…a fountain of snowflakes descend upon the frozen tundra of Green Bay, I knew the gods would be with the other team, not with ours.

In other Sunday nooze:

• I’m briefly quoted in a SeaTimes obit for Gunther Woerne, who ran Woerne’s European Pastry Shop in the U District for several decades.
• How’s historic preservation going here these days? Eh, so-so.
• Could “social networking” dot-commers save the Crocodile?
• Damn, there was more gunfire outside a Belltown bar; this time the Spitfire Sports Bar.
• So-what’s-new dept.: A state ferry’s been drydocked for some needed fixing.

…to the 27 people who attended my li’l book event at the Form/Space Atelier gallery. If I’d known I’d have had a mike and a stage and a desk, I’d have scripted something.

IN SATURDAY’S NOOZE:

• Declared too damaged to be preserved, the City’s allowed developer David Sabey to demolish the Stock House at theold Georgetown brewery complex on Airport Way, the pre-Prohibition home of Rainier Beer.
• A marriage made in heck: Wife runs a street ministry to drug addicts in Tacoma, hubby sells crack in Seattle.
• Sonic Boom Records is leaving Fremont, in another instance of the arty and funky disappearing from neighborhoods that have been sold to home buyers on the basis of their artiness and funkiness.
• BankAmericrap is bailing out Countrywide Financial, onetime big blowers of the housing bubble.
• Wash. state challenges the Bushies on draconian anti-privacy regulations.
• The ferry system doesn’t know where to put all its out-of-commission boats.
• What? You mean to tell me old pier pilings are bad for the water?
• Pat Cashman has a 30-year-old son, who won some online joke-telling contest. In other passage-of-time news, Madonna will be eligible to join AARP this year.
• And in case you haven’t heard, the Seahawks play an extremely important playoff game this afternoon.

…a nice hearty recommendation for my book event tomorrow (Friday) at Form/Space Atelier, 2407 First Ave.

However, I must disagree with the blurb writer, one Brian Miller, when he characterizes me as “a condo-hating anti-growthnik with strongly nostalgic feelings towards his home turf.”

I don’t hate condos. I lived in one (a high-rise, even!) for nearly five years. I like urbanity. I like excitement. I like density. I like walkable neighborhoods full of attractions. I like prosperity.

It’s just that I also like small businesses, DIY arts, indie music, affordable homes, all-nite diners, and public displays of whimsey.

I say we can grow WITH all these things intact, not as preserved memories but as living, breathing parts of our daily life.

Does anybody really enjoy the lifestyle of stolid, joyless “luxury” touted in all the condo ads as late as last year? Anybody at all? I’d like to meet ’em if they exist.

Otherwise, let’s instead have buildings that look good, are well built, and offer value (even “added value”) for their prices.

Let’s have more living-wage jobs and homes, here and in the nation at large.

Let’s have more fun, dammit.

And, in the immortal words of L. Barry, Keep It Funky God.

• Letterman, and his writers, staged a gala comeback Wednesday night. Could this be the turning point in the election?
• Seattle’s Landmarks Preservation Board agrees with us that the Ballard Denny’s building is potentially worth keeping. Meanwhile, Robert Jamieson quotes the manager of Seattle’s last extant Denny’s as being mad as hell about Saturday night ruffians. And he’s not even on upper First Avenue.
• What with shrinking ice caps and endangered polar bears, what do the Bushies want for Alaska? More offshore oil drilling!
• Child Protective Services could use a lot more social workers. Gov. Gregoire wants to help, at least a little.
• Could Wash. state voters really have a pivotal role in the Presidential nominating process this time ’round?
• A coyote was seen in the general vicinity of Magnolia Bluff. Insert your own joke here.
• Tim Eyman hates transit, loves roads.

• Even architects can’t afford to live in Seattle these days without special programs.
• The end of Netscape Navigator as a web-browser brand doesn’t mean all that much. The best of Netscape lives on in its open-source successor Firefox.
• One of the ex-Mariners named in the Mitchell Report has admitted to using steroids and uppers in 1999. His explanation: All the other kids were doing it. (Except catcher Dan Wilson.)
• It’s the law: If you’re stoned, don’t install other drivers’ tire chains.
• You can tell it’s a slow news day when every TV station reports the following: “Woman doesn’t want dog in bathroom during couple’s shower.”
• Betcha didn’t know there was anything historic in Tukwila. Except it’s not there anymore. It’s being barged to Seattle.

• Wash. state insists on giving kids “medically accurate” sex-ed info instead of the federally-mandated abstinence-only nonsense, loses federal funding.
• MS and Amazon decide they’d rather fund Democrats, at least for this cycle.
• Would you like the King County Courthouse to continue looking like a poorly “modernized” ’60s efficiency-architecture victim or have it restored into the stately authoritative edifice it once was?
• A UW frat member was arrested for shooting a gun at tin cans in the frat house’s basement. Hey, at least he wasn’t aiming outside.
• What??? Evergreen State Coll.’s actively soliciting students from in-state???
• Huckabee (hearts) regressive taxation, Wash. state-style.

• There’s finally enough funding to fully restore/rebuild the landmark Hat n’ Boots gas-station building in Georgetown. Yay!
• City officials now insist forcibly destroying homeless people’s camps is good for them.
• The bus tunnel was closed all day Wednesday and will remain closed Thursday. The culprit: The new computer system Metro installed to control all the tunnel’s systems. It’s not running MS Vista, is it?
• Is it really so bad for Port of Seattle cops to make a homemade music video showing off their anti-speeding radar guns? If it was made on public time with publicly funded equipment, maybe so.
• Nothing new on the “save the Crocodile” front.
• We DO know that the Comet has a new owner. We just don’t know who. (Let’s hope the new mgmt. hires less-unnecessarily-violent bouncers.)
• The Seattle School District wants to efficiently site a high school and middle school at the same location. Just think of all the ways the “tweens” could learn from the older kids: “You call that a beer bong? Let me show you how it’s really done.”

…this totally fictional (for now) ad would show up. (I found it at Seattlest; it’s been poppin’ up all over the local blog-O-sphere.)

As far as reality, there’s little more to report Croc-wise. The joint’s still closed. Stephanie Dorgan, its owner these past 16 years, isn’t talking to the media. At least one potential new ownership group has apparently shown up, but a lot of behind-the-scenes haggling would need to be done. Shows had been booked at the Croc into January (some touring gigs had been booked into next April); new venues or cancellations will be announced one show at a time.

I’m trying to figure what to say about the beloved, loud, crowded Croc, it of the tasty bar grub and the long lines, the way past-their-pull-date ceiling hangings and the exterior windows still (partly) commemorating the place’s 10th anniversary in 2001. The opening party for Loser took place there in 1995; I took care to place hand-scrawled signs at the door, warning that it wasn’t a secret Pearl Jam show.

I fell in love several times in that building, and out of love at least once. Darn, I hope someone figures out how to revive the place.

Tacoma’s own Ventures, kings of instro surf-pop lo all these years, have got their totally deserved berth in the Rock n’ Roll Hall O’ Fame.

• Also from T-Town, somebody wants to replace part of the historic ex-Heidelberg brewery with a hotel. Yep, preservationists don’t like the idea.
• Columbia Winery will move its winemaking and bottling operation from Woodinville to eastern Washington. Its retail and “hospitality” operations, which employ more people than its wine production does, will stay on this side of the mountains.
• And the old Olympia brewery might be “sold on the courthouse steps” if a bankruptcy trustee, representing the bottled-water venture that tried to buy it, can’t negotiate a sale.
• In allegedly healthier drinkies, a big Colorado agribiz operation has been selling “organic” milk in several states. Health-food advocates call foul, claiming the big agribiz operation’s breaking or bending the rules on what can be called organic.
• Mayor Nickels’s son Jacob was sentenced for his role in a casino scam operation. Insert your own “Nickels slots” joke here.
• As you might have already heard, twelve ex-Mariners are on the Mitchell Report list of baseballers who’ve allegedly used or trafficked in steroids. Meanwhile, P-I columnist Art Thiel compares the whole scandal to “a look through the keyhole at a ballroom full of elderly, naked dancers. Something exotic is going on, but exactly what isn’t clear, and few are in any trouble aside from embarrassment. At least the line for the keyhole is short.”
• A GOP state legislator from the Eastside decides he’d rather be a Democrat.
• Another urban church is thinking of selling its historic building. University Baptist, a local leader in diversity and social-justice causes for more than two decades, hasn’t decided what to do yet, but has decided to offer up the building and see what offers show up.
• Gov. Gregoire’s latest plan to end the worn-out-ferry-boat crisis: Build three new boats ASAP (insert newsreel footage of the Kaiser shipyards in WWII here), lease one boat from Pierce County immediately, and run special foot boats from Seattle to Pt. Townsend. (I’m holding a group excursion on one of these boats in the next week or two; keep watching this space for details.)
• Sound Transit showed off its plans for an elaborate University transit station. In keeping with the current UW pecking order, the light-rail stop would be close to the football stadium and the medical center, farther from the upper-campus liberal arts buildings.

• To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Paul Allen and Amazon will get to build 160-foot-tall office buildings in South Lake Union.
• Can the Sonics be saved? Some say yes! Among them: MS head honcho Steve Ballmer. There’s a lot more dealmaking and haggling to go, though.
• What should be done with the ex-Public Safety Building block downtown, which has been a big hole in the ground for more than two years now? Some city officials (read: Mayor Nickels) would like a “civic square” project. This turns out to be, as you might have guessed, a privately-developed office/condo tower with a bit of a bricked public plaza at the base.
• Pike Place Market officials want to raise $80 million, presumably from public sources. They claim the money’s needed for essential infrastructure improvements, some of which weren’t done when the Market was “saved” in the ’70s.
• How to save Pt. Townsend’s tourist biz: How ’bout a passenger ferry direct from downtown Seattle?
• The SLUT’s first day of passenger service was interrupted for half an hour when somebody found a stray ball bearing in the track.
• Meanwhile, Lake Union businesses are already helping pay for the next phase of transportation improvements–additional bus runs on two existing Metro routes.

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s become fascinated by old blank signs.

…rhetorically ponders whether the construction of ultra-luxury residences and offices behind the facades of old buildings is really historic preservation:

“Market capitalism has a special way of producing an illusion of adaptation when a community senses something lacking in a world filled with alleged choices. You want a piece of history? Fine, tell us how we can fettishize it and sell it back to you for a profit, and you can have all of the rustic brick you want. We’ve got truckloads.”

I was at the Mariners-Angels game on Aug. 28. The first inning was fantastic. As for the rest of the game, (insert Mad magazine-style, gross-out sound effect words here).

But some local players still ended the evening coming out ahead. They’re the kids and teens who attend the Rotary Boys and Girls Club, 201 19th Avenue.

That’s due to Tom Herche. He runs United Warehouses, in the (for now at least) industrial district south of Safeco Field.

No, his company’s not the old United Furniture Warehouse, of once-ubiquitous musical TV commercials. It’s a general storage facility, where small manufacturers, importers, and distributors can stow their wares at modest rents.

Every August, Herche buys a block of up to 500 tickets to a Mariners home game. He then resells them to friends and friends-of-friends at $25 each, with all the money benefitting the Boys and Girls Club. Folks who buy four or more tickets get to park in the warehouse’s lot, one long block south of the stadium.

He also treats the ticket buyers to a “Tailgate Bar B Que” at the warehouse. He springs for the burgers, hot dogs, sodas, and pony kegs of Coors. The drinks are served inside the building, the food outside.

The tailgate party was a perfect early evening, held in a perfect setting. United Warehouses looks like a warehouse ought to look. It’s got a curved roof and bare-wood support beams. A delightfully rundown-looking front office emits that vital “we don’t waste our customers’ money” look.

Herche’s company also has three larger, newer facilities out in Kent (plus one in Portland). But his Occidental Avenue building is a classic of warehouse architecture. And it’s a shining example of why the city should fight to preserve industrial uses in the old industrial district.

For one thing, it’s hard to imagine a scene in the big-box Kent Valley like the Tailgate Bar B Que.

The scene outside: Standup “tables” made of shipping palettes with Costco tablecloths. Hundreds of casually dressed adults, and a few kids, basking in friendly chatter and the late-afternoon sun, avoiding both the rush-hour traffic and the stadium parking jam.

The scene inside: Grownups sipping refreshing beers in the refreshing shade, standing amid stacks of cases of soft drinks, gardening tools, small appliances, and whatever else was staying in the warehouse this day.

But after a mere two hours of this, it was time for all of us to march en masse up Occidental Avenue toward the ballpark.

Sure, the seats were up in the right field nosebleed section, but nobody complained—at least not about that.

The game itself, you either know about or have tried to forget. The Ms scored five runs on four hits (including an ultra-rare three triples) in the first inning. It all went downhill from there. Our boys lost their fourth in a row (in what would become a nine-game losing streak), dashing hopes that they’d overtake the Angels for the division lead.

But everyone in the tailgaters’ group still had a swell time. Today’s Mariners organization, unlike the early Kingdome-based outfit, knows how to put on a complete show.

But enough about that. Let’s talk about the night’s real winners.

The Rotary Boys and Girls Club began as the Rotary Youth Foundation in 1939, begun by the Rotary Club of Seattle (still a major supporter). In 1947 it affiliated with Boys’ Clubs of America, which went coed in the 1970s.

The club serves more than 700 children from the Hill and the CD, ages 6-18. More than 200 show up on any given after-school day. Programs include education and career prep, “character and leadership” development, health and life skills, and the arts, as well as sports and recreation.

The club’s been blessed over the years by major supporters. Besides the Rotary Club and United Warehouses, Microsoft and auto dealer Phil Smart Sr. have made big contributions.

But they could always use more cash and volunteer hands, to help keep their programs going strong. You can contribute by calling 206-436-1880 or logging on to rotarybgc.org.

I first visited the Pike Place Market in 1975. More than three years after city residents voted to “Save the Market,” the big renovation/restoration was still underway. Much of the South Arcade was boarded up, with “artistic” grafitti and murals painted on the plywood barriers. One board bore the simple message: DON’T FIX IT UP TOO MUCH–SAVE THE MARKET.

The Market voters had “saved” was a homey, funky, rundown warren of stands and shops, a place of proletarian dreams and honest hard work. The fixed-up Market maintained this look, even as the surrounding First Avenue sleaze district shrank.

As the years passed, it became a mecca for civic self-congratulation. More merchants geared themselves to tourists, using such gimmicks as the infamous fish throwers. Luxury car dealerships shot magazine ads along Pike Place (“No Ordinary Supermarket, No Ordinary Car”).

New York financiers, supposedly “silent” investors in the Market’s real estate, suddenly claimed ownership. The city fought ’em and won. The city argued the financiers intended to “fix it up too much,” destroying the Market’s soul for the sake of upscale retail revenues.
Now, it seems the city bureaucrats running the Market might just be “fixing it up too much” on their own. Some of the powers-that-be want to promote the place as the ultimate high-end retail destination for the condo crowd.

I say the Market’s role as “the soul of Seattle” is more vital than competing against Whole Foods.

Sure, sell fancy stuff. But still sell the basics. Make the place a refuge for products downtown people need but high-end retail doesn’t offer.

And Keep It Funky, God.

…at Crosscut has a brilliant idea—let’s save the Ballard Denny’s! The classic 1964 coffee-shop building was originally the last of the once-coast-wide, Seattle-founded Manning’s chain. But just like nearly everything else on or near Market Street these days, it’s threatened with demolition for a condo project. Berger seems to think any preservation move is doomed. I’m less cynical. It can be done! It should be done!