OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
YESTERDAY, we discussed the putting-up-for-sale and potential loss of the Frontier Room, downtown Seattle’s last truly great dive bar and a gathering place for everyone from young punks to old pensioners.
That sale is probably predicated (the Frontier’s runners aren’t officially talking) by owner burnout; unlike most of our formerly-fair city’s cool-place disappearances.
The latest apparently doomed outpost of non-mellow life: The five-story Jem Studios and Galleries in the historic Washington Shoe Building.
For nearly 20 years, Jem’s been the heart and soul of the Pioneer Square Art Walk and a landmark in artist-controlled exhibition space. It got to be that way under the benign landlordship of Sam Israel, who was notorious for buying old buildings, renting them out cheap, and performing the least maintenance and upkeep on them allowed by law.
Israel’s will assigned his properties to a newly-formed nonprofit group, the Samis Foundation, to provide income for local Jewish schools. The Samis board has treated maximum income as its only operating goal for the buildings.
That’s meant the dislocation or annihilation of the Red White and Blue Restaurant, the Colourbox rock club, the ex-Pioneer Square Theatre, and all the small public-interest agencies that used to have offices in the historic Smith Tower (now mostly occupied by dot-coms).
Now, Samis has gotten around to the Shoe Building. The place is to be gentrified into hi-rent Internet offices, plus a luxury “loft” penthouse suite. (The latter, according to some rumors, is intended as a home for Samis’s president.)
The Times did a glowing, pro-gentrification article in its Sunday real estate section in late January. The story (no longer available online) talked about how the “art-loft lifestyle” was the latest In Thing among the fashionable New Money crowd, and the developers who are kicking out all the working artists as somehow bringing new energy to the arts scene.
To its credit, the Times ran a letter to the editor that called crap on all that. And to its credit, the Times also ran a weekday arts-section piece days later telling a more realistic take on the Jem story.
The Jem resident artists and gallery operators held a press conference at the most recent First Thursday. They wanted to raise public awareness about the plight of artist housing (and, by extension, all non-millionaire housing) here in City Extra-Light.
Jem’s current manager talked about getting a new studio-space complex in the city’s far south end (which would protect artists’ work spaces from gentrification for a little while but would be a lousy public gallery location). Some other speakers even set the audacious goal of trying to buy the Shoe Building from Samis (which insists it won’t sell).
The save-Jem-Studios drive might be a tiltin’-at-windmills effort or a publicity stunt. But the situation remains.
This town that used to pride itself on supporting “The Arts” is fast becoming a soulless blank, populated by hot-shots who have “lifestyles” but not lives.
TOMORROW: Cussing around the world.
ELSEWHERE:
