I knew I was going to attend the final group exhibit opening/closing party at the 619 Western art studios.

I didn’t know, until Wednesday, that I already have.

The city’s Department of Planning and Development suddenly proclaimed the building’s tenants have to get out by Oct. 1, six months earlier than the previous eviction date.

And, what’s worse, the tenants can’t hold public events in the building by Aug. 1.

That means no August First Thursday openings.

• When better toilets are designed, the Gates Foundation will design them.
• R.I.P. Bagley Wright, 1924-2011. A Princeton grad from Georgia who married into the Bloedel timber family, Wright was one of the five original Space Needle investors (hence the Needle’s original corporate name, the “Pentagram Corp.”). He also helped run the Seattle Art Museum and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, cofounded the medical-devices maker Physio Control, was a key player in downtown real estate development, was a major early investor in Seattle Weekly, and sold the house where Kurt Cobain died. He and his wife Virginia amassed a large contemporary-art collection, some of which is on view at their own gallery space.
• Anand Giridharadas believes it’s all well and good for bright minds to go to work at “social entrepreneur” projects, but he insists that “real change requires politics.”
• Buried in a story about PopCap Games boss Dave Roberts is an important lesson that always needs re-teaching:

…Making simple products is way more difficult than making complicated products…. Simple is more complicated, simple is elegant, simple is harder.”

• A Japanese American community activist wants part of S. Dearboarn Street rechristened “Mikado Street,” the name of one of Dearborn’s 1890s predecessors. The question not raised in the linked news story: Can ethnic pride be boosted by the use of a name associated with British comic stereotyping? Or, conversely, could this move help “reclaim” the word?
• Tacoma’s biggest private employers these days? Hospital chains.
• Is Microsoft trying to build its own social networking site? Heck if I know.
• State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown sez Wash. state just might be ready to approve gay marriage.
• Simon Reynolds finds a lot of retro classic rock n’ soul tributes on today’s pop music charts. And he’s sick and tired of it.

• How I misspent my Saturday—getting lost in the Seattle Public Library’s historic 1962 World’s Fair pictures. I’m particularly fascinated by the name of a fair exhibit, the “Home of the Immediate Future.”
• Sable Verity wants the Seattle Urban League to come back strong from its recent misfortunes, and believes its once-and-future leader is not the man for the job.
• Close a hillside road. Bring in a dump truck, pre-loaded with 10,000 tennis balls. You can guess the wondrous spectacle that ensues.
• One positive result of the viaduct and 520 highway projects—the discovery of lots of pioneer garbage!
• Everybody in or near Seattle: Go see Mad Homes. It’s a site specific art installation occurring in a group of Capitol Hill houses set to be razed for apartments later this year. The 11 invited artists, given free rein to make “permanent” changes to the structures, have filled them and their front and side yards with fun and fanciful works. It’s up until Aug. 7.

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?

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).

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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.