ONE OF THE BIGGEST ANNOYANCES of my younger days, when I was annoyed at quite a lot of things, was when somebody would tell me bad news and then perkily ask, “OK?”
No, it wasn’t OK that I didn’t get that scholarship, the last ferry back into town for the night had already left, or Kirsten wanted to stay friends.
And it’s definitely not OK that we just lost the OK Hotel Cafe, for over a decade Seattle’s most enduring, and one of its liveliest, spots for music, performance, and art.
I’d known it when it was just a raw, old building acquired first as a rehearsal space, then as a cafe. To the cafe were added art shows (at first in the tiny hotel rooms upstairs; then, after that part was declared unoccupiable by the general public, in the main cafe space). Along with the art shows came occasional live-music shows in the cafe’s raised back area.
As the years went by, owners Steve and Tia Freeborn took over two more rooms on the ground floor. They and their team built a handsome bar-lounge and an intimate back ballroom stage.
For a while, they kept the back room boozeless and all-ages, while hosting 21-and-over shows in the lounge. But the costs and complications of this arrangement didn’t work out, and the whole place went adults-only in ’94.
During both the all-ages and 21-plus segments of the OK’s history, it’s hosted just about everybody of consequence in the NW music scene(s), plus tons of touring acts.
A representative sample: Built to Spill, Mother Love Bone, Beat Happening, the Black Cat Orchestra, Wayne Horvitz, Combo Craig, the Drews, Soundgargen, the Presidents of the United States of America, Bill Frisell, and Rockin’ Teenage Combo.
And it had remained an eclectic and dependable art space; showing the works of, among others, our own regular MISCmedia print mag contributor Sean Hurley (whose multicultural mermaids, shown here, were displayed just above the back-room bar).
But the Ash Wednesday quake damaged the building just enough for its current landlord to evict Freeborn and company on the premise that the place isn’t safely occupiable as a public gathering spot and won’t again be so for some time.
The building, I’m told, has landmark status; but the OK Hotel Cafe operation as we know it is gone. Whether Freeborn and crew will be able to resurface elsewhere is something only time will tell.
The OK was better than just OK. Its sudden loss is one of the most not-OK things I can think of.
NEXT: A fond adieu to a film critic.
ELSEWHERE:
