Over the next several days, I’ll show off some pix I took on a recent jaunt to our neighbors to the south.

First off, the signs and other sights of that great street immortalized by Neko Case, South Tacoma Way.

The Starlite Drive-In is, like most un-razed drive-ins, now an all-week swap meet.

Come in to the PI Bank for today’s special interest rate, 3.14159 percent.

The magnificent Java Jive survives, while many other nightspots and merchants have not.

Also surviving, sort of: The B&I Shopping Center. Once a thriving indie discount store, amusement arcade, and private zoo, it’s now a mini-mall at which various scrappy mom-n’-pop merchants hawk telephone cards, T-shirts, religious trinkets, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and Mexican soda pop. Ivan the gorilla, who lived at the store for years until economics and politics sent him off to a regular zoo, still oversees the place in caricature form.

In the ’70s and ’80s the Tacoma Mall, and its adjacent strip-mall spaces, absorbed most of the City of Destiny’s retail trade. City-planner types moped about the decimation of Tacoma’s downtown, which has only recently begun to rebound. Few such official concerns were raised over the fate of South Tacoma Way (the in-city stretch of U.S. 99).

America’s great retail chains either moved out of South Tacoma Way or never moved in. Today, the only corporate names you’ll see on that street are those on franchised car dealers and gas stations. South Tacoma Way is a haven for independent retailers of all types—at least for those who can stay in business in today’s Bush-decimated economy.

More of these to come.