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HERE’S ANOTHER BATCH of mini photo features on recycled and “restored” buildings around town, plus one building that thankfully hasn’t been “restored” to anything, at least not yet.
Almost eight years later, some clueless out-of-towners still expect to find Seattle crawling with the sorts of aimless young slackers and garage-banders they think they remember from Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles–even though the film’s episodic vignettes mostly involved four very clean-cut young adults who were getting real careers underway whilst undergoing assorted relationship misadventures. The movie’s principal exterior location was the Coryell Court Apartments, already a familiar sight due to its prominent location on the #43 bus line.
This utilitarian brick industrial building on Western Avenue was originally a box factory. Then it housed job-printers Frayn Publishing. Then it was a warehouse for Northwest (now National) Mobile Television, a former KING-TV subsidiary that provides remote trucks for televised sports events. Now, it’s luxury condos (with two additional floors of penthouse “lofts” just added on), plus those two additional occupants every non-demolished old Belltown building seems to be getting–a restaurant and an architects’ office.
KIRO-TV was the last of Seattle’s original TV stations to go on the air, debuting in 1958 (a full decade after KING). For its first 11 years, it operated from this former church building atop Queen Anne Hill, adjacent to its transmission tower. During those years, it was a solid #3 in local-news ratings, and depended for profits on network shows and the still-legendary J.P. Patches local kids’ show. The building’s current tenants include an aerobics center and an Italian restaurant.
While the main entrance of the Bethel Temple evangelical church was “modernized” in the 1950s, the rest of the building’s facade (and much of its interior) remains from the building’s original use, a public swimming pool or “natatorium” (it used salt water, piped in from Elliott Bay and heated). The church already sold the land it had owned across the street, where World Pizza and several small galleries had been, for condos; now it’s preparing to vacate its own building. The developers promise to maintain some of the old natatorium facade in the new building; preservation activists want the whole thing saved as a historic site.
TOMORROW: Hedonism as a non-revolutionary stance.
ELSEWHERE:
FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.
Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite historical era:
Favorite website:
Favorite Pokemon character:
Favorite word:
What this decade should be called:
My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:
I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:
Favorite local band/musician:
The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:
How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:
What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):
MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION
What should be done with Schell:
What should be done with Microsoft:
What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.
FOR THE FIFTH TIME, here are some looks at recycled real estate around my town. This time, there’s more-or-less a theme: Places that had their moments in the movies.
Second Avenue in Belltown used to be Seattle’s “Film Row.” Movies were neither made nor publicly shown there, but the big studios had their regional distribution offices there. Many were in the Screen Services building at Second & Battery, long since razed for the Belltown Court condos. Still surviving across Battery are the ex-Paramount office (more recently housing the Catholic Seamen’s Club and the Milky World gallery) and the ex-MGM office (currently housing a card shop, a fabric store, and the Lush Life restaurant).
Across Second Avenue from the Lush Life is the Rendezvous Restaurant’s Jewel Box Theater, which had been a promotional screening room used by the local distribution branches of all the major film distributors. It’s where they’d promote their latest offerings to theater operators. The room itself was a miniature movie theater; the display showroom for a theater-design company operating in the same building. During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, firms such as this would build and completely equip a movie house wherever you wanted one built, based on a complete prototype plan. Today’s strip-mall multiplexes are also often built from prototype plansÑjust much less beautiful plans.
Few feature films were shot in Seattle before the ’60s. One of the first was The Slender Thread (1965). The movie was constructed around the producers’ desire to cast Sidney Poitier with a white actress but with no romance (this was a couple years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?). So Poitier ended up playing a Crisis Clinic volunteer called by suicidal housewife Anne Bancroft. (The two characters never meet on screen.) Exteriors of Poitier’s office were shot at what was then the real Crisis Clinic HQ, in this lo-rise Eastlake Avenue building.
The Union Street side of Benaroya Hall used to be a temporary park (as seen in the film American Heart). Before that, it was a construction-staging area for the Metro bus tunnel. Before that, it was the original 211 Club, a billiard palace now relocated to Belltown. The old 211 served as the titular location in David Mamet’s 1987 movie House of Games, in which card shark Joe Mantegna plays a complex scam on psychiatrist Lindsay Crouse. Her office scenes were filmed at the old AFLN gallery building on Capitol Hill (the Madison Market grocery and condos are now on that site).
This site on Lenora Street has housed several different kinds of restaurants over the last decade (another’s soon to open). None of those real eateries was anything like the boistrious diner set there in Alan Rudolph’s 1985 film Trouble in Mind. Run by Genvieve Bujold, it was a classic checkerboard-floored, cuppa-joe joint the likes of which this town sees far too little of these days. The same film used what’s now the Seattle Asian Art Museum as the private mansion of a slimy crime lord (played in male dress by Divine), decorated completely by Seattle contemporary artists.
Singles, Hype!, and Kurt & Courtney depicted the “Seattle Music Scene” the kids know and love; but The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) depicted a “scene” Seattle civic officials would much rather promote–piano bars and lounge singers. Beau and Jeff Bridges are the ivory-ticklin’ boys; Michelle Pfeiffer’s the torch queen who rescues Jeff from an existence of sullen solitude and tawdry sex. We know about the latter because of a brief scene, shot in the apartments above the 2 Dagos From Texas restaurant, with Jeff and a character identified in the credits only as “Girl in Bed” (played by Terri Treas, later on TV’s Alien Nation).
TOMORROW: What to do with that leftover Y2K-survival stuff.
IN OTHER NEWS: Remember, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t really the meek-and-mild dreamer of latter-day corporate PR….
HERE’S A THIRD SET of recycled real-estate mini-essays. The theme this time is relics of bank mergers, something with which readers across the country can identify.
The recent retirement of the “Seafirst Bank” brand by Bank of America means the end of what had been the dominant name in Washington banking since the pioneer days, when Dexter Horton ran a private storefront bank with a single safe in the back. Horton’s company was the oldest of several that merged by the 1930s into Seattle-First National Bank. Its standardized branch-bank design of the late ’40s, best seen at the 6th and Denny branch, is a classic of neighborhood-retail architecture.
This early-’60s bank branch at 3rd and Wall was a monument to car-culture–the entire ground level is drive-up booths and parking, plus an escalator to the raised walk-in building. It’s also a monument to the industry consolidations of the past 15 years. It began as a unit of National Bank of Commerce, which changed its name to Rainier Bank. Then, thanks to mergers, it became in turn a part of Security Pacific Bank, WestOne Bank, the Portland-based U.S. Bank, and the Minnesota-based Firstbank Systems (which kept the U.S. Bank name but changed the logo).
America’s cities are strewn with the former main-office towers of local and regional banks that have since been merged or sold. A three-block radius of 4th & Union in downtown Seattle contains the former Pacific First Federal Building (now U.S. Bank Centre), Puget Sound Bank Plaza (now Puget Sound Plaza), Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Square), and this, the former HQ of Peoples Bank (“Member FDIC and the Human Race”), now refitted as a Cavanaugh’s Hotel. A few blocks south are the former Seattle Trust Court (now Marion Court) and the former Seafirst Columbia Center (now Bank of America Tower).
I once worked as an office temp on the 13th floor of the Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Square), just as the bank was preparing to merge out of existence. The concrete pedastel contains storage rooms and heating/plumbing equipment, saving space on the upper floors for more office room. Built in ’75, it replaced a stately lo-rise structure, the White-Henry-Stuart Building. The surviving Cobb Medical Building across 4th Ave. is a shortened replica of the WHS Building’s old full-block design, and preserves an old WHS Indian-head gargoyle in its facade.
The Seattle Times is known among local insiders as “Fairview Fanny,” from the handsome Fairview Ave. building it’s occupied since 1930. Before that, the paper had a smaller, triangular building at 5th & Stewart, still known as Times Square. Its front entrance was gussied-up a little in the ’80s, when Washington Mutual Savings Bank opened a branch on the ground floor. Last year, the bank branch moved across the street to the Pacific Place mall (built on the former site of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s pre-1948 building); allowing the stoic Times Square facade to now be used for the selling of golf clubs.
TOMORROW: Bad Xmas gift and card ideas.
ON WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
Along with the rest of the high-tech and e-commerce industries, MS has brought this once-forgotten corner of America into full boomtown mode.
And, along with the rest of the software and Internet businesses that have grown here, it’s led to a building boom.
Many American cities have gone through boomtown eras this century. Seattle itself had one starting with the 1897 Yukon gold rush and continuing (in greater or lesser spurts) until the 1929 stock crash.
Recent decades have seen booms overtake Denver, Houston, Miami, and (in several waves) Las Vegas.
In each of these, big new buildings have arisen. In most of these, the character of the new buildings has expressed a more extreme, more intense version of the cities’ former character. Houston’s glass towers could be seen as reflecting the same bluster as an old Texas ranch mansion. Miami became even more shallow and glittery. Vegas became even brighter and louder.
Seattle’s current boomtown phase is significantly different from those other booms–precisely because it marks such a break from the city’s heritage. And I don’t just mean behaviorally.
It’s changing the face of the city. But it’s not just replacing old buildings with newer, bigger buildings of the same basic aesthetic.
Boomtown Seattle’s new buildings replace an old local architectural shtick of a quiet engineers’ and lawyers’ town trying desperately to become “world class” and failing spectacularly) with real world-class-osity, expressed in big, costly, and monumental public and semi-public structures.
The Kingdome’s final scheduled event, a Seahawks football game, takes place in 16 days. Sometime between then and the start of baseball season, the Dome will be imploded. In its place will eventually rise a luxury-box-heavy new football stadium, the last of the three structures replacing the Dome’s different functions. Already up: Safeco Field and a new exhibition hall (where Chris Isaak and Squirrel Nut-Zippers will ring in the millennium).
While all three post-Kingdome building projects have substantial public subsidies, all were instigated by software fortunes–Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamauchi for Safeco Field; Paul Allen for the football stadium and the exhibition hall.
Steps away from the soon-to-be ex-Dome, Allen’s refitting the old Union Station as a posh gathering place, and building a fancy new office building next to it.
Allen’s also been involved in the newly rebuilt UW Henry Art Gallery (subtitled “The Faye G. Allen Center for the Arts”), the restored Cinerama Theater, and the sculpture park to be built at the old Union 76 waterfront terminal site; and is the sole sponsor (to date) of the Experience Music Project, the huge blob-shaped pop-music museum rising in the Space Needle’s shadow.
Allen’s erstwhile partner Bill Gates fils has taken smaller, but still significant, roles in putting up the new Seattle Art Museum (essentially the first of Seattle’s current generation of culture palaces) and the big new wing of the UW’s main library, and is contributing to rebuilding neighborhood libraries (just like that prior monopolist, Andrew Carnegie).
And Bill Gates pere, the corporate lawyer, has used his networking skills to help assemble local “old money” (i.e., non-computer-related wealth, from the likes of real estate and broadcasting) to join with the new cyber-rich in backing, and pressuring governments to further back, still other temples: A new symphony hall, a new basketball arena, the Pacific Place shopping temple, a new domed IMAX cinema, new or heavily-remodeled homes for four big theater companies, three old movie palaces reworked for Broadway touring shows, and (announced last month) a rebuilt opera house.
Still to come, with various funding sources: A new central library, a new city hall complex, a rebuilt UW basketball arena, and a light rail network.
On smaller scales, the new Seattle architectural aesthetic has influenced everything from condos to discos to Catholic churches. The new St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle U. is asymmetrical, sparse, and airy–values you’d ordinarily not expect from Jesuits, but would expect from a high-tech town awash in new money.
The Seattle Boeing built was a place that attempted brilliance-on-a-budget. A town that tried to avoid wasteful extravegance even as it wanted the world to notice it.
The Seattle Allen & Gates are building is a place that settles for nothing less than the most spectacular, the most “tastefully” outlandish.
UPDATE: Coronation Street, the long-running U.K. working-class soap opera, is now on the Net. A startup company called iCraveTV is streaming all of Toronto’s over-the-air TV stations to any Net user who can type in a Canadian telephone area code (such as 604, 250, or 416). The stations are taking legal action, to try to stop this unauthorized re-use of their signals. But for now, you can see the Street on the web at 12-12:30 p.m. PT Mon.-Thurs. and 6-8 a.m. PT Sundays. (Click on “CBC” from iCraveTV’s site).
MONDAY: Bad beers I have known.
YESTERDAY, we discussed Coldwater Creek, a new “rustic luxury” clothes-and-home-furnishings store in downtown Seattle.
Fortunately, though, there are still other firms willing to invest in retail spaces for those of us without software-stock-option moolah.
Case in point: Fred Meyer, a chain with a peculiar history.
Back in ’22, Fred G. Meyer started a little drug-and-variety store in downtown Portland. But the chain’s real beginnings are in 1931, when Meyer expanded on the then-new supermarket concept and built a full-block, self-service general store (food, drugs, variety, clothes, hardware) in east Portland’s Hollywood neighborhood (it remained open until 1991). This was over a decade before the first discount stores opened, and almost three decades before Kmart and Wal-Mart first appeared.
Meyer (a lifelong Rosicrucian) lived to be 92, leaving a circuit of “One Stop Shopping Centers” stretching from Alaska to Utah. The chain was taken over by leveraged-buyout kings Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, who later sold off their stake on the open market. The Meyer company then bought other food and drug chains throughout the west, including Seattle’s QFC, before itself getting acquired by Kroger.
Part of the Freddy’s chain’s strategy has been to construct huge stores in free-standing locations. They didn’t like to share customer traffic with malls, downtown or neighborhood storefront shops, or even strip-mall stores other than the few they rented parts of their own buildings to. They made an exception in the ’80s when developer Ken Alhadeff turned their existing Broadway site in Seattle into the Broadway Market minimall (which included a relatively-small Freddy’s store along with other tenants).
When Freddy’s decided to build another Seattle store, they picked an industrial block in Ballard that had housed a defunct steel mill. The site’s not only almost a quarter-mile from any other large retail establishment, it’s a couple blocks away from major arterial streets (it’s actually closer to the Burke-Gilman bike trail). Advocates of retaining industrial jobs in the area fought the plan for years, until a compromise was reached that allowed Freddy’s to use most but not all of the steel-mill lot.
There, Freddy’s built an all-new structure that looks like a string of old industrial buildings (the same retro-utilitarian look found at Safeco Field). From the outside, it looks like it could’ve been one of those abandoned factories turned into shopping centers. On the inside, though, its newness is evident.
It’s a huge place, yet cleanly laid out. And it has most everything a person or family of less-than-spectacular means might want–except any books more obscure than Harry Potter or any music more indie than Shania Twain. (Even though the new store’s just blocks from the recording studio, now known as John & Stu’s Place, where all those seminal “Seattle Scene” records were made).
Unlike discounters, Freddy’s sells brand-name stuff at fair but not-significantly-lower prices. At the twilight of the mass-market age, Freddy’s is still an almost-everything-for-almost-everyone kind of place. And at the dawn of “e-tailing,” Freddy’s is still building huge tangible stores.
How long the Freddy’s business plan can remain viable is anyone’s guess. But if the new Ballard location doesn’t work out, at least it could be reclaimed for making stuff instead of merely selling stuff.
MONDAY: Getting ready for the big world trade protest-a-thon.
AS I MENTIONED HERE a few weeks back, I’m now doing a little thing in the back of a certain self-styled “sleazy tabloid,” out by the real-estate ads.
It’s a little guide to some remaining old buildings, and the stories they have to tell.
Here are a few more examples.
Originally, chain grocery stores were just little neighborhood mom-and-pop stores, only owned by corporations instead of by moms and pops. The biggest chain in the pre-supermarket era, A&P, had 14,000 outlets in 32 states at its peak. Safeway, the west’s first dominant chain, started in Idaho and started building and buying stores in Seattle in 1923. One of these first-generation stores still exists as a grocery, the independent Hillcrest Deli-Market on East Olive. It added a new front end in the ’80s and now sells a lot of product lines the old stores never had (hot deli items, frozen foods), but the basic layout remains.
The central building of the complex now known as Starbucks Center was originally built in 1907 as a Sears catalog warehouse, delivering most everything a household might need (even houses, in the form of plans and parts). In 1925, Sears took a hesitant step beyond mail-order by setting up retail stores in its Chicago and Seattle warehouses. Today, the chain’s oldest remaining store is still on 1st Avenue South, though the phase-out of Sears’ catalogs caused the rest of the sprawling complex to be refitted for offices and other retailers. (It’s got more square footage than the Columbia (now Bank of America) Tower.)
The first generation of self-service food supermarkets came along in the 1930s, as a Depression-era cost-cutting gimmick. They typically ran about 5,000 square feet, less than 10 percent the size of most new ones built today. But many of these tall, solid cement-box structures have found continued uses, even as the food chains moved to ever-bigger, ever-further-apart sites. Tower Books (1st North and Mercer) and Seattle Paint Supply (80th and Aurora) don’t just bear the ghosts of Wheaties boxes past. They’re stoic, relatively human-scale buildings with plenty of life past their original “pull dates.”
In the early ’60s, Albertsons built a modern supermarket at 23rd and Madison. Just a few years later, company brass got nervous about being in an “inner city” (read: minority) area, but was equally nervous about the potential bad PR if it closed the store. So instead, it created an opportunity for good PR by turning the branch over to a nonprofit community group. The resulting venture, Co-Op Foods, didn’t survive long. The space now houses a Planned Parenthood office/clinic. Its rapidly-upscaling neighborhood is serviced by four supermarkets, including a huge new Safeway and the new Madison Market health-food co-op, all on or near 15th Avenue.
Regional discount-store chains thrived briefly in the ’50s and ’60s, before K mart and later Wal-Mart cornered that market. Here, there was Valu-Mart (later known as Leslees), owned by the Weisfield’s jewelry chain. The Greenwood Valu-Mart survives as a Fred Meyer, but a more interesting fate befell the Everett branch. It was bought up by John Fluke, a leading manufacturer of electronic test equipment; resulting in perhaps the only abandoned shopping center to be turned into a factory. (Too bad Fluke didn’t call it “Ye Olde Mall.”)
IN OTHER NEWS: Times TV listing for Monday: “9:00 Later Today: Style, menopause.” Taking menopause in style–now that’s the attitude I like. Maybe one could throw a posh “last-period party,” highlighted by the ceremonial flushing of the last flushable applicator.
TOMORROW: So there are a lot of female public artists. So what?
YES, I’VE GONE BACK to a certain sleazy tabloid. It’s just on a penny-ante freelance basis, and it’s in really tiny type buried back in the classifieds, but it’s there.
It’s an examination of some of my not-so-fair city’s surviving real-estate relics.
And here’s some of the first batch of these pieces.
In 1907, the world’s first stand-alone filling station was built south of Pioneer Square by the old Rockefeller oil trust. That place no longer exists, but other early examples of the form still stand–the Madrona Automatic art studio (formerly Kriegel’s Texaco), 1435 34th Ave., and Sig’s Barber Shop (formerly the Eveready Gas Station), 2103 3rd Ave. Both attempted to fit in with their neighborhoods, via small, decorative buildings that neared the sidewalk on at least one side. Their beauty recalls a time when the car culture was new and promising to fit in with its surroundings. As we’ll see in future installments, drive-up architecture didn’t stay that way for long.
The automobile has become the most powerful single icon of American life, but the neighborhood full-service gas station has had its ups and downs. In the ’70s, when oil shortages caused a major industry consolidation, a lot of smaller stations closed. In the ’90s, when oil gluts caused another major industry consolidation (still underway), more smaller stations closed. Some were demolished; others were refitted to new uses. The Olive Way Richfield (later Arco), closed in the early ’80s, was remodeled to fit a dry cleaner in its former office and service bays. A storefront addition was added later, leaving only the former Arco sign.
As the gasoline biz consolidated in recent decades, some neighborhood fuel-station/garage combos switched to only selling gas (and convenience-store treats) or only providing auto parts and repairs. The Arco-AM/PM combos exemplify the former; Japanese Auto Clinic (6th and Denny) the latter. Richlen’s Super-Mini (23rd and Union) has a more complex history. It began as a Shell station with service bays, then became a gas-and-convenience-store outlet, then became just a convenience store, and more recently started selling (Exxon-branded) gas again along with drive-up espresso and “Kick’n Chicken.”
For some six decades, from the ’20s thru the mid-’80s, the old Union Oil Co. of California supplied its Union 76 stations from a sprawling pipeline terminal and tank farm at Elliott and Broad, just inland from the waterfront. Union Oil later split into two companies; one of the successor firms, Unocal, has spent several years cleaning up the former terminal site of the fuels, greases, and chemicals that had seeped into the ground. Now that it’s officially clean enough for redevelopment, the city and Paul Allen are planning to turn it into a “sculpture park.”
Seattle builds Boeing planes and big Kenworth trucks, but once we also built passenger cars. Specifically, the legendary Ford Model T. Around 1917, about halfway through the T’s 19-year production run, Henry Ford had so fully regimented the car’s manufacturing process that he decided to build regional assembly plants, hoping to shave shipping costs. This stoic structure near Fairview and Mercer stopped making cars during the Depression, but survived as a printing plant (making, among many other things, regional editions of TV Guide). It’s now a Shurgard storage warehouse.
TOMORROW: The cyberkids are alright.
worth seeing, but it doesn’t really make it into the pantheon of great drunk chick movies.” (Found by Andrew….)
YESTERDAY, we mentioned some troubles facing Vancouver, a place where early-’90s-style economic doldrums are back and politics has devolved into blood sport.
But there’s still a lot to like about the place. Such as–
Vancouver itself’s a very compact city, with most everything a tourist would be interested in lying in a two-mile radius of the downtown Granville Mall, and everything else easily reachable by bus, by commuter rail, and by…
Prostitution is quasi-legal; though politicians and cops keep harrassing the area’s estimated 1,500 sex workers (providing a $65-million segment of the tourist economy) and their client-supporters, it’s on a much lower-key basis than in most U.S. cities, and is mostly aimed at keeping the streets respectable-looking. Sex-worker-rights advocates are many and outspoken.
The once-thriving Vancouver strip-joint circuit, though, has nearly collapsed; as many bar owners have switched to music formats to attract more coed audiences.
So take off to the Great White North as soon as you can. Not only will you have tons-O-fun (unless Customs finds pot stashed on your person), but the economy up there needs your U.S. bucks.
TOMORROW: Fun music-related talk.
YESTERDAY, I discussed the potential partial demise of the Gothic Surf Shop, a group of four adjacent Lower Queen Anne houses where several artists and photographers live and work.
(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)
I’d been there at a party which was centered in the houses’ joint back yard and trailed off into the various live-work spaces. I found myself repeatedly wandering back to one particular room, where a prominent photographer showed off some of her exquisite hand-tinted, neoclassical portraits and nudes.
This lusciously sensual exhibition, and the path leading toward it, reminded me a lot reminded me, in a low-budget DIY way, of a book I’d read that week–The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, an odd 18-century short story by Jean-Francoise De Bastide.
In the story, a wealthy French libertine nobleman has commissioned a country estate for the specific purpose of seduction. Every inch of the place, from the entrance-court to the gardens to the individual rooms, is meant to stir a woman’s senses (except her sense of resistance).
It’s published in an elegant, tiny paperback by none other than the Princeton Architectural Press, in an edition loaded with introductory remarks about the use of storytelling to explain principles of architecture and decoration.
You don’t have to approve of the story’s antihero and his predatory motives to admire his devotion to the home arts and his obsession with detail (as illustrated in the Princeton edition with period line drawings of real chateaus similar to the story’s fictional one.)
And you don’t have to be a nostalgist for pre-revolutionary France’s ornate architectural excesses to long for a sense of design that cared this much about the human spirit, about nurturing the senses, instead of just about mounting the most square footage for the least amount of money (or, in the case of most rich-people’s residential construction, intimidating people with out-of-scale behemothness).
TOMORROW: The Amtrak Cascades train and the America that once was.
YESTERDAY, we discussed how Y2K survivalists are becoming less communitarian and more capitalistic.
In a way, it’s a hopeful sign that more folks are seeing the supposed global computer crash (which I don’t think will happen on the scale the scaremonges hope for) not as the end of the world but as just another opportunity to sell stuff.
But I’m still longing for an older, more optimistic future.
The future we were promised at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.
I’m far from the only one with such retro-futuristic longings. Manray, a new predominantly-gay “video nightclub” on Seattle’s Capitol Hill (one of several clubs started this year to siphon audiences from ARO.Space), takes its logo from a slightly-altered version of the Fair’s logo, an oval with an “arrow of progress” pointing up. (Local label Up Records also uses a version of the fair’s symbol.)
Alas, the Manray folks tell me most customers think the logo’s just a “male” symbol. But the thought’s still there, and that’s what counts.
The rest of the bar’s equally Jetsonian, by the way, with recessed white lighting, Eames-esque furnishings, and curves instead of corners just about everywhere.
IN OTHER SPACE-Y NEWS, I recently attended what might be the last “Gothic Surf Shop” art party, at a group of four houses in Lower Queen Anne all occupied by visual artists (painters, photographers, installation-builders, and at least one car customizer) and sharing a common back yard.
You can guess the story here: At least one of the houses is being threatened with condo-replacement. The Gothic Surf artists are hoping to pitch in and buy the place, but nothing’s certain yet.
Anyhoo, the Gothic Surf complex is a simply gorgeous hidden treasure in the heart of the city. Between the different plywood-based installation pieces, the gardens, the “art cars” parked in front, the separate bar building (reused from an old COCA installation), the woodshop/studio in an old carriage house, and the many art collections inside the houses (including both the residents’ own works and collections of such artifacts as bakelite radios and Asian masks), it’s a site that should be saved.
It’s also a potential harbinger of the future. As the yupscale “urban revival” continues apace, here and in select other urbs across North America, less-than-wealthy creative types may end up living in the older suburbs, the already-decaying beige-rambler subdivisions surrounding airports and ex-industrial sites. It’s easy to imagine artsy folk combining their resources to buy up several adjoining cul-de-sac properties and spending the rest of their lives transforming them into neo-art-colony spaces, with folk or “naive” art decorations and self-built alterations all over.
TOMORROW: Some more of this, plus the lost art of seductive architecture.
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
IN OTHER NEWS: Buried in a Macworld story is the factoid that commercial printers these days are making fewer huge press runs, instead churning out “a greater number of small- and medium-volume projects than ever before.” Cultural decentralization continues…. Buy a magazine, help a struggling neighborhood institution….
ELSEWHERE: The Virtual Talking Mom (found by Bifurcated Rivets) is ready to give you a virtual scolding any time of the day or night…. The last days of the original Prodigy, inventor of the Banner Ad and the censored chatroom…. Musings on the real nature of creativity….
EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote something for Seattle magazine, expanding on themes I’ve been exploring here about the new face of “hipness” around town.
For the sake of our out-of-town readers and others who missed the mag, here’s the uncut version of that piece (the mag didn’t cut much):
There’s a new definition of hipness emerging in Seattle, and it’s a lot more than just “Not Grunge.”
It’s a repudiation of the whole bohemian notion of an “alternative” to “mainstream society.”
The new hipness doesn’t oppose society; it wants to lead it. It doesn’t repudiate material wealth; it wants to use it more stylishly. It’s about dressing up, seeing and being seen, and making the scene.
For a long time, to be a hipster in Seattle all you had to do was proclaim your antipathy to squareness.
And that meant almost everything approved by our civic powers-that-be.
Squareness ruled Seattle, absorbing all anti-status-quo movements.
In the ’50s, regional Teamsters boss Dave Beck turned a once-militant labor movement into a force for conservatism.
In the ’70s, many local hippies aged into either docile Deadheads or domesticated professionals.
In the ’80s, Starbucks made the coffeehouse, that beat-era symbol of artful rebellion, safe for strip malls.
In the early ’90s, college station KCMU moved away from raw noise bands, toward more retro-country and ethnic acoustic music.
For every incarnation of squareness, an incarnation of hipness emerged in response.
Ultimately, that led to the anti-fashion look and gritty sound of the “grunge” scene, so loud and aggressive it could supposedly never be tamed by the squares.
The new hipness denounces that dichotomy of having fun vs. having funds.
It says you can enjoy a creative, active life without taking a vow of poverty; that you can earn a good income without becoming a dull homebody.
It’s fueled by waves of cyber-wealth, bringing in people with youth and money, and by real-estate inflation, scatterring many old-style bohemians out of town or into non-artistic careers.
A locus of the new hipness is ARO.Space, the one-year-old dance club at 10th and East Pike. The building used to house Moe’s Mo’Rockin’ Cafe, the old hipness’s most lavish (yet still funky-chic) rock club. It’s now a sleek palace of pastel colors and recessed lights, where DJs mix the latest subgenres of electronic dance music for gay and mixed audiences. The design’s fancy yet understated and reassuring, a spot for beautiful people to show off their good taste.
Under Seattle’s old hipness, gay bars were obscure, underground-cachet places (some didn’t even have exterior signage).
Under the new hipness, they’re the high-profile trendsetter spots, where straight people try to look good enough and dance well enough to fit in.
The ARO.Space formula’s worked so well that two similar clubs have opened within walking distance, Spintron and the new Vogue.
The old Vogue space in Belltown (previously a new-wave bar called WREX) was an old-hip institution done up in basic black, where two generations of rock and dance-music fans co-mingled (and where Nirvana played its first Seattle gig). The new Vogue’s a little less funky, a lot more chic, and all-DJ.
[Update: Since this was written, the new Vogue added Tuesday live gigs, a former tradition at the old Vogue.]
The owners of ARO.Space just opened the Ace Hotel in the Belltown building where the Seattle Peniel Mission and Operation Nightwatch used to be. Its stark, Japanese-inspired look of small rooms with hospital-white walls and futon-level beds got it written up in hot design magazines.
The magazines’ writers were aghast that something in Seattle was so understated, so clean, so (you guessed it) not-grunge. They apparently forgot what ARO.Space’s name implies–we make passenger planes here, so a few people here would know how to make small spaces slick-looking yet efficient.
Downstairs from the Ace is the new Cyclops restaurant. The old Cyclops (demolished in 1997) was a hip icon, serving tasty food at affordable prices to aspiring artists and musicians. The new Cyclops’s decor bears some resemblance to its homier prior self, but it’s a fancier place, serving fancier dishes at fancier prices to folks who loved the old Cyclops but can afford nicer fare now.
Establishments that served the old hipsters had to keep prices down, because their customers didn’t have much money and didn’t ever expect to. Even after “grunge” bands got big, many hipsters continued to believe nothing you ever did here mattered; lasting change or influence was impossible in squaresville Seattle; the most you could do was form a community of fellow outcasts.
The new hipness, despite its occasional lapses into shallow hedonism, at least thinks certain achievements are possible. It says high-energy music and contemporary art and design play big roles in vital urban life.
But will the new hipsters’ achievements prove worthwhile in the long run? That’s a topic for another time.
IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Bring people with you.
TOMORROW: The latest in fun inventions and designs.
ELSEWHERE: Somebody else who thinks irony is dead, and who dares to say it without “air quotes”… A next-big-thing story about Internet radio notes that traditional AM/FM listening “among those 25 and under has plummeted 10 percent in the last six years…”
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the continuing blight of suburban sprawl and what might possibly be done in upcoming years to make those Nowheresvilles more eco- and people-friendly.
What drives the sprawl, of course, is a growing population that needs to live, work, and go to school somewhere. But what if there won’t be as many additional folk in coming decades as folk today expect there to be?
An Atlantic Monthly article claims not only won’t there be a Soylent Green-style overpopulation catastrophe, but the world’s supply of living humans might actually decline in the long run.
Author Max Singer expects world-pop numbers to grow at ever slower and slower rates; so “within fifty years or so world population will peak at about eight billion”–still a way-scary two billion more than we have now–“before starting a fairly rapid decline.” Indeed, “unless people’s values change greatly, several centuries from now there could be fewer people living in the entire world than live in the United States today.”
Singer claims the real reason for this reversal wouldn’t be AIDS in Africa or economic collapse in Russia or girl-abortions in China or eco-disasters or wars or declining sperm counts, but the spread of modern attitudes about work and family. If this transpires, our grandchildren (however many we have) might not have to eat one another, but they’ll have other issues to face. The North American economic system’s pretty much always been premised on growth–more people, and more wealth for some of these people to spend on consumer goods. What would a more-deaths-than-births world mean to one’s career or personal ambitions?
It should be mentioned, though the Atlantic doesn’t fully mention it, that Singer’s a leader in the near-right Hudson Institute, a prolific producer of reports and policy papers asking citizens and governments to ignore those loudmouth environmentalists about pollution, tainted food, nuclear waste, and assorted other issues in which the insitute believes big business should be given the benefit of all doubts. Singer’s Atlantic article just might be considered to be possibly part of a larger scheme of attempting to rebuff enviro-doom-warners at any opportunity.
But the U.N. figures Singer cites seem plausible. And he’s not calling for the developed countries to breed away, but simply reporting what he claims is an almost-inevitable trend (albeit one that won’t prove true or false for a long time).
Who knows? Maybe that radical-green “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” just might find its dreams nearly fulfilled–after everybody in the group today will have died.
(For another viewpoint, check out Zero Population Growth’s Y6B site.)
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be equilateral.
TOMORROW: Less need-to-breed might increase the number of single men, America’s socio-sexual outcasts since way back.
UPDATE: We’ve already told you of the totally separate, and apparently feuding, sites Seattlemusic.com and Seattlemusic.org. I’ve since learned of a third name-game player–Seattlemusic.net!
ELSEWHERE: The same Atlantic issue mentioned above has a somewhat amusing “Periodic Table of Rejected Elements,” including Imodium, Xena, Hydrox, and Fahrfergnuven… Everybody loves wacky inventions, especially when the inventors are (apparently) totally sincere in their intentions…
IN LAST FRIDAY’S Misc. World Midsummer Reading List, I mentioned James H. Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere and its sequel Home From Nowhere.
The two books claim to offer a thorough diagnosis of what’s wrong with the American suburban-sprawl nightmare and what might be done about it. Unfortunately, Kunstler himself sprawls all over the landscape of thought. He reveals himself as a self-described “angry old hippie” who doesn’t just have beefs against cookie-cutter subdivisions, soulless strip malls, and scenery-scarring freeways. He appears to hate the entire 20th century industrial society.
Kunstler rants and rants against mass-produced building materials, standardized home design, Craftsman-era magazines that published ready-to-build house blueprints, single-crop agriculture, etc. etc. etc.
And, of course, like all conformist nonconformists of the angry-old-hippie school, he reserves his deepest animosity for television, the angry-old-hippie’s all-purpose scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with everything.
I guess we should be grateful that Kunstler, unlike a certain other angry old hippie who hated industrial society, offers some positive solutions. Most of them come from the “New Urbanism” movement, a scattered bunch of architects, developers, planners and thinkers who wish to undo 55 years of North American civic planning.
For now, the New Urbanists’ schemes have led to a few planned communities, mostly in the Sunbelt. But if carried a little further, their schemes might eventually lead to “suburban renewal,” humanizing the existing sprawl (taking advantage of the possible depletion of oil reserves and the even more possible decline of existing malls and big-box chains as Net retailing gains more of a foothold).
Dig, if you will, the picture: Decaying old discount stores and supermarkets rebuilt as, or replaced by, public marketplaces and walkable meeting places. Hectares of surface parking lots replaced by curbside storefronts. Older and more decayed subdivisions refitted to be (or razed and done anew as) real neighborhoods with narrower streets, real sidewalks, smaller houses built closer together, and the population density that could make public transit more feasible.
One thing the New Urbanists sometimes don’t like to mention (though Kunstler does) is how today’s sprawlscape is the child, or at least the bastard grandchild, of yesterday’s humanitarian schemers, who thought they could destroy the twin scourges of urban chaos and rural poverty by imposing a rational, efficient, modern, convenient, and clean-looking built environment. Harvard Design Magazine writer Michael Benedik discusses this in a piece on “Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace”: “The condition of the modern world is due at least partially to what the ‘best’ and most prominent architects have done, have allowed, and have come earnestly to believe over the past fifty years.”
Kunstler insists government regulation will have to be part of the answer. But he also admits government regulation has been part of the problem. Streetcars were private enterprises that merely used city rights-of-way. Freeways were and are built and maintained by governments, via gas and vehicle taxes encouraged by “the highway lobby.” Subdivisions and strip malls are the product of building codes devised to allow almost no other types of residential construction.
The Libertarian Party might use these facts to claim developers not only could but certainly would build more imaginative, affordable, dense, and eco-friendly tracts if only freed from those pesky ol’ governments telling ’em what to do. I don’t completely buy that line of reasoning (the private sector’s done plenty-O-damage to the landscape over the decades, with and without gov’t encouragement), but it does have something going for it.
As the influx of cyber-wealth into Seattle has shown, people want to live in real cities and towns. It’s just that Sprawlsvilles are the only new residential areas being built.
But before we buy up the old beige-rambler houses and replace them with something with more “character,” let’s remember what the subdivisions have wrought, the human-scale lives lived in inhuman-scale surroundings. As a current photo exhibit in NYC shows, humans have and will continue to express their individuality amid even the least-likely settings.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be octagonal.
MONDAY: A think-tank boss wants us to stop worrying about overpopulation.
ELSEWHERE: “Want to know what to expect before you see a movie? Want to read a mockery of some movie you hated? Have a few minutes to kill?” Then see parody movie scripts at The Editing Room (“We Clean Up After Hollywood”). An example, opening up Eyes Wide Shut:
INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.” MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked. HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked. AUDIENCE: So did we. TOM: Ha ha ha.
INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT
NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.”
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION
TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked.
HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked.
AUDIENCE: So did we.
TOM: Ha ha ha.
>PORTLAND HAS HAD its own “hip” interior design look for some time now.
You can see it down there at nearly every Pearl District record store, book store, bar, clothing boutique, and coffeehouse. You can see it up here at Hamburger Mary’s and the McMenamin’s brewpubs. It’s a look that even makes efficient new buildings look quaint and lived-in, at least on the inside. It involves “weatherbeaten” paint hues, retro wallpaper, “antiqued” wood paneling, and reproduction posters and metal signs. It doesn’t really look old; it looks like a stage set for some nice little play about how sociable life used to be, back before the sterility of modern design and the hectic pace of advanced-industrial society.
Seattle now has its own “hip” interior design look, and it celebrates everything the Portland look implicitly renounces.
We’ve previously mentioned it in regards to the ARO.Space dance club and its associated venture, the Ace Hotel. Now, the look’s spreading further.
Example #1: The Lux coffeehouse on 1st used to be a homey, comfy little joint, intimate and coccoon-ish. Now it’s been redone in “clean” off-whites. The overstuffed chairs and heavy tables have been replaced by lightweight, curvy, Scandinavian Modern-inspired furnishings.
The old Lux was a womblike shelter, a respite from the day’s stresses. The new Lux is a more engaging environment, a place to recharge one’s batteries.
Example #2: Pages is the new independent, capitalistic bookstore in the Capitol Hill space formerly occupied by the leftist Red and Black Books Collective. Red and Black was tastefully crammed with products of feminist, gay/lesbian, ethnic-minority, labor, Beat, and other un-corporate thought systems. Pages is much cleaner-looking and much, much airier; almost a boutique. It carries far fewer titles than Red and Black did, and it displays them far more “elegantly.”
Red and Black was like a reassuringly-cluttered general store for vital information. Pages is more of a boutique.
(Being on Capitol Hill, Pages still carries gay books, but they tend to be celebrations of out-ness rather than struggle-for-respect broadsides.)
Out-of-towners can see the principles behind this look in the UK-based magazine Wallpaper*. It’s like a Charles and Ray Eames revival blended with a Herman Miller fetish, stirred through with less-cheap versions of Ikea designs, and strained through a seive of World’s Fair-style futurism.
And it is not, despite everything Wallpaper* and others claim, foreign to Seattle. As I wrote in Seattle magazine, the ARO.Space name implies a reference to our leading pre-Gates industry. We make planes here. We know a thing or four about sleek lines, functional streamlining, and making small interiors look roomier than they are.
And, 37 years ago, we built the Space Needle and the arches of the Pacific Science Center as parts of the Century 21 Exposition.
As the real 21st century approaches, the homey-clutter look is getting turned into upscale preciousness by the likes of Restoration Hardware and The Pottery Barn; while the new hipsters, inspired by Euro-chic and Tomorrowland nostalgia, are heading back to the futurism.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: The potential next great civic task, humanizing the suburbs.
ELSEWHERE: Speaking of Oregon-based trends, the L.A. Times has discovered Eugene’s punk anarchists, about 20 years after their first appearance–and starts out the article with yet another dumb ’60s nostalgia lead.
