The Belltown Messenger, the scrappy li’l neighborhood monthly for which I wrote and edited for some six years, has just put out its last, online only, edition.

Publisher Alex R. Mayer, who’s now running a pro-pot rag called Mary Jane, had kept the Messenger going on the interwebs after the last, newsletter-sized, print Messenger came out last August. (I was not a part of the latter, unprinted, incarnation.)

The Messenger’s spiritual roots go back to the late 1980s and Belltown’s Brain Fever Dispatch, published by Elaine Bonow out of her dance studio.

At the time, there were a few scattered condo towers going up, but the ol’ Regrade was still largely a half square mile of print shops, small apartments, car lots, and artists’ studios. It was the latter milieu, that of the painters and musicians and clothing designers in their rustic lo-rent spaces, the original Dispatch covered.

The Messenger’s era of Belltown also contained art and music and fashion, plus a lot of creative “foodie” restaurants.

And it had a lot of other things.

It had the region’s hottest “HI-NRG” bar scene, which was covered more completely in Exotic Underground and later in D List.

It had the high-rise rich (and the merely affluent, spending as if they were rich). The regional slick magazines catered to these consumers’ spending needs much more closely.

And it continued to have more than its share of the various “street” subcultures, chronicled and advocated for in Real Change.

What Belltown didn’t have were some of the things “neighborhood” papers spend a lot of time covering, such as public schools, parks, kids, and community centers.

In the end, the “place” covered in the Messenger wasn’t so much a geographic region as a state of mind.

Any attempt to bring back something like it, which I’m considering, would have to keep that in mind.