…Pioneer Square building that suddenly started to get dismantled this past winter? Turns out that all might not have quite been legal.

…this is the week when a major Seattle aesthetic institution marks a new opening, in a much larger, fancier space.

I speak, of course, of the Queen Anne QFC.

This 45,000-square-foot palace of sensual pleasure is twice the size of the chain’s prior unit six blocks west (a site acquired in 1974 from the once-mighty A&P). The new gallery of edibles is at the ground floor of a behemoth condo development, on land vacated by another once-mighty retailer, Tower Records.

The “store,” if you must call it that, contains all the departments you’d expect and more–a fish market, deli, “bistro,” sandwich bar, walk-in wine cooler, walk-in flower cooler, pharmacy, and, natch, a Starbucks stand.

As for product selection, it includes almost all the sometimes obscure brands I sought. It’s got HP and Pickapeppa steak sauces, Fisher scone mix, Session Lager, Hungry-Man frozen dinners, Millstone coffee, whole-wheat spaghetti, and liquid smoke. It didn’t have Moxie pop, but a manager promised it would show up next week. As for two other products it lacks, Campbell’s pepper pot soup and Arizona diet green tea, the folks in charge said they’d look into getting ’em.

This ongoing tribute to the wonders of human taste is open 24 hours a day, with no admission charge (though it’s hoped you’ll purchase some merchandise while you’re there).

As for that other local aesthetic institution opening an expanded space, the Seattle Art Museum’s grand new digs at First and Union are open free for a 35-hour marathon today and Sunday, for art lovers and Cinco de Mayo amateur drunks alike.

For five years, I lived across from the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, that huge concrete box propping up part of Freeway Park at the cusp between Capitol Hill and downtown.

More lately, I’ve occasionally temped there in between freelance gigs. I’ve gained a new appreciation for that city-within-a-city, that most earthbound segments of the floating world of business travel.

Despite the glamourous image of the ’50s-’60s “jet set,” business travel’s really what put the airline biz, hence Boeing and hence Seattle, into the big money. (In 1968, American Airlines advertised itself as a company “built for the professional traveler.”) While some people travel on business year-round as dealmakers or sales reps, most folks who travel on business do so only a few times a year; a goodly portion of these do so to gather en masse with their professional counterparts from around the country. They go to get out of the office for a few days, to see a strange city at company expense, to sit in group ennui during PowerPoint presentations, and to receive numerous sales pitches from vendors at exhibit booths.

Many people from many employers work the conventions, or benefit from the work done there.

There are the officers and year-round employees of the convention’s sponsoring entity (usually a business or professional association). There are the employees of professional convention-services companies—nomads who roam North America’s convention halls running registration desks, “lead retrieval” systems (see below), client-satisfaction surveys, etc.

There’s the Convention Center’s regular staff, cleaning rooms, operating video projectors, forklifting display-booth parts between the loading dock and the etc.

There are the various contractors and suppliers—caterers, catalog printers, sign printers, and such.

There are the restaurants, bars, hotels, cab drivers, and merchants in and around the Convention Center. There are the bus drivers who ferry groups of visitors to their hotels, to ancillary meeting venues, and to tourist attractions. There are the workers at the tourist attractions. (And, yeah, there are the strip clubs and escort services.)

There are the car-rental companies. There are the beneficiaries of car-rental taxes, includng the Seahawks and the Qwest Field staff.

There are the concierges and ushers, employed by the Seattle-King County Convention and Visitors Bureau (the fine folks who once bestowed us with the moniker “Emerald City,” and who now want our burg to be known as “Metronatural”).

And, under the concierge crew’s supervision, as many as 25 of us in the temp squad earn our pay by being dependable, being efficient, and being able to endure boring hours of either repetitive tasks or just sitting around looking authoritative.

With all this cash to be collected from out-of-town pockets, it’s no wonder states and municipalities kept outdoing one another in the 1980s and ’90s to build these taxpayer-supported shrines to business and the Business Class.

The convention biz has slumped since 9-11 and the resulting headaches of air travel, not to mention teleconferencing and online chats and other hi-tech alternatives. Yet, every year, thousands of people in hundreds of work-related “tribes” still feel a need to meet F2F and IRL. (That’s “face to face” and “in real life,” in ’90s chat-room lingo.)

My most recent gig there was a convention of surgical radiologists. Before that, I worked on the American Library Association’s confab. (From Willa Cather to catheters, all in one building.)

Most Convention Center events aren’t as exciting as that of the World Trade Organization in 1999. And most convention work is routine stuff, particularly the tasks assigned to the temps.

We stuff thousands of logo-encrusted backpacks full of promotional pens, CD-ROMs, T-shirts, umbrellas, ad flyers, convention catalogs, schedules, and last-minute addenda to the schedules.

We sit outside the center’s many big and small meeting rooms as “room monitors.” There, we pass out evaluation forms before sessions and collect them afterwards. In between, we regularly count the attendance, lest the fire marshals bust the whole convention over one overpopulated room. We answer questions and complaints from belligerent convention goers about intricacies of the convention’s schedule—or, as often the case, respond with a smiling “I’m sorry, I don’t know. The big booth on level 4 probably has someone who’ll know.”

We work for convention-service companies, disbursing “lead retrieval” machines to exhibit booths. (These are credit-card type readers that collect the demographic data of each attendee who swipes his/her registration card at an exhibitor’s booth.)

We stand behind the registration booths, assembling attendees’ badges and ticket packets while quickly explaining why they mustn’t misplace them; all while long sign-in lines are held up by one or two people whose pre-registration confirmations had been eaten by a computer somewhere.

My favorite moment in that regard was at a convention for ethnic-minority students from private high schools. While many convention goers are jaded and jet-lagged adults, these teens acted truly excited to be in a strange city with thousands of their peers. And, unlike some of the librarians and radiologists, they were visibly excited to receive their free backpacks.

I’ve learned to admire the vastness of even a middle-sized convention as a logistical operation, from signage to people-moving to the setup and teardown of exhibit booths.

And our Convention Center, even after the 2001 expansion, is but an average-sized facility of its type, at 200,000 square feet of exhibit space (not counting meeting rooms). The Las Vegas Convention Center, the world’s largest, holds 15 times that much floor space.

That’s an awful lot of lead retrieval machines to be handed out by a lot of temps.

…at the exhibit of gingerbread houses at the City Center building downtown. This year’s display is a highly appropriate benefit for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

For the past eight years or so, the Airport Way strip in Georgetown has held a growing reputation as Seattle’s last low-rent artsy-funky neighborhood.

The quarter-mile of old lo-rise buildings, across from the Georgetown Steam Plant, has been the awkward but loveable commercial core for an awkward but loveable population of metal sculptors, musicians, and painters. The strip’s storefronts came to house hip bars, coffee shops, a pizza place, a record store, a video store, and a Vespa scooter dealership.

Meanwhile, the bulky, sprawling brick buildings of the plant (also known as Rainier Cold Storage and Ice; originally the biggest of Rainier Beer’s three pre-Prohibition sites) housed art studios, band-practice and party spaces, and even another brewery (Georgetown Brewing, makers of Manny’s Ale).

But Airport Way’s status as a pocket of cheap thrills, unsullied by commercial megabucks, changed this week. The steam plant, plus a few peripheral lots, were bought by hotshot real estate tycoon David Sabey. (He’s also infamous as the final owner of the Frederick & Nelson department store.)

Sabey told the P-I he plans to turn the complex into “a mix of stores, light industry, offices and homes.” He says some of the current tenants, including Georgetown Brewing, might be invited to stick around.

But his staff also released a drawing of how the site might look when it’s done. The drawing’s full of “tasteful” landscaping and quaint flourishes, just like you see at every Ye Olde Factory, Ye Olde Cannery, Ye Olde Firehall, Ye Olde Flour Mill, Ye Olde Freight Yard, and Ye Olde Whorehouse in America that’s ever been “restored” for townhomes and gift shops.

Maybe it’s time for us all to hie it to Everett or Bremerton after all.

…in the coming days: A 20th column-birthday reminiscence, plus pix of all sorts of big public spectacles.

But for now, here’s a remembrance of Roland Terry, one of our region’s most influential architects ever.

…has issued its findings. Thankfully, they want to keep Center House and the Fun Forest, albeit with some serious upgrading. Memorial Stadium would be replaced by an “open space” above underground parking. And the Sonics would get most of the KeyArena redo money they want.

…about assembling a picture book about disappeared Seattle landmarks is the fact that more landmarks keep on a-dissapearin.’ Next: the Ballard Denny’s, which is both that chain’s next-to-last Seattle outlet (there’s still one on Fourth Avenue South) and the former last branch of the once-mighty Manning’s chain. O, when will the madness cease?

Every few years or so, somebody comes up with a huge master plan for Seattle Center. The latest of these somebodies is a Mayor Nickels-appointed task force. They’d like to modernize Center House and the Fun Forest, and demolish the awkward, rickety High School Memorial Stadium.

Meanwhile, ex-Seattle Weekly mogul David Brewster has submitted a more extreme plan. In keeping with his lifelong ideology of baby-boomer bias, Brewster’s plan would eradicate all Center facilities that serve clienteles significantly younger or less affluent than himself.

Brewster would raze Memorial Stadium, Mercer Arena (formerly the Arena, formerly the Ice Arena), the Fun Forest, Center House (formerly the Food Circus, formerly a National Guard armory), the North Court meeting rooms (including the Snoqualmie Room, where the Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will move later this year), and maybe even the new and popular Fisher Pavilion. And he apparently wouldn’t mind seeing the Sonics leave town so he could erase KeyArena (formerly the Coliseum) as well.

In the place of all these funky, un-slicked-up, well-used facilities, Brewster would like to see—nothing.

Albeit, it would be a lushly landscaped nothing, with lotsa grass and trees. Maybe there’d be some gourmet sidewalk cafes and used-book pushcarts. Maybe there’d be some outdoor ampitheater spaces, which would replace a few of the many indoor performance venues Bumbershoot and Folklife would lose.

Brewster’s Seattle Times essay notes that when Seattle Center was originally being planned to take over the 1962 World’s Fair grounds, it was made to accommodate many interest groups and population segments. He’d now like to replace that “cacophany” with a unified vision of a “glorious urban park.”

I happen to love the cacophany. And I want to keep it.

Too much of Seattle (hell, too much of America) has already been subsumed by the ultra-bland upscale monoculture. Publicly-owned treasures such as Seattle Center should resist this trend. They should always belong to everyone. They should always have a place for senior square-dancers, for working families, for teens, for minorities, for fast-food eaters, and for us Century 21 nostalgists who still want to believe in a festive future.

We can have contemplative green spaces, too. And we can have upscale dineries and theatrical venues. Just not only those.

So, I propose: Anything cut out from today’s Center gets put back into tomorrow’s Center. The only exception would be the high-school football games. They can move to some current school-district-owned property (such as one of those grade schools threatened with closure), or even to Husky Stadium or Qwest Field. Down in the Beaver State, Corvallis High has long played its football games at Oregon State’s stadium (and often had better winning records than OSU). The fact that neither Brewster nor the Nickels task force bothers to talk about where the high-school games would go just shows how ivory-tower (or condo-tower) their POVs are.

As for the rest: The Sonics, in their plea for another taxpayer-subsidized arena remodel, say they want a food court and an amusement arcade. Fine. Let ’em buy out the Fun Forest operators. An altered arena complex could incorporate replacements for the Fun Forest and the Center House food court. (These restaurants and arcades should be open to the general public, not only to arena event-goers.)

The arena should also be refitted to be more favorable to hockey. The NHL is dying in Sunbelt cities where it doesn’t belong; I’m convinced one of those southern-tier teams would fare far better in a northern town with major Canadian connections.

I’d keep Fisher Pavilion and its popular rooftop deck.

The empty lawn surrounding KCTS east of Mercer Arena could become a landscaped play area, replacing the wading pool north of KeyArena (and relocating the “atomic” neon lights from there).

The other Center House and Northwest Court functions (Vera, the Center School, the Seattle Children’s Museum, the square dances, the conferences, Bumbershoot’s visual arts) could go into new structures on the Center’s periphery, perhaps at the Mercer Arena site and retaining its facade. These new buildings could be included in the same funding package and construction schedule as the arena redo.

That would leave Center House available for implosion. In its hole might go some of the green spaces and outdoor amenities Brewster wants.

But, in my heart-O-hearts, I like Center House. I like the swords-into-plowshares idea of a bulky military warehouse now devoted to fun and games. It’s a grand old building, with a lot of life left in it. And besides, I like the Mongolian BBQ and the Pizza Haven.

Maybe Brewster would slag folk like me for not possessing a will to civic greatness. Too bad.

I don’t want a civic center with good taste. I want a civic center that tastes good.

…of the Seattle Wonder Bread neon, which for decades drew people toward Seattle’s least-whitebread neighborhood?

…honors Seattle as having one of the “Fifteen Best Skylines in the World.” The only other US cities rating higher on his list: Chicago and NYC.

RANDOM PHOTO PHRIDAY returns after an absence of way too many months.

To begin, this recently-opened used car lot on Aurora takes its sign letters from a prior business further up the street, Sure-Fit Seat Covers. You can’t tell in this shot, but the “A” is an upside-down “U.”

I know I read somewhere what company this airship is advertising. But the article ran in a daily paper several days ago, and I’ve already forgotten it.

YES, EVEN upscale megamalls can experience the occasional identity crisis.

…for a Seattle kitsch landmark, the Buddy Foley “Ladybugs” storefront.

The local mainstream media’s monorail bashers remain vigilant, ever on the lookout for any potential for negative spin. One recent case in point: SeaTimes columnist Danny Westneat, who ponders whether the most recently-released designs for the elevated rail lines look too much like “another Kingdome.”

If they do, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

The Kingdome was a marvel of engineering, and was built in budget and almost on time. It was designed before the era of nonstop cable sports coverage, luxury boxes, and retractable-roof technology; so it was designed to maximize what was baseball’s principle revenue stream at the time, regular ticket sales, by preventing rainouts in the most cost-effective way–a permanent roof. Aside from the ceiling-tile fiasco and early field-lighting issues, it served its purpose well, until the time came to progress beyond it.

So will the monorail.

Minimalist retro-modern bars are called copies of an LA/NY look. (“…These places scream: This. Is. Not. Seattle.”) Not so. They’re really nostalgia for a past fantasy of the present–specifically, the 21st century as predicted at the Seattle World’s Fair. (And what’s with the article writer, and the quoted drinkers, repeatedly denouncing “grunge” as if it still existed?)

HEADLINE OF THE DAY #2: “Rules limiting beach bonfires to grow tougher.” Rule one: You can’t call them “bonfires” anymore. You have to call them “macyfires.”