I’m on a marathon temp job this week and next. Until the 24th of this month, I’m basically doing little but working, commuting, sleeping, and perhaps eating. Expect few if any posts during this time.

Instead, consider a peek at writer-composer Igor Keller’s new blog, Hideous Belltown. Keller claims to have just recently noticed that a lot of Seattle’s artificially flat neighborhood “is downright hideously ugly.”

Well, it always was such, ever since Denny Hill was removed early last century and the resulting lowland became downtown’s low-rent district. It became a place of printing plants, car lots, union halls, social service agencies, warehouses, storefront taverns, and a few stoic lo-rise apartments and hotels.

Belltown was the unassuming generic cityscape in between the Space Needle and the downtown towers. It was what the Monorail helped you bypass between downtown shopping and Seattle Center entertainment. It was a relative nothing, in the middle of everything.

Which is precisely what made Belltown so attractive to artists and musicians in the 1980s and early 1990s.

It was a place of (relatively) cheap rents, funky loft spaces, dive bars, and endless possibilities.

Of course, real estate developers also saw the possibilities.

After a few starts and stops, successive mayoral administrations succeeded in pushing Belltown as a hi-rise residential mecca.

And, either in spite or because of the gentle nudges of city zoning policies, the neighborhood’s big new buildings were generally just as homely as the small old buildings they replaced.

Which, of course, is part of the area’s enduring charm. Seriously.