren’t quite all the way there.” An old man who, informed one night the place had no anchovy pizzas, would march past it night after night screaming, “No anchovies, no pizza!” A homeless guy who always wanted half a pepperoni slice and half a lemon. A guy who’d try to sell ball-point pens or women’s coats to the customers.
When the Nu-Born Tribe clothing store vacated its Second Avenue storefront in the same building in early 1995, World Pizza finally had an opportunity to add an auxiliary dining room, to relieve the standiing-room-only conditions at peak evening hours. The Cones tore down a small section of back wall to join the two rooms. The new room became a more spacious version of the old, with room for more ’50s-style seating and fun posters. On Sundays, the windows were covered up and the room was rented out for life drawing classes.
The new room opened with the biggest World Pizza party of them all. Thirty cases of wine were consumed that night, at a rate of a bottle a minute. The church people forbade any further such parties on the premises. Worse, the extra dining space didn’t lead to enough increased business to pay for its rent. The Cones reluctantly retreated to their original room. Bethel Temple now plans to use the Second Avenue storefront for a temporary thrift store and food bank.
In retrospect, World Pizza was a basic recipe of a few well-chosen ingredients. It all added up to a place that, while never holding a live music event and never giving a damn about the Seattle media stereotypes old or new, became a perfect encapsulation of the real “Seattle scene” spirit. Lively yet steadfastly unpretentious, knowing but never smugly “ironic,” it took honest admiration in both a perfect pepperoni slice and a candy-colored plastic water fountain. It was a refuge for people who enjoyed good food and a good time at a good price.
But it was also a child of a specific place and time; a time that ended when the church decided to clear out the building, while preparing to receive offers for the underlying real estate. When the Cones return this fall from a long-delayed European summer, they say they’ll look into re-entering the restaurant biz. They own all the restaurant’s equipment and fixtures, and will keep them in storage while they evaluate their futures. But their next venture might not be in Belltown, might not be a short-order drop-in joint, and probably won’t revive the World Pizza name.
Still, as Adam Cone puts it, “it’s more of a beginning than anything else.”
“We made very close friends,” Adam adds. “I’m still going with a girl I met here in the first few weeks we were open… It seems more like a time period than a restaurant. It’s taken on more of a personal level. I had things confirmed; what’s really important, like friendship, a sense of place, having an idea and finishing it.
“And we learned how to make pizza.”
