The Amtrak Cascades to Porltand left Friday morning at a challengingly-early 7:30 a.m. My traveling companion and I had been up two hours prior, so some napping was done by each of us on the soothing, scenic 3.5-hour ride.

I can’t think of many reasons to go enter the Beaver State through any means other than the train. Instead of strip malls and off ramps, you get to see farmlands, forests, Puget Sound, the Tacoma Narrows (above), the Columbia River, the giant egg statue at the town of Winlock, WA, and much more; and all the while you get to eat, drink, read, work, and/or watch an in-train movie. (The one this time was A Guy Thing, another of those horridly average sitcom movies set in Seattle but filmed in Vancouver.)

The economy in ol’ Rip City is as bad as it is here, or worse, and has been bad longer than it’s been bad here. The papers are full of dire warnings about yet another state government cutbacks. There’s an initiative campaign to raise a local income tax (on top of the state income tax) to keep the public schools open.

Yet some big-thinking local folks are trying to attract baseball’s athletically competitive but fiscally hapless Montreal Expos to Portland, a venture which would bring in tourist bucks but would probably require a publicly-subsidized stadium. I myself would love a National League team in the Northwest, if only as an excuse to go south more often.

We’ve previosly mentioned how most of Portland’s compact downtown has been preserved in its seedy yet funky glory. The new depression has kept rents low for the vintage stores, indie book and music shops, coffeehouses, and brewpubs.

And between the two MAX light-rail routes and a shorter downtown loop train, you won’t miss not having brought a car.

…”Seattle totally sucks, man” whining came today in the unexpected spot of the Seattle Times Sunday magazine section.

Writer William Dietrich compared Seattle’s downtown to that of Portland and Vancouver BC. He gave our town last-place marks in everything from public transit to residential development. He blamed Seattle’s perceived failings on a lack of a strong, paternalistic planning bureaucracy capable of deciding what’s best for everybody and acting freely on its decisions.

Reality check time.

Yeah, we’re over a decade late with starting a big multi-county transit scheme; but the Times doesn’t particularly love the one we’ve now got (Sound Transit) and opposed the grassroots alternative to it (the Monorail initiatives).

We’ve had bureaucrats with big designs for how we were supposed to all want to live. They gave us the “urban village” and Seattle Commons schemes, which many citizens denounced as giveaways to private developers. (Oh yeah: Dietrich’s story highly approves of government givewaways to private developers. He praises Vancouver’s heritage of politicians who’ve been exclusively devoted to such giveaways.) So now we’ve got unofficially planned zoning schemes to promote luxury condos on every block that isn’t reserved for single-family homes (i.e., any block where the non-affluent might currently live).

What Vancouver really has, besides the land giveaways and the SkyTrain: A downtown constrained to a two-square-mile isthmus, surrounded by a city equally water-confined, discouraging highways and sprawl. It also has a Canadian political system in which the “highway lobby” has traditionally had less clout.

What Portland really has, besides the light rail: A flatter central downtown with smaller blocks and no alleys, encouraging more foot traffic and tying the “hip” areas (Burnside and the Pearl District) closer to downtown than our Capitol Hill and Queen Anne are to our central business district. This lack of topological barriers between the business district and residential districts is the chief reason why Portland has a downtown high school and supermarket and we don’t. (Of course, it didn’t help that Seattle closed Queen Anne High in the ’70s.)

Seattle’s transportation and sprawl problems haven’t been solved, and probably can’t be solved, by professional bureaucrats acting by fiat. It’s the bureaucrats we’ve got who’ve made such a mess of Sound Transit, led the fight against the Monorail, and helped promote sprawl. (Remember that failed state transportation referendum last November, that would’ve given trickles of cash to transit and gushes of cash to more suburban highways?)

Dietrich, and the Times, want a Seattle with more potentials for insider dealmaking and fewer democratic checks and balances. I want better. So, I’m certain, do most area residents. And that doesn’t suck at all.

Like you, we have many dreams and hopes for Ought-Three. We’d like to think no year could be more awful than Ought-Two, but the pro-war politicians keep promising otherwise.

Still, we must hope. Our first hope, natch, is that the purveyors of Armageddon Lite (in this and other countries) be thwarted from their dark dream. We’ve other dreams as well. In our ideal Ought-Three:

• The architects who design ugly, inhospitable office buildings would have to move their own offices into them, instead of hogging all the remaining funky old buildings for themselves.
• Some bigshot economist will realize you can’t maintain a national economy that depends on consumer spending if you systematically decimate the spending power of all non-zillionaires.
• Corporate de-consolidation will begin naturally, without the need for legislation, as unweildy conglomerates (particularly in the media) continue their steady march toward fiscal collapse.
• Indie films will cover topics other than the supposedly wacky lives of indie filmmakers.
• Kazaa and QuarkXPress finally come out for Mac OS X.
• Looney Tunes finally come out on DVD.
• Somebody figures out that if “freedom” is what makes this country distinguishable from the alleged bad guys, then our people should have more freedoms, not fewer.
• City Hall figures out that the answer to every problem is not necessarily a subsidized construction project.
• G.W. Bush finally doesn’t get something he wants. Like a war, for instance.

UPDATE: The lovely computer recently offered below has indeed been sold. (Thank you.)

The amazing Nikon Coolpix 995 digital camera, however, remains available at this new weblink. (Ignore the previous link below).

DEPT. OF MISPLACED PRIORITIES: I like to imagine I wrote something two and a half years ago bitching about the city’s then-craze for palatial new buildings, a craze that ignored the little matter of secure longterm funding for the programs to be operated within the spaces. Alas, I now realize I had been more wishy-washy about that than I should’ve been. But then again, so were many others. Case in point: The Seattle Public Library (see final item in linked article), suffering drastic budget cuts even whilst its palatial new HQ continues a-buildin’.

Now that we’re into serious recessionary times, you might think political priorities would change. I don’t expect them to. Look for Seattle’s politicians (except Nick Licata), under marching orders from the construction companies and unions, to proclaim the urgent need to prop up local employment and consumer spending by launching even more bond-funded megaprojects.

I CALL THIS LITTLE IMAGE Church Under Wraps. It was taken at a Catholic parish on Roosevelt Way currently undergoing a major structural and landscaping overhaul. If you wish to see it as a metaphor for Catholicism itself in disarray, you might as well do so.

Seems like everybody in the civic establishment, and in the just-outside groups lobbying the civic establishment, wants to get rid of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Seattle Times wants it gone. The P-I wants it gone. Allied Arts of Seattle wants it gone. And most influentually, Paul Allen wants it gone.

I want it to stay.

By far, it’s Seattle’s most scenic and romantic higher-speed roadway. Driving north on it at night is a visual definition of coming home to Seattle–the office towers shining to your right, Elliott Bay peacefully slumbering to your left. (And that sudden off-ramp onto Marion Street is always a mini thrill ride.) On the few days a year pedestrians can use it, it becomes a heaven of undiscovered angles and photographic possibilities.

Of course, I know the 51-year-old Viaduct can’t stay, at least not in its current incarnation. It’s not earthquake-safe, it’s built on unstable landfill, and the seawall holding up the landfill is itself old and decaying.

This provides the civic-builder clique with the perfect excuse to demand the viaduct’s replacement–not with another elevated scenic drive but with a tunnel. And on the ground level above the tunnel, the parking lots and low-rent storefronts of today’s Alaskan Way would be tossed aside as an unwanted memory of a working-class past the city’s elite would rather forget. In its place: What Times guest writer and architect Karen DeLucas calls “a great urban oasis” comprising “a rich dynamic series of urban places linked together by a pedestrian promenade that stretches the entire length of the Seattle waterfront.”

Feel free to read that as Seattle Commons II: A squeaky-clean, hyper-bland, fantasy playplace for the upscale and the tourists, openly intended to drive up surrounding property values and drive out any remaining outposts of the non-affluent.

Or, as Times columnist James Vesely writes of today’s waterfront, “The cheesy tourist strip was OK for a different Seattle, but there are grander things that could be done, and why not dream them?”

Well, I’ve got my own dreams on what to do with the waterfront. And keeping the cheesy tourist strip, even expanding it, is #2 or #3 on my list.

The rise of containerized cargo and shipboard fish processing means we can’t return the old stevedore docks to their original uses. But we can preserve their current uses–unpretentiously entertaining the citizenry with fish n’ chips under radiant heating units, ferry rides, ice cream cones, street vendors, sea-otter displays, Imax movies, souvenir-plate stores, Sylvester the Mummy, and the occasional tugboat race or Flaming Lips concert. These fine attractions could be enhanced with selective additions, which might include an amusement park with a kickass roller coaster, a summer-long “street fair,” some more exotic-import shops, some nighttime hot spots, fire eaters, stilt walkers, cabaret acts, and, of course, the Kalakala.

Just up from the water, Alaskan Way and its immediate environs between Spokane and Seneca Streets would become, in my dream, a covered (though not fully rain-protected) year-round anything-goes zone. Bars in this zone would have no mandated closing times. Pedestrians (though not drivers) would be permitted to carry open containers along what would be an all-night party place.

Beneath the street and above a traffic tunnel, a new “underground Seattle” would let grownups play safely out of sight from the family-values types: Casinos, strip clubs, rave clubs, odd performance-art venues, etc. South of Washington Street, it would turn into an “Amsterdam West” district offering red-light experiences for consenting adults of all persuasions.

Above the street, a new and seismically-correct viaduct would offer three or four lanes of slow, scenic traffic on its top tier (everyday traffic would be encouraged to take the tunnel). The new viaduct’s lower tier would be a covered pedestrian and bicycle way, with P-Patch planting boxes and art installations, alongside a monorail branch line.

Yeah, it’d all cost money. (Although my plan has more potentially rentable and taxable aspects than the plan the Times likes.) Yeah, it’d need rezoning. Yeah, it’d face political opposition.

But Vesely says we’ve gotta have big dreams if we want this city to become a better place. And my dreams are bigger, and more fun, than his will ever be.

IT’S PHOTO DAY TODAY, starting with some more examples of American business standing up for our nation (don’t you dare imagine any commercial exploitation of the popular emotions could be involved.)

First, it’s good to know the bowling pins of America refuse to be knocked over by internal divisiveness…

…And almost as good to know that giant balloon eagles are valiantly defending our right to consume mass quantities of imported oil to power our big-ass RVs.

Meanwhile, some folks who had other ideas about America and commerce staged protests across the nation on Saturday. Locally, rallies took place at Westlake Park, the Seattle Central campus, and at Broadway and East Thomas Street (where activists staged a symbolic “Take Back the Streets” exercise in the middle of the intersection.)

Whilst phalanxes of cops protected oil-company assets, peaceful advocated advocated peace. Peace was about the only thing all the protesters seemed to be for (some attendeess also expressed support for the Palestinian cause).

The protests across the country were ostensibly about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Protest leaders have depicted the organizations as loan sharks, ruining the economies of Third World countries for the benefit of big global corporations. But, as often happens in a lefty gathering, topic drift abounded.

So you got bashers of the Bush oil policy, the Bush Mideast policy, the sanctions against (and potential invasion of) Iraq, the war on drugs, SUVs, domestic banks, and capitalism in general.

Later on Saturday, about 100 fans of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley held a quiet vigil at the Seattle Center International Fountain. Staley, 34, was found dead at his University District home late Friday night; probably from an overdose.

In his songs and in interviews, Staley frequently admitted that he’d used heroin and that it had turned his life into a living hell. His lyrical imagery was perfectly matched by the band’s music–heavy metal dirges, often slow and pounding.

By 1993 AIC’s brutal and tragic aesthetic, unrelieved by the pop-punk energy of Mudhoney or the cynical wit of Nirvana, had come to most purely embody what many people (including most rock people in Seattle) claimed they hated about the media’s “Seattle Scene” stereotype. By 1996, Staley had essentially retired from making music. He seldom appeared in public, stopped performing live, and contributed to only a handful of new recorded songs. The few friends who kept in contact with him didn’t talk.

A Stranger gossip item last year said he’d been seen, looking presumably healthy, at a local club. A lot of us wanted to believe it. Instead, it now turns out to have been one of many unsuccessful sobriety attempts.

Staley never glamorized drug use. His songs and interviews spoke plainly of heroin’s momentary joy and lingering sadness. He lived in a private hell; it ultimately didn’t matter that this hell was initially of his own making.

Letter From Astoria

from the Winter 2002 print MISC
by Matthew Stadler

ASTORIA, OREGON is a city of 10,000, covering most of a hilly peninsula where the Youngs River meets the Columbia and the two empty into the Pacific. The weather is severe, astonishing, and the city itself is very old, first settled in 1811.

It is a city, not a town. Taxicabs navigate the narrow grid of downtown streets, shadowed by a tall art-deco hotel, office blocks, and brick apartment buildings. There are alleyways, canneries along the waterfront, secret tunnels under ground–all the stuff of literature, which Astoria has in fact become. It was a novel (Washington Irving’s eponymous international best-seller of 1836) 15 years before Seattle was even a single roofless cabin.

I moved here last year, to a huge, derelict house I bought for about two-thirds what my one-bedroom apartment in Seattle had cost.

THE UNIONTOWN Steam Bath, just below the porn shop, opened in 1928 and is still in business. I go there on Thursdays, sometimes Fridays and Saturdays too. On Saturday there’s a beer party in the “men’s public sauna”–a cooler full of Hamm’s, plus foam collars for the beers so the steam doesn’t warm them.

The talk is animated and coarse, sometimes clever: A call to bomb Berkeley for its rumored stance against the American war in Afghanistan is shouted down by bikers who point out that neighboring Oakland is world headquarters for the Hell’s Angels. Partisans take sides. New clearcutting on state forest land is both attacked and applauded. Bush is differentiated from Cheney, Cheney from Ashcroft, and each is allotted subtly calibrated degrees of contempt or admiration.

This steam bath is the kind of civil society I recall from Holland, the last place I lived where people conducted public discourse in the nude. Like Holland, Astoria enjoys a robust libertarianism that seems driven primarily by the capitalist instinct for free exchange, unhindered by morals.

I tell friends Astoria is just like San Francisco, if San Francisco had collapsed after the gold rush. The operative word is collapse.

Astoria has been failing for longer than most of the urban Northwest has existed. It is a comfortable, even attractive, place to fail. No city has done it longer.

IT WAS FOUNDED by a New York fur trader and venture capitalist named John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world at the time (described in his obituary as a “self-invented money-making machine”). Astor financed an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia to build a city that would monopolize the nascent Pacific fur trade. It was America’s first infusion of capital into the region; the rest, as they say, is history.

I like to call the whole Northwest “Greater Astoria,” as a reminder that its operative ecology has been shaped as much by the circulation of capital as by the circulation of water, an assertion made by the detestable name “Cascadia.” “Cascadia” is this region’s last nature poem; I prefer Greater Astoria’s tale of heedless capital and urbanization.

If anything marks us, it is that capital–with all of its hunger for motion and speed–arrived here, free from the burden of institutions that in every other place had slowed its movement: Family, church, even rudimentary humanist values like decency, self-determination or respect, were, in effect, absent here as capital made its giant sucking sound and mobilized every dormant resource (from trees to fish to minerals to men) with impunity.

This unbridled behemoth also brought a rich harvest of delayed, reactionary initiatives: The defense of human rights through organized labor; utopian experiments proposing economies free of money; an abiding ecological sensibility. Greater Astoria’s marriage of great exploitation and reactionary retrenchments is simply what unhindered capital looks like.

Astor failed here (though his name stuck), fur dwindled, and fisheries, canning, and logging rose to replace it. These three collapsed and returned, variously, from the mid-19th to the late-20th centuries, while inland vacationers arrived to pursue their seasonal entertainments. Then people like me began to settle, modems in hand.

MIRACULOUSLY–and uniquely among this region’s many failed emporia–Astoria today belongs to no one faction. It is a heterogenous city where no single industry nor social stratum dominates.

Stray tourists endure the stink of fish processing to watch sea lions scarf guts off the pier. Out-of-work loggers swim laps with seniors at the new city pool. An ex-Marine peddles his lefty newspaper (in its 26th year) from the used bookstore where he clerks on Saturdays. Job Corps kids from Tongue Point gather in knots by the movie theater. Idle salmon fishermen strategize over cocktails at the Feed Lot. A German software genius learns carving from a guy in Warrenton who’s now part-time at the mill. In Astoria everyone stays “afloat” because the water level has dropped so low.

Everything’s cheap here, and there’s a lot of it. I live in a towering 100-year-old house built by a riverboat captain on his retirement. I had thought I was very lucky to find it; but it turns out Astoria has hundreds of such houses (and mine is an especially run-down example). The city has never had enough money for urban renewal; so everything stays as it was, most of it in poor repair.

Victorian and craftsman houses dominate, the legacy of 19th century maritime and logging wealth, while downtown there’s a lot of art deco. (A fire wiped out downtown’s center in 1922; the next year it was rebuilt in brick and terra cotta.)

Amidst the older stuff there are surpassing examples of post-WW II design, from a ’60s four-story apartment complex (in a fabulous double-winged “V”) perched near the hill’s crest, to a neatly modulated necklace of woodsy ’70s apartments stair-stepping down the slope, to an astonishingly brutal Soviet-style apartment block straight out of Zagreb, pitched up out of the river on concrete pillars.

The result is a kind of encyclopedic mini-museum of architecture, small enough to wander in. Late at night, while most of the city sleeps and only the restless taxis drift through the empty streets, I go out to observe these treasures (most of which are, for better or worse, for sale).

OH, THERE ARE PROBLEMS. Astoria has no decent wine store. (You should start one.) Local sheriffs nearly killed a tree-sitter by driving him batty with lights and loud music, then cutting all the branches off his tree. Those Job Corps kids hang out at the movie theater because there’s no place else to go except a Christian-only youth center. Live music is generally lousy.

Fishermen can’t make a profit, no matter how big the runs get. Poverty drives a lot of lives here. In Astoria it’s all pretty visible, but at least there’s no higher station toward which to claw.

As a result, the bars are friendly. Denizens of the High Climber Room don’t turn their hickory-shirted backs to book-toting wine-drinkers like me. In Forks, WA, by contrast, I never dared ask about wine. The cocktail slinger at the Voodoo lounge takes food stamps (don’t rat on him), while in Port Townsend bars courting tourists treat local poverty as the mark of the devil (unless it’s that cultivated brand of poverty self-righteously called “voluntary simplicity”). Meanwhile, down on Astoria’s waterfront, hippies dance with fishermen at the Wet Dog.

THERE ARE BATTLES here, but what is there to win?

Astoria’s future pivots on a handful of questions: Will the community college be allowed to move onto a downtown site that could revitalize year-around pedestrian business in the city? Will environmental concerns curtail logging of old growth and other rare forests in the surrounding county? Will the planning board relax long-standing laws against larger chain stores and allow them inside the city limits? Will opposition to the deepening of the Columbia River channel succeed and make Astoria a much busier port by preventing upriver traffic? How will fishermen survive the reductions in bottom fish quotas and populations?

AFTER THE STEAM bath I drink at the Elks Lodge, sitting by the bandstand of an art-deco ballroom looking out on downtown.

Delinquents loiter by the courthouse. Taxis speed past, on their way to pick up drunks in Uniontown, where bars cluster in the shadow of the bridge. Noise from the cannery echoes up the hill, running all night to handle this year’s freakish sardine run, the biggest in 95 years. Container ships taller than downtown slip past the docks and block out the sky.

I can’t think of a better place to spend hard times.

As promised a couple weeks back, here is my preliminary list of some of what I love about this nation of ours. Thanks for your emailed suggestions; more are quite welcome.)

• Corn dogs, and the proud people who make and serve them.
• 217 cable channels, at least 10 of which are showing the same dumb movie at any given time.
• Upbeat/consensual pornos in every known fetish.
• Urban intersections with a Starbucks on every corner.
• Suburban intersections with a 7-Eleven on every corner.
• September issues of Vogue thicker than the models.
• Fabulous babes coast to coast, many of whom have powerful careers.
• Boys happily puking into bushes at Florida Spring Break.
• Dr. Seuss, Mary Engelbreit, Charles Schulz, James Thurber, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and Dan Clowes.
• Fudge-banana swirl ice cream.
• Dodge Darts.
• The Internet, MP3s, chat rooms, multi-user dungeons, and QuickTime movies.
• Jack Benny, Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Looney Tunes, and Corey Feldman.
• The gum that goes squirt.
• Novelty stores with chocolate nipples and penis candles.
• The sports-book room at the Cal-Neva casino in Reno.
• The films of Russ Meyer and John Waters.
• The long lonesome highway, and the proud truckers and tourists who traverse it every day.
• Ann-Margaret, Betty Page, Mae West, Willa Cather, Beverly Cleary, Ella Grasso, Susan B. Anthony, Marilyn Chambers, and Jessamyn West.
• Sleazy detective magazines, “true crime” books, film noir.
• The Brooklyn Bridge, the Gateway Arch, the Brown Derby, and the Corn Palace.
• Anyone can grow up to become a corrupt politician or a sneak-thief business executive.
• Summer in Anchorage, winter in Honolulu, autumn in New England, and spring in Seattle.
• Old Faithful, the Mammoth Caves, Monument Valley, and the Trees of Mystery.
• Dollywood, Opryland, Wisconsin Dells, Wall Drug, Enchanted Village, and the Bible theme parks of Florida.
• All-you-can-eat buffets and bottomless cups of coffee.
• BBQ beef, Cajun catfish, smoked salmon, chicken nuggets, and pork rinds.
• Potato chips, ice cream cones, Hostess Sno-Balls, and non-dairy creamer.
• Crossword puzzles.
• Gene Rayburn, Betty White, Garry Moore, Bill Cullen, and Charles Nelson Reilly.
• David Letterman, Johnny Carson, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Fred Allen, Ricki Lake, Sandy Hill, and Rosie O’Donnell.
• Indie motels with fantastical neon signs.
• Butter-Lite flavor microwave popcorn.
• No-fault divorce.
• Retractable-roof stadia.
• Millions of assorted cults (religious, celebrity, musical, medical, investment, etc. etc.).
• Muddy Waters, Ethel Waters, and Barbara Walters.
• Bix Beiderbecke, Dizzy Gillespie, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Wayne Horvitz, and Raymond Scott.
• Julie London, Vikki Carr, the Andrews Sisters, the Mills Brothers, Motown, Phil Spector, the Ventures, the Ramones, the B-52s, and the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Wine bars, sports bars, pickup bars, pickup trucks, monster trucks, semi rigs, and fork lifts.
• Aaron Copland, Henry Partch, Charles Ives, Frank Zappa, and the Residents.
• Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, Tammy Wynette, Chet Atkins, Duane Eddy, Tex Ritter, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Kitty Wells, and Homer & Jethro.
• Pulp magazines, bodice-ripper paperbacks, and $100 collector’s editions of Walden.
• The Big Mouth Billy Bass, the Kitchen Magician, the Pocket Fisherman, and the George Forman Grilling Machine.
• Lou Piniella, “Louie Louie,” Louis Prima, Louis Jordan, Joe Louis, Tina Louise, and Louise Bourgeois.
• Miss America, Miss December, miscagenation, and Ms. magazine.
• Simon & Schuster, Simon & Garfunkel, and Simon & Simon.
• Folks from all the rest of the world are here.
• Quite a lot of the things I love about other countries are here too.

(This article’s permanent link.)

JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER AND NIKOS A. SALINGAROS WRITE:

” We are convinced that the age of skyscrapers is at an end. It must now be considered an experimental building typology that has failed. Who will ever again feel safe and comfortable working 110 stories above the ground? Or sixty stories? Or even twenty-seven?

“We predict that no new megatowers will be built, and existing ones are destined to be dismantled. This will lead to a radical transformation of city centers–which, however, would be an immensely positive step towards improving the quality of urban life.”

CORWIN HAECK WRITES:

“Not quite a morbid aside, but this occurred to me early in the unfolding of the story: Some buildings are just too damn tall.

“I always felt that way about the World Trade Center. Not only were they too tall, but they visually unbalanced the entire island of Manhattan. The towers, by virtue of being featureless, untapered rectangles, looked top-heavy and ungainly.

I admire some tall buildings. The Empire State Bldg. is a brilliant classic. The Patronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are too tall but at least look cool. Overall, though, most really tall buildings are excessive and ugly.

“Now we see again that they can be targets, too.

“The loss of life in this attack is terrible. The loss of the buildings is no tragedy.”

I miss the old downtown Seattle library already.

Granted, it was far more blase than the Carnegie-era palace it had replaced in 1959 (of which, of course, I’ve seen only exterior photos). And, granted, it was a severely rotting work of slipshod “modern” construction, a relic of the same budget-conscious administration that gave us the also-slowly-collapsing current city hall.

But it was also a relic of the same jet-age optimism that gave us the ’62 World’s Fair. It abounded with “clean” lines, tall ceilings, and a populistic openness of space.

And as of last Friday, it’s closed and will soon be demolished. The temporary library in the new part of the Convention Center (closer to my home but still just a rental) won’t open for a month. ‘Til then, the self-researching investment gurus, Mormon geneologists, and homeless folks looking for a temporary indoor sitting space are outta luck.

ON OTHER SITES:

“The opposite of smooth is sexual….”

“Why e-business needs feminine energy….”

Art photos, old catfight-fetish paperback covers, and 1957 cocktail-party invvitations are just some of the tasteful attractions at Art and Leisure….

IT’S BEEN A WILD COUPLE OF WEEKS for many of us. So today, something lighter, from my forthcoming Seattle photo book with ace shutter-clicker Lori Lynn Mason.

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I believed the Interstate Highway System was one of the things that ruined American society in my lifetime.

It destroyed urban neighborhoods, ripped cities’ internal social fabric, and propagated suburban sprawl. It destroyed the glorious creativity that was once roadside America, and instead gave us malls and bland chain motels.

But I’ve more recently learned to like a few things about the freeways, particularly our own I-5. Still not necessarily as a road, but as an engineering feat and a public artwork.

So it was easy to see the idea behind a poster some folks put up around town last year, trying to promote car-free and greener cities. The poster’s illustration of a fantasized post-car future had I-5 still standing (as was the Kingdome), only used for bicycles and P-Patch gardens.

There’s a beauty to the freeway, both graceful and grandiose.

Especially where it rises into the sky, and where its lanes combine and recombine with other highways’ lanes. Such spots include the Spokane Street interchange with the West Seattle freeway, and the almost Greek-ruin-esque pillars west of Capitol Hill.

The freeway’s sheer, outscaled beauty in these places makes one almost forgive its sins.

Almost.

NEXT: Another piece of the Seattle character–its work ethic.

ELSEWHERE:

• Selling Buddhism to hip white Americans: Emphasize the meditation and the personal growth, leave out the religion and the self-discipline….

ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITE HAUNTS closed last week.

The Ditto Tavern was one of the tiny joints where, in the mid-to-late ’80s, you could see the likes of Green River, Soundgarden, Andrew Wood, and the other unsung heroes of what was still a very underground local alterna-rock scene. The place was willing to book this stuff because it was a tiny spot, well off of Belltown’s foot-traffic patterns, and hence needed to attract a “destination” clientele.

But as the Seattle scene actually got popular, the little out-of-the-way Ditto could no longer compete for acts with any real following. The place’s old owner seemed unable or unwilling to do anything to improve its situation.

It closed in early ’98 and reopened that fall, under new management and with a very handsome orange-and-black paint scheme. I was in a fairly decent drinking mode that fall, having been hired from a longtime post, and enjoyed having another regular hangout.

It had good pub meals and 21 (count ’em!) micros and imports on tap. It was clean and bright and had good rotating art exhibits. It did a good lunch business and had a modest but loyal regular evening crowd.

But the location problem remained a problem; and without the capital to hire enough relief staff, Lydia the new owner went on a slow-n’-steady road to burnout.

So when the building’s owner announced plans to raze the whole half-block for yet another office-retail midrise, she was, as she told me later, only too happy to get the heck outta Belltown.

Besides, she said, the type of people she wanted as customers seemed to have all moved away from the neighborhood. The affluent new condo dwellers, furthermore, don’t walk around in the neighborhood, preferring to drive to and from their secured garages.

Belltown really lost its “artist neighborhood” status back in ’97 or so; with the demolition of the SCUD studios (a.k.a. “the Jell-O mold building”) as the signature event of this loss. Developers of condo tower in the neighborhood continue to advertise their luxury homes with hype-words about the “lively urban creativity” their projects have already kicked out–or which the new condo dwellers immediately attempt to kick out, via lobbying for enhanced zoning and anti-noise regulations.

(And no, I don’t consider architects’ offices to be “art studios” or $100-a-plate restaurants to be “avant-hip nightspots.”)

Just don’t count on any potential ’01 economic recession to change this trend. All it might mean is a few projects could take a little longer to get off the ground, and the resulting new abodes could be merely ridiculously expensive instead of obscenely expensive.

So with the situation unlikely to change on its own, perhaps an urban-preservation movement is in order. But I don’t mean that old kind of urban preservation, in which ancient meat-packing plants, brothels, and horse stables were “restored to their original elegance.”

I mean a preservation of usages, not just of structures.

Other activists and thinkers have already suggested officially designating certain buildings (or spaces within buildings) for below-market-rent artist use. I’d go further, and designate certain parts of certain “urban village” neighborhoods for affordable housing (artist and otherwise), non-luxury retail, and entertainment (including bars and live-music clubs). Folks who move into a block that a live-music club is on will be told as they move in that they can’t just kick the music people out.

None of this would’ve saved the Ditto, whose problems were endemic from its first opening. But maybe they’ll save what’s left of the ol’ Belltown scene on First through Fourth Avenues.

And, just maybe, if there does turn out to be an oversupply of luxury home units in Belltown this year, the purveyors of those units might be willing to participate in a scheme that would limit or even cut back these units’ inventory, thus keeping the prices of the remaining units from falling too far.

NEXT: The bad old days of energy crises–they’re baaaaaaaack.

ELSEWHERE:

• “The ONLY website dedicated entirely to recipes that use candy bars as an ingredient….”

TODAY AND TOMORROW, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #1: The 211 Club pool hall abandoned its increasingly costly Belltown space after 16 years (following more than 40 years at its previous site where Benaroya Hall is now). It was something Belltown, and Seattle in general, is rapidly losing–a classy and unpretentious gathering place, a timeless and fadless site for serious playing without noise or capital-A Attitude.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #2: Montgomery Ward is closing its last 299 stores after 106 or so years in business. Most news articles about the closure claimed Wards had lost its market niche to newer chains like Wal-Mart and Target. But the roots of Wards’ decline go back many decades earlier, to its rule by a bullhorn company president named Sewell Avery.

In his prime, Avery brought color photography and modern graphic design to the Wards catalogs; and spearheaded the company’s expansion into retail stores.

But he became both dictatorial and senile. There’s a famous photo of him being forcibly carried out of his office in 1944 by Federal agents, because he’d refused to obey War Production Board quotas regarding the use of scarce materials for consumer goods.

In the postwar years Avery got even odder–he kept the retail stores at a uniform size and building style (two stories plus a basement and half-story mezzanine), small and unresponsive to local market conditions. Then he decided the catalog was too risque, and ordered that all women’s fashions except coats were to be photographed on dress forms, not live models or even mannequins.

By the time Wards’ board of directors finally had enough votes to oust Avery, the chain had become a distant competitor to Sears and Penney’s, and never caught up. It junked its “big book” catalog a decade before Sears did, and retreated from a national retail presence to a few select regions where it could afford to compete.

Even in some of those, such as Portland, it found itself shut out of major mall projects and had to build freestanding stores far from the peak car-traffic zones. Such companies as Mobil Oil and GE invested millions to keep Wards alive, but to no ultimate avail.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #3: Oldsmobile was America’s oldest car brand, but the General Motors top brass, in their infinite ignorance, didn’t know what to do with it. It had long ago become the odd leftover in GM’s grand market-segmentation strategies; it offered few models that weren’t renamed versions of other GM products.

Olds’s final end wasn’t a casualty of imports or SUVs, but an admission that GM couldn’t think of anything to do with it anymore.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #4: When KOMO-TV put up its grandiose new building, I was unaware the station was going to promptly demolish its old building. It was a beautiful work of postwar, post-Deco architecture.

At a garage sale once, I managed to obtain the big color brochure commemorating the building’s opening in ’46. That was still in the so-called Golden Age of Radio; but KOMO was already planning to expand into TV, and built its new broadcasting palace with that in mind. But the Truman Administration froze new TV licenses soon after KING-TV got on the air.

KOMO-TV had to wait until ’54 to start up. It got the local NBC affiliation, and within two years had the region’s first color cameras (one of which is now on display in the Lincoln-Mercury showroom up on Aurora). But then KING snatched the NBC franchise in ’59, leaving KOMO with ABC (whose market position then was comparable to UPN’s today).

All that history, and four decades’ worth more, were in the old building at Fourth and Denny. Boomerang, the local kiddie show hosted by former Hollywood voice-over singer Marni Nixon. Assorted Town Meetings and AM NWs and Northwest Afternoons. Keith Jackson’s first sportscasts. That still-harrowing film footage from a news photographer who got caught in the Mt. St. Helens ash storm.

All that’s left of the building are the memories, whatever tapes the station’s kept, and a small pile of rubble (which, admittedly, gave folks standing on Denny a better view of the Space Needle fireworks on 1/1).

TOMORROW: A few more sad tales of this type.

ELSEWHERE:

• The worst movies of 2001! (found by Fark)….
• The religious origins of bland American foods….