LAST FRIDAY, I began to discuss my recent move from a Belltown apartment to a Pike-Pine Corridor condo.
I’d first moved into the Ellis Court building in September 1991. As you may recall, several other things happened in Seattle that month. Nirvana released Nevermind, Pearl Jam released Ten, KNDD brought commercial “alternative” radio back to Seattle airwaves for the first time in three years, and a certain tabloid newspaper, for which I would end up devoting seven years of my life, began publication.
When I first moved in, Ellis Court was a regular commercial apartment building. I hadn’t known that it had been a favorite of drug dealers. The first clue of that came on my first night as a resident, when the intercom would BUZZZZ loudly all through the wee hours, by men who invariably gave, as their only name, “It’s Me, Lemme In.” Fortunately, the owners had just begun to clear the building of crooks; by my second month there, nearly a third of the apartment doors bore foreclosure notices.
By 1993, the building was being managed by Housing Resource Group Seattle, a nonprofit agency doing what it can to meet the ever-escalating need for “below market rate” (i.e., for non-millionaires) housing in our formerly-fair city.
Belltown was a happenin’ place at the time I moved in. While several artist spaces and studios had folded due to already-rising rents, there were still many (including Galleria Potatohead and the 66 Bell lofts). The Crocodile Cafe nightclub had just opened. The Vogue was in the middle of its 17-year reign as Seattle’s longest-running music club. The Frontier Room, the Two Bells, the Rendezvous, My Suzie’s, the original Cyclops, and the venerable Dog House were serving up affordable foods and/or drinks; to be soon joined by World Pizza.
By early 1995, the Speakeasy Cafe and the Crocodile had become the anchor-ends of a virtual hipster strip mall along Second Avenue, which also included Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, World Pizza, Shorty’s, the Lava Lounge, the Wall of Sound and Singles Going Steady record stores, the Vain hair salon, the Rendezvous, Black Dog Forge, and Tula’s jazz club.
But the place got a far pricier rep soon after that. In block after block, six-story condo complexes replaced the used-vacuum stores, recording studios, band-practice spaces, old-sailor hotels, and old-sailor bars. About the only spaces not turned into condos were turned into either (1) offices for the architects who designed the condos, and (2) fancy-shmancy $100-a-plate restaurants (the kind with valet parking, executive chefs, and menu items designated as “Market Price”).
The demolition of the SCUD building (home of the original Cyclops) in ’97, followed in ’99 by the condo-conversion of the 66 Bell art studios, provided more than enough confirmation that Belltown just wasn’t my kinda scene no more.
Moving on time was well due.
Maybe past due–aside from people in the same apartment building, by this spring I only knew five people who still lived in Belltown. Everyone else had either gone to other established boho ‘hoods in town or had joined Seattle’s new Hipster Diaspora, scattered to Ballard, Columbia City, Aurora, or White Center.
More about that in a few days.
TOMORROW: A few moving misadventures.
IN OTHER NEWS: The icon of many a blank-generation boy’s dreams is alive and well and living in Kelso!
ELSEWHERE:
