Last November, Capitol Hill resident Ferdous Ahmed appeared in a full page photograph in City Arts magazine. He was dressed to the proverbial nines in a vintage black suit, top hat, sunglasses, and high-top boots, accessorized with a gold pocket watch.

A lifelong vintage-wear fan and collector, Ahmed had just opened a boutique on East Olive Way the month before. It specialized in outfitting “steampunk” afficianados in suitably outlandish retro costumery, with garments and accessories mixed and matched from assorted real-world times and places (though mostly of a Victorian sensibility).

Ahmed’s boutique, Capitol Hill Vaudeville, is gone now.

The Solara Building, where the store had been, is mostly vacated (except for a tattoo studio). Entrepreneurs Shanon Thorson and Laura Olson (the team behind Po Dog on Union Street and the Grim bar on 11th Avenue), in partnership with Alex Garcia (Emerson Salon, Banyan Branch Marketing), are turning the place into The Social, a mammoth (3,000 square feet) gay bar and restaurant. Construction crews are now reshaping the building’s interior to sport a dining room and at least four semi-detached bar areas.

Olson and her partners are keeping the tattoo studio on the premises during the construction period, and say they want to bring back some of the building’s other former tenants (including a hair salon and a role-playing game store) in its peripheral spaces.

Ahmed’s boutique, though, might not get invited back. It was just getting off the ground as a business when it got sent packing. Harem, another clothing shop that had been in the Solara (and had previously been in its own storefront on Broadway), is definitely not returning; owner Victoria Landis has held her liquidation sale and is moving on.

Two features had made the Solara ideal for merchants like Landis and Ahmed.

The first was the interior flexibility of its main floor. It featured a big open space, where the gaming store could hold tournaments and the boutiques could hold fashion shows and receptions, without having to pay full time for the extra square footage.

The second was the relatively low rent. None of the Solara’s tenants had its own street-facing storefront. Without this means to attract casual foot traffic, in a building that was already set back from the street by a small parking strip, the tenants had to draw their clientele with clever promotion to identifiable niche markets. The building’s low rents were priced accordingly, to allow these specialty destination spaces to exist.

But a couple of alt-fashion boutiques and a gaming parlor just can’t bring in the kind of money a destination restaurant, and especially a bar/nightclub, can potentially generate.

Thus, the Hill is getting a new, high profile gay club. Olive Way, in particular, is getting another stop on what’s quickly shaping up as the Hill’s next major bar-crawling scene.

And we’re losing an experiment in providing urban spaces for highly specialized retail, the first experiment of its kind here since the Seattle Independent Mall (on East Pike a decade ago.)

Any “artistic” neighborhood needs some cheaper spaces within its mix. Spaces where the unexpected can happen, where new subcultures can form, where new concepts can germinate.

I was reminded of this when I read the University of Washington Press’s new essay collection Seattle Geographies. One of its longer chapters is entitled “Queering Gay Space.”

The chapter’s authors (Michael Brown, Sean Wang, and Larry Knopp) noted that Capitol Hill hadn’t always been the region’s gay culture nexus. In the first half of the last century, gay and lesbian bars, cabarets, and residential homes existed, with varying degrees of “out”-ness, mainly in Pioneer Square, plus a few scattered spots throughout the downtown core and in the University District and Queen Anne.

But when gay pride first really took off in the early 1970s, the Boeing Bust had depressed housing prices throughout the region. The Hill’s housing prices were further held back by what the essay’s authors called “white flight and fears of inner-city decay.” That gave the Hill a “large number of affordable apartments and rooms in shared houses,” which “drew young queer baby boomers into the area.”

The Hill’s desirability as a place to live, aided in part by then-low housing costs, helped spur its growth as a place for gay businesses and hangouts; and also as a place for bohemian art, theater, and fashion scenes.

Thus, four decades later, it can sprout a venture as monumental as The Social.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Went to Thursday night’s big presentation for some Brit architects’ big plans for the post-viaduct Seattle waterfront.

They’re pretty much as I’d feared.

Lots of big, potentially bleak, empty spaces. Lots of monumental “architectural features” and spots for gigantic public art pieces.

Nothing intimate. Nothing human-scale. Nothing quirky. Everything huge and slick and “green” (as in huge-empty-front-lawn green), all reeking of world-class-osity.

(Oh, but the designers would consider putting in “thermal pools,” aka public hot tubs, so we all could touch the water during the cold months.)

I’d rather have Atlantic City (pre-Trump) or Blackpool.

Let’s have a boardwalk (wood, not concrete please). Let’s have a place for buskers and food carts and street artists. Let’s have an (at least seasonal) amusement park pier to fully replace the already mourned Fun Forest. Let’s set aside a budget stage human social/cultural events along the water, even if it means cutting back on the scope of new construction in the project.

I don’t want a waterfront with good taste.

I want a waterfront that tastes good.

The Totem House fish n’ chips stand near the Ballard locks is SAVED!

Red Mill Burgers will open at the site later this year. The location will offer fish and chowder as well as Red Mill’s regular gourmet-burger menu.

It was originally built in the mid 1930s, as a gift shop selling Native American artifacts to locks visitors. It closed in WWII. It reopened in 1945 as a fish stand. The same family owned it for 65 years of gradual decline, until they abruptly shuttered it this past New Year’s.

• Ida Kay Greathouse, who ran or co-ran the Frye Art Museum for more than four decades, died at the impressive age of 105. With her husband Walser (executor of meat packer Charles Frye’s estate), then on her own after Walser’s death in 1966, Greathouse kept the Frye free, and kept its laser focus on “realist” art. She paved the way for later curators’ expansion of the museum’s mission into more contemporary genres.
• The 619 Western art studio building lives! Probably. State transportation planners, who still want to dig the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s replacement tunnel beneath 619’s less than totally solid foundations, said they’ll now try to work out a plan to shore up the building without upscaling it out of the artists’ price range. We shall see.
• The Red Dress concert special, a Seattle Channel/KCTS presentation that aired this past week, can still be viewed online at Seattlechannel.org. The show highlights a rock/punk/blues/funk fusion outfit that’s still as vital as it was three decades ago. Who’d like to scour for donations, so’s we can have more showcase concerts like this on local public TV?
• The Neptune Theater in the U District closes this weekend as a cinema, to reopen later on as a live performance space. I remember the Neptune’s heyday in the ’80s as a “repertory cinema,” showing a different new or classic bill every night. There was a suggestion book at the concession counter. I used to write in silly double bill ideas like M and Z. If the book were still there, I’d now be suggesting a twin bill of 127 Hours and A Farewell to Arms.

Two years ago this week, Seattle arts promoter-patron Su Job died from a fast-debilitating illness.

Now, the art-space building she managed and nurtured for more than 15 years is threatened.

619 Western is a gallery and/or workspace for more than 100 artists, as it has been since 1979. It is one of the principal stops along the First Thursday art crawl.

It is a gorgeous century-old rustic warehouse structure, its six stories divvied into labyrinths of large and small spaces.

And it’s got Seattle’s third coolest public elevator (after those of the Smith Tower and the Space Needle).

All this is threatened by the deep-bore tunnel project, to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

The state doesn’t want to tear down 619. But it wants to dig beneath it.

619 is an old building, built on top of fill dirt. As any Pioneer Square Underground Tour patron knows, the ground in the area was filled in during the early 20th century.

The state is wary that 619, in its current condition, might not survive being dug beneath.

So: If the tunnel dig proceeds, 619 will have to be evacuated in early 2012. After that, it would either be torn down or expensively rehabbed; probably out of the artists’ price range.

Some of the artists have started an effort to find new digs.

But I say: Let’s save the place.

So does Cheryl dos Remedios at Great City, the civic progress group Mayor McGinn used to belong to. She wants the Seattle arts community to organize for 619 and other tunnel-threatened structures. (She’s writing on her own behalf; Great City has not taken an official stance on the tunnel.)

As longtime readers know, I haven’t taken an official stance on the tunnel myself. I’ve wanted to save the viaduct; but I’ve been willing to listen to the argument that saving it’s not cost effective.

Now, I’m firmly on the anti-tunnel side.

As part of the big megaproject to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the City wants to redevelop the pedestrian areas of Seattle’s central waterfront. Four competing proposals for this will be publicly unveiled this week.

My onetime housemate Steve “Fnarf” Thornton hasn’t seen all these proposals yet, but he suspects he’ll hate them all.

In an essay at the Seattle Transit Blog, he persuasively explains what downtown doesn’t need—more windswept plazas and cavernous boulevards.

And he delineates what downtown does need—more places like the Pike Place Market, places alive with the cacophony of commerce and the bustling mix of human activities.

In the case of the waterfront, this means more piers, more stuff going on on the piers, more vendors and food carts, and (in a big duh) more boats. The waterfront’s original purpose, Thornton knows, will never be reclaimed in an age of containerized cargo. But other water-based uses wait to be put in there.

I agree with most everything in Thornton’s premise.

To paraphrase an old slogan for a sea-originated product, we don’t need a waterfront with good taste.

We need a waterfront that tastes good.

They’re demolishing Pier 48 on the Waterfront today. The beautifully rundown wooden building was vacant for several years. Before that, it had several uses.

It was home to the Princess Marguerite car ferry to Victoria, long since replaced by the faster but blander Victoria Clipper stationed a mile or so north.

It was the site of the first few Seattle Bookfests. Fans of the event (relaunched last year in Columbia City) like to say it just wasn’t the same after it couldn’t use the pier anymore.

The global Cobain fetish cult knows it as the 1993 site of MTV’s New Year’s Live and Loud concert special, which turned out to be Nirvana’s final Seattle show.

The pier, once cleared of the old building, will become a construction staging area for the Alaskan Way Viaduct demolition (and perhaps for whatever project might replace the viaduct).

—

CORREX: Kind reader Martha Bussard remembered that Nirvana played Seattle once more, in the old Coliseum (soon to become KeyArena) on 1/8/94. The Live & Loud special was taped on 12/13/93.

They’re still building large buildings somewhere! Specifically, in Chicago. That’s where the new 82-story Aqua Tower, designed by a team led by Jeanne Gang, is said to be the biggest building ever commissioned from a female-led architectural practice.

It’s full of curves.

As the cool among you know, the venerable German noise band Einsturzende Neubauten takes its name from the “collapsing new buildings” built quickly and cheaply in the two postwar Germanys.

Now we’ve got one of our own. Just nine years in existence, the McGuire Apartments, all 25 stories and 272 residential units and four storefronts, are going down.

And the biggest irony: It was co-developed by the Carpenters Union, on the Belltown site of its old union hall. Union crews built the building, which contains a small union office and hiring hall on its ground floor.

But it was co-developed with Harbor Properties. I don’t know who chose the building materials, including the cables and concrete that have proven to be of suboptimal quality. The whole structure’s been covered in scaffolding for exactly one year. Finally, its management decided that in the current apartment market, fixing the place would not be worth the cost.

As an all-rental property, the McGuire is legally easier to vacate, and hence to raze, than it would have been if its units had been sold as condominiums.

But this WILL happen to a condo building in the region, sometime this decade. And that’ll be an attorney employment scenario for sure.

All fans of kitsch architecture, great dive bars, giant teapots, and Tacoma—Unite! Save the Java Jive alive!

The old Rainier Brewery on Airport Way South is contaminated with toxic exterior paints. If a solution isn’t found to remove or seal up the old paint, the whole complex might get condemned and demolished.

It’s a beautiful labyrinth of industrial spaces, now housing artist studios and the Tully’s Coffee head office. (The coffee roasting plant, located in part of the old brewery for several years, is now closed; Tully’s product is now made by Green Mountain Roasters in Sumner.)

This is a landmark. It needs to stay. Period.

The Fun Forest carny operation is being demolished in stages. Boo! But a done deal, alas.

Now, the Space Needle’s private owners (principally the Howard S. Wright family) have announced what they’d like to see in place of the Fun Forest’soutdoor rides and indoor arcade—a huge Dale Chihuly glass art exhibit, most of which would be behind paid-admission gates.

Don’t do it, Seattle Center!

Getting rid of the last amusement park within the city limits is one thing. It would be even worse to replace it with one more world class-esque monument to the Dictatorship of the Upscale.

Let’s have more visual arts in the Center. But let’s have lots more different kinds of visual arts.

Our ol’ pal Tim Egan knows where the new poverty is at—”Slumburbia.”

Urban planning blogger Josh Grigsby spent three days in Seattle recently. He totally hated it:

Seattle is predominantly low-density sprawl, and its urban core reeks of decay. Never have I felt less inclined to venture out after dark than in the International District or adjacent Pioneer Square. Heading out from the hostel on foot to find a bowl of noodles for dinner I was accosted twice by young men selling drugs, followed for several weaving blocks by five other young men, screamed at by a well-dressed but seemingly mentally ill young man, and propositioned by a strung-out pimp whose employees remained unseen. Roving gangs of teens and twentysomethings, faces hidden by oversized hoods, patrolled the streets. I saw no families, no police, no women, none of the eyes on the street that self-regulate their urban neighborhoods.

He doesn’t like our transit system either.

With the Fun Forest going away, City officials now have their sights on the other part of Seattle Center they’ve long wanted to remove, High School Memorial Stadium.

Now, the City and the School District have a tentative pact to tear down the stadium and replace it with an underground parking garage, a “great lawn” (with the Olympic Sculpture Park nearby, do we really need another of those?), and a newer but smaller stadium.

Memorial Stadium is one reason the 1962 World’s Fair turned a profit, when later fairs in other cities didn’t. The fair reused several existing buildings—an armory (Center House), a civic auditorium (McCaw Hall), an ice arena (Mercer Arena), and Memorial Stadium (built in 1947, and named to honor the local WWII dead). The fair’s opening and closing ceremonies were held there. A temporary water-filled trench was put in on the football field, and used for boat races.

The stadium, designed in Truman-era military/stoic public architecture and already 15 years old at the time of the fair, already looked decrepit by the ’70s. All the civic planning pundits (especially those without kids in the public schools, which is most of them) have wanted it outta there, replaced by something more high-culture-y.

But the school district needs a neutral-turf site for football and soccer games. And it really needs the revenue it gets from the stadium’s surface parking lot.

So far, nobody’s talking officially about what the City and the school district agreed to. The here-linked SeaTimes story speculates it might include an all-new high school where the Mercer Garage is now, just north of the Center grounds.

As one whose longtime friends include a lot of parents of school kids, I think that would be great. It’d be concrete evidence that this city does indeed care about kids. It would also encourage more families with kids within the greater central-city core.