FOR THE FIRST TIME ALL SUMMER, we resume our occasional habit of looking for meaning in real estate.
A Bell System ad from the late ’40s claimed, “It takes 500 tons of equipment for just one telephone exchange” (that is, for the central-office connections among the 10,000 phone numbers sharing one prefix). As you may have noticed, electronics are a lot smaller these days. So, even with the explosion of phone numbers due to modems, cell phones, and fax machines, US West didn’t need all the downtown buildings it had inherited when Ma Bell was broken up. One of these buildings was extensively reworked (with exterior windows and other amenities) to become the Hotel Monaco.
The view of downtown Seattle from the Camlin Hotel’s top-floor Cloud Room was forever ruined in the early ’70s by Pacific Northwest Bell’s new headquarters tower. Originally, it was officially billed as being at the made-up address of “1600 Bell Plaza,” confusing out-of-town phone company officials and everyone else who didn’t know it was really on 7th Avenue. With the Baby Bell spinoffs in 1984, the building went from PNB’s head office to a mere divisional outpost of the Colorado-based US West–which, in turn, was just acquired by the long-distance provider Qwest (no relation to the Quincy Jones-owned record label of the same name and spelling.)
The Bauhaus Cafe complements its retro-modern appearance by posting its phone number with a lettered prefix. These were remnants from the early days of telephony, when local service was hard-wired into named “exchanges” of no more than 1,000 lines. Before the rotary dial was invented, callers were initially put through to an operator, who manually patched a switchboard to connect the caller to the number he or she verbally asked for. As phone use grew, exchanges grew and numbers got longer. The Seattle Times, for instance, had the successive numbers over the years of “Main 300,” “MAin 0300,” “MAin 2-0300,” and “622-0300,” before the paper installed a new office phone system that required a block of separate numbers.
The El Gaucho steakhouse and cigar bar’s in a building that used to service a different end of the management-labor equation, as the meeting hall of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. Its downstairs (now the Pampas Room and the Big Picture) was the Trade Winds, an irony-free tiki lounge whose back bar was decorated with exotic coins from around the world, collected from sailor patrons. A small sculpture in front of the building, in the form of a beret adorned with union badges (including that of the radical Industrial Workers of the World) remembers the site’s heritage.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, black empowerment became a rallying cry in the suites as well as on the streets. African-American-owned banks started popping up in cities across the U.S., including Liberty Bank in Seattle’s Central District. It sold home loans to people and neighborhoods underserved by the big banks; it provided business-banking services to the black-owned construction companies that had emerged to do affirmative-action subcontract work on government building projects. But the big banks soon went after the more profitable segments of Liberty’s business. A reorganization under the name Emerald City Bank didn’t last; it was sold to Key Bank in the late ’80s.
TOMORROW: Real Seattle fiction.
ELSEWHERE:
- They’re making a movie with a computer-animated character in an otherwise live-action setting. They claim they tested real actresses for the role but none of them were right. That, of course, is the excuse Broadway casting people always use when they reserve all starring “ethnic” characters on stage to white actors….
