EVEN BEFORE the P-I front page discovered it, Misc. was in love with the new Westin Hotel rooftop signs. While the red letters are nearly four feet tall, they’re placed so high up on the hotel’s round towers that they look real tiny from the street. They provide an unexpected spot of cheer against the downtown skyline and bring back memories of the past golden age of hotel neon. They’re also a statement of pride for the locally-based chain, rocked in recent years from a succession of out-of-state parent companies. Elsewhere in greater downtown…

OFF THE MENU: The 5th & Denny restaurant graveyard building maintains its curse on would-be operators–most recently with a would-be southern-esque dining concept called Jambalaya’s. The curse acted faster than normal this time; Jambalaya’s “Coming Soon” signs came down and the “For Lease” signs came up without the joint ever opening. In other money-related fantasies…

GAME THEORY REVISITED: The Seattle Monopoly game, premiered in a big Bon Marche promo event last Friday, is Monopoly owner Hasbro’s belated answer to Stock Block and CityOpoly, two ’80s indie board games based heavily on the Monopoly concept but with different street and business names for each town they were sold in. The thing is, there are enough avid game players and professional game designers in town for somebody to think up a real (not fill-in-the-blanks) Seattle board game. Maybe it could be about trying to start a computer-related company that could make it big, but not so big that Microsoft would crush it by copying its technology. Or it could be about coming up with schemes to improve civic life and trying to get them realized in spite of opposition by the big-money people. For example…

RIDING HIGH?: You can tell it’s election season ’cause the local TV commercial slots and daily-newspaper ad space, normally full of appeals to be a “rebel” by buying officially “rebellious” consumer products, are instead saturated with images of authority figures exhorting citizens to do as they’re told and just say nope to those crackpot initiatives on the ballot. There’s images of cops against (mild) handgun control, and images of nurses against (very mild) health care reform. Another case in point: the Monorail Initiative, denounced by the increasingly rabid-right propagandists at the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Instead of opposing the initiative as the work of “crackpots” (i.e., of people outside the government/ business elite), our business leaders should welcome the chance to add more in-city mileage to a light-rail scheme initially intended for suburban commuters, and to add them in the form of a hi-profile, futuristic-looking elevated train system people would want to ride on.

We ought to pass the Monorail Initiative this election. Then we’ll let the city and the Regional Transit Authority (established in last year’s transit referendum) work out how best to incorporate the initiative’s mandate with the in-progress RTA planning and the future RTA operation. RTA was and is about reducing smog, easing freeway congestion, and making life easier for motorists by getting a few other motorists off the road. The Monorail Initiative is about those things, but it’s also about something more. It’s about dreams for the future, and about wresting control of these dreams from the suits, from the consultants and focus-group researchers and the politicians who never met a condo project they didn’t like. Historically, urban transit projects in the U.S. have been proposed from on high by political inner-circle members who would never deign to use public transit themselves, but who love the opportunity to award construction contracts to potential campaign contributors. This is something dreamed up by ordinary citizens, without years of bureaucratic “process.” And it appeals to everyone who’s ever loved the short Seattle Center Monorail and ever wanted to believe it really was the transportation system of the future. As I wrote back in April, much of the dream future presented at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair never happened. Here’s a chance to realize at least a piece of the fair’s promised “World of Tomorrow,” to be finished just a few years into Century 21.