ENDING OUR RECENT VISIT to the formerly-scenic Kent Valley, we come across one recent attempt to create a public space in this heavily privatized stretch of suburbia, the Interurban and Green River trails.

These hiking-biking paths wander along disused railway corridors. One of them crosses the still-scenic Green River at a restored wooden bridge. Go far enough southward on the 15-mile Interurban Trail and you’ll eventually get to where it’s still the countryside.

The Great Wall Mall, south of Ikea in the greater Tukwila-Kent-Renton sprawl, is an undoubted godsend to the thousands of Asian-American families who’ve moved there in search of slightly-less-obscene housing prices. For a casual shopper from the city, however, it has little that you can’t find in greater variety/lower prices in Seattle’s International District.

An arrangement in black and white, courtesy of a black fridge on display at Albert Lee’s in the big-box superstore desertscape surrounding Southcenter.

Tukwila’s Family Fun Center, whilst not as expansive as the Wild Waves/Enchanted Village complex in Federal Way, is still prominent enough to get its own road signs. (As well as having go-karts, mini-golf, a climbing rock, a wooden-fence maze, water-cart racing, a video arcade, and the ever-familiar sights of screeching tots, sullen teens, and nerve-wracked parents.)

Question: What’s out of place in this picture of the franchised Bullwinkle’s restaurant at the Fun Center?

Answer: The Underdog Show wasn’t made by Rocky and Bullwinkle creators Jay Ward and Bill Scott. It simply had some of the same financial backers and merchandising contracts as the Ward shows.

…was even duller than the first. About 70 of us sat around at the Kent Regional Justice Center from 8:45 until 3:00, including a long lunch from 11:00 to 1:30. Finally we were informed no trials were ready for us to be picked for. Thus ended our obligation to the People of King County.

With time on my hands in a corner of Puget Sound country I never get to otherwise, I of course had to photograph what sights there were to be seen. And there were many.

The original downtown Kent is a beautifully sited and constructed little town. It’s compact, has great all-American architecture, and is bedecked with well-groomed shade trees.

The only problem with downtown Kent is you can’t shop there for life’s basics (aside from tires and mufflers). As in so many other U.S. towns, Kent’s food, drug, and clothing stores have all fled to the outer sprawl. Former supermarkets now house a carpet store and a discout outlet cutely named “Stupid Prices.”

AS YOU CAN SEE ABOVE, yr. dangerously underemployed web editor bit the proverbial bullet of credit card debt and attained a replacement digicam.

The particular scene is the King County Regional Justice Center in the much-maligned suburban community of Kent, right in between the vestigial old small town and the strip-mall and office-park barrenscape. This big, magnificent 1997 building is NOT a grandiose waste-O-taxpayer-$$, in my opine. In places such as Kent where private-sector architecture’s particularly brutal & grim, we need governments to show what the built environment can be like when it’s made with care for the people who have to move through it.

Today, I was one who had to move through it. Called for jury duty, I spent a long under-caffinated morning being herded from room to room, listening to judges’ lectures and watching an instructional video on the juror’s responsibilities narrated by the late Raymond Burr (who probably did more to popularize misunderstandings about the trial process than anybody in U.S. history). At the end of all this, a state attorney kicked me out of the trial being empaneled that day. I get to go back Tuesday and make myself available for other trials.

Following that misadventure, I finally got to dine at an indie BBQ joint I’ve long heard about and even written about, the legendary Cave Man Kitchens. It’s one of those “you need no teeth to eat our beef” places. The meat is smoked and melt-in-your-mouth; the sauce is sweet and tomato-ey. Good eatin’. (Though I prefer the Pecos Pit on First Avenue South.)

ANOTHER FRIDAY, another sample of pix from our ongoing Space Available project.

PRIOR TO OUR RECENT BOUT WITH CAMERALESSNESS, we visited the fabulous Tacoma museum district. We’ll go back again soon for the Museum of Glass’s new exhibit of Japanese anime artifacts.

What was around to see that day were two slick yet cool exhibits at the Washington State History Museum.

First, the permanent exhibits about the first century and a half of Caucasian settlement in the Great NW, including a re-creation of the “Hooverville” homeless camp (at the modern-day site of Safeco Field) and a “tree” displaying some of the many valuable products made from local wood.

Upstairs in the same building is 1001 Curious Things, taken from the vast collections of Seattle’s historically vital tourist-trinket stand, Ye Old Curiosity Shop. The shop used to commission Alaska tribes to make authentic totem poles and scrimshaws, and also bought, stuffed, and mounted selected freaks of the animal kingdom (below).

The state museum’s a huge, grand place that’s got its act fully together. It doesn’t just show cool stuff; it mounts entertaining narrative exhibitions with storylines worthy of any Discovery Channel documentary. Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, scheduled to move into the temporary downtown-library space on Pike Street late next year, will have to do a lot to reach the state museum’s level of attractiveness and intrigue.

TODAY, more proof there’s beauty everywhere in our town, even in the no-person’s-land known as Interbay. (Please, don’t let ’em put up a strip mall there.)

JUST ‘CAUSE IT’S FRIDAY, some more images from our ongoing Space Available series.

FINISHING OUR RECAP of scenes documented but not uploaded back in June, here at last is the open house at Seattle Opera’s new McCaw Hall. (Yep, a giant theater named for a family fortune earned from every theater manager’s #1 bane, cell phones.)

The joint’s not paid for yet, even though its makers saved a few bucks by keeping the structural frame of the old Civic Auditorium/Opera House. And there’s no way of telling when or how it’ll be paid for, since there aren’t any governments in the immediate proximity that have a bunch o’ spare cash laying around.

There are still two arts-related construction megaprojects in Seattle, the new downtown library and the Paul Allen-supported sculpture garden near Pier 70. It’s now time (or rather way past time) to turn our collective fiscal attention toward arts funding that emphasizes art and artists, rather than the more politically expedient route of huge building projects.

The place itself is, as you might have expected all along, a clean, retro-modern looking joint, but with its own touches. The Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall looks like a modern urban Protestant church. McCaw looks like a new suburban mega-church.

In place of the old Opera House’s steak-house crimson wallpaper, McCaw’s all done up in what Ikea would consider to be “warm” designer colors. It’s all so laid back and mellow and formally informal. I’m not sure that’s the proper milieu for opera and ballet, which are (or ought to be) all about big passions. At least they kept all the public art from the old space, including the Mark Tobey mural.

The all-new lower Queen Anne Safeway just opened today on the site of what had been one of the chain’s smallest surviving Seattle outlets. That building, a classic ’60s box structure, had been razed for a big half-block condo complex with the unfortunate name of “Tribeca”–a moniker intended to conjure images of old iron Manhattan warehouses redone into nouveau-riche loft dwellings, not brand-new stick structures.

(BTW: Safeway, while once the world’s biggest food chain, has never had a store within 300 miles of NYC.)

The store, while twice the size of its precursor, is still a compact and urbane work of “retail theater.” It has narrow carts and aisles, tall shelves, and a slightly darker color scheme. Its internal layout’s also different from the standard grocery cube we’ve known all our lives. The single entrance is toward the building’s narrow south side. The checkouts are placed diagonally along the south side, leaving space near the entrance for special promotions. The produce coolers are in the middle, not along a wall, freeing more wall space for higher-profit-margin operations (pharmacy, deli, video rentals).

It’s a pleasant, even quasi-happy place. My only gripe: Just as with Safeway’s late-’90s rebuild on 15th Avenue East, the new lower Queen Anne store abuts the sidwalk instead of hiding behind a moat of parking–but doesn’t have an entrance at its peak foot-traffic spot (in this case, Mercer Street).

SOME MORE ENTRIES in our Space Available photo series.

…to Raymond “Ras Bongo” Lindsay, the Lake City music-store owner and longtime staple of the local roots-music circuit, who was slain in an apparent domestic dispute. I’d only met Bongo offstage once, at his store (see above), but instantly sensed him as a gentle man of a centered sensibility.

TO AVE AND AVE NOT DEPT.: Last weekend’s University District Street Fair was supposed to have been the coming-out party for the completely rebuilt University Way. But, in traditional best-laid-plans fashion, the Ave’s northernmost big block (47th to 50th) remained closed and unpaved.

Ergo, the fair was shrunk to about 70 percent of its normal size. The audience’s size, and energy level, seemed even further reduced, despite decent weather. This may have befitted a neighborhood that was already stuck in the retail doldrums even before the totally traffic-closing construction scheme made it worse.

Some UW design students had a big display in the former Tower Records storefront, full of schemes to redo the Ave’s storefronts so they’d look all fresh and Euro-modern, not the funky/rundown amalgamation of low-rise architectures we all know and love.

Still, there’s something to be said for a reinvent-the-Ave campaign that comes out of a sense of creativity, that asks young adults (rather than corporate consulting firms) what a young-adult shopping street should look like, and that imagines plenty of spaces for independent businesses instead of the same ol’ dorky chains.

…since Planet Hollywood opened its first in-town Seattle outlet on Tuesday, run by the same regional franchisee whose Issaquah store’s become the target of sexual-harassment and racial-discriminaiton suits by Hispanic employees. I’ve no way of knowing whether the controversy dampened the Aurora branch’s opening-day hoopla, but I only had to stand in line 15 minutes (most of that time protected from the elements inside a logo-merchandise-filled tent).

Once inside, everyone got a free example of the chain’s signature product, the hot-glazed grease-and-sugar circle, fresh from the massive all-automated production line. It turns out to really be an extraordinary product, a ring of melt-away gooeyness that bears only a visual resemblance to a supermarket donut. (We refuse the pretentious “doughnut” for such an unpretentious product. We also don’t like how the flyer passed out to the patrons in line referred to the restaurant’s coffee-and-pop menu as a “beverage program.”) The same product, when served at room temperature, becomes a fluffy semisolid that hits you with a pronounced sugar rush after three bites.

Thus, it shouldn’t have been so surprising that the “greeter” lady who saw customers out the door reminded everyone that the store’s got a special unglazed version for diabetics.

The Krispy Kreme hype campaign is more than a publicity gimmick. It’s a vital aspect of the chain’s business plan as it expands from a cult-classic Southern regional circuit into a national powerhouse. The lowly donut stand has been a part of roadside and urban America for decades, but mainly in the form of independent operations (often immigrant-owned) or small regional chains. (Winchell’s and Dunkin’ Donuts have either scaled back or pulled out of their Norhwest regional operations.) Krispy Kreme has supersized the donut stand into a behemoth of relative Wal-Mart proportions (though each outlet is still little larger than McDonald’s largest urban branches). Everything about the restaurant, from the bright lighting to the cutesy T-shirts, reflects this re-imaging of a little ring of flour and lard into a destination entertainment experience.

Of course, the entertainment experience is taken to a new level by the franchisee’s current scandal. The combination of donuts and sleazy sex is such a rife opportunity for snickering jokes, which you are hereby allowed to imagine on your own. (Suggested premises: Holes, frosting, batter, mixers, beaters, roundness, crullers, dough, self-rising, “for here or to go,” drive-thru, cream filling, plain vs. chocolate, and, of course, sprinkles.)