In recent months, the local news media have rediscovered crime in Belltown. This happens every year or two. By year’s end, they’ll surely cycle back to ranting about exurban meth labs and copper-wire thieves at construction sites.

The situation here will remain.

For decades, the City’s unofficially moved drug dealers and streetwalkers (whose industries cannot be eradicated) along to wherever they’d seem less visible—from Chinatown to lower Pike Street, then to upper Pike/Pine, then to Second and Bell.

As long as this was a sparsely populated commercial district, unsightly forms of commerce could occur in relative discretion.

But Belltown is now a high-rising abode for the affluent.

It’s also a nightlife zone, where the legal drug of alcohol is sold and consumed in quantity.

This brings a lot of people here. At night.

Some of them get noisy and rude, especially after closing time. Some of them also consume non-legal drugs. (Remember, illicut-drug buyers are often rowdier than illicut-drug sellers.)

So what can be done?

A consistently stronger police presence can help deal with the 2:15 a.m. fights, and could drive illicit-drug marketing further into the shadows. But the underlying situation would remain.

Our little half-square-mile will still have drinkers and druggers and street people and frat boys and little-black-dress girls and corporate executives and people who belong to two or more of these categories.

It’ll be a piece of work to get all these folks to coexist more peacefully.

And that would really be a news story.

…speak my mind about the “Belltown Crime” YouTube videos.

The clips in question, no longer publicly viewable, were placed by an anonymous 26-year-old white female who moved into an apartment here and was shocked to find poor people hanging out in the alleys.

That’s a snarky sentence, I know. It makes the videographer sound like one of those upscale couples who move into quaint country houses near picturesque cattle pastures, then complain about the wafting aromas.

Please note the videographer’s not claiming the persons in ehr video clips had directly threatened any crime against her own self. Nor was she overtly ranting about the poor or the homeless, but about what she calls “crackheads.” She’s not dissing them for existing but for existing while (allegedly) drugged up.

Yet, to the untrained (suburban) eye, the behavior of a disoriented, mentally ill, or simply out-of-sorts man or woman, particularly if the man or woman has an unkempt appearance, can be mistaken for the behavior of a frizzled-out drug user.

Downscale people have existed in Belltown long before upscale people did. There have been three traditional newcomer responses to the downscalers’ existence:

1. Ignore, shy away, close the curtains, cross the street, don’t talk to them, don’t look them in the eye, pretend you didn’t see anything.2. Harass, belittle, demonize, call for police crackdowns, alert the media, evict social-service agencies, demand Someone Do Something Now.

3. Empathize, donate, seek positive solutions (no matter how incomplete).

You can probably discern which category I believe the videographer has chosen, and which I believe you should choose.

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

In other Sunday nooze:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s have more fun, dammit.

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

Jim Demetre has a response to Charles Mudede’s review of Seattle’s Belltown.

• There’s been another Saturday-night Belltown shooting, this time near Fourth and Stewart.
• Trees: We all love ’em. Let’s keep more of ’em around. After all, a city without trees isn’t fit for a dog.
• Pit bulls: There are more of ’em around than ever, even though they’re less universally loved than, say, trees.
• Seattle’s Chinatown is getting a brand new “historic gate.”
• The University of Washington: One of your best higher-education values, even with a sucky football program.

…in I don’t know how long, my work is the subject of serious criticism. My erstwhile Stranger colleague Charles Mudede has written a nuanced, lucid review of Seattle’s Belltown.

Essentially, Mudede seems to like the book for what it is, but wishes it had more. That, I’ve learned, is a common response to Arcadia Publishing’s slim photo-history tomes. Arcadia’s formula of many pictures and few words has proven very commercially successful, here and around the country. But many aspects of any place’s story will necessarily get left out by this broad-strokes approach. Some readers would like more oral-history material. Some would like more human-interest anecdotes. Some would like longer passages about specific people and places of interest to them.

Mudede specifically wishes Seattle’s Belltown included more emotional, human history. He’d have liked more of “a sense of horror or sadness or wonder at the great and rapid sequence of events that shaped Belltown.”

And he’d like the book to have a stronger sense of advocacy. After all, he notes, the neighborhood’s an “explosive battleground of competing land use and architectural ideas, of private and cultural capital, and a variety of class issues. Even in a book as small as this, one wants the writer to take a stronger position on these pressing matters, presenting not only conclusions but also solutions.”

These are all good things to yearn for, and not just in books.

It’s a level of discourse beyond Arcadia’s format. (They are trying to move units through Costco and Walgreen’s.)

But it’s certainly something I can work harder at in my other forums, including the Belltown Messenger and this site.

Have I got answers to the ongoing disappearance of living-wage jobs, affordable housing, artist spaces, and the Crocodile? No, at least not any good ones, at least not tonight.

But let’s keep talking about it.

• Fret not about Bill Gates’s pending retirement from MS’s day-to-day operations. The whole joint’s hardwired around his mindset. MS will continue to produce and market just as it’s been doing.
• Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to read/solve the NY Times crossword in the Seattle Times. No word on whether it’ll continue in the P-I.
• One more reason to quit smoking: A guy asks two Belltown lowlifes if they’ve got a light, gets robbed.
• Wash. state will boldly go where Greyhound no longer bothers to go, bringing intercity bus service to the state’s small towns.

…post-shopping-season Sunday. This means the Sunday paper’s a much more compact product, stuffed with far fewer flyers and far easier to carry. Still, there is some news today:

• Who wouldn’t love a fancy home holiday display, depicting a full-size Santa on a cross?
• The American Stasi wants to know everything about you.
• Another old ferry has potential problems.
• Capitol Hill’s delightfully delapidated “Undre Arms” Apartments might give way to yet another mixed-use whatever blah blah blah.
• And my Belltown Messenger colleague Mary Lou Sanelli has a nice li’l essay, summarizing some of her thoughts about the novelty of urban living.

• As the Crocodile’s sudden closing gets its much-worthy big splash coverage, the Seattle City Council finally passed tougher new nightclub noise laws, for which the Belltown condo crowd had particularly lobbied. Any Croc buyer might have to put some dough into extra soundproofing.
• Gov. Gregoire and Legislative leaders are proposing a big affordable-housing push, packaged in with a bill for flood relief.
• Seattle to White Center: “Maybe I still like you after all.”
• Madrona Creek has been “daylighted” after a decade-long volunteer effort to get the stream out from underground pipes.
• Meanwhile, King County’s trying a different kind of answer to recurring floods—don’t fight ’em, at least in yet-to-be-developed areas.
• Those state ferries that got abruptly retired, after having been used years past their pull date? The state had been selling “depreciation rights” to the boats, one of those weird derivative investment schemes that have been going around lately. The state may have to pay off the investors, to the tune of $2.73 million.
• Some Beacon Hill kids apparently think it’s fun to set elaborate traps in the road, with hidden spikes that cause instant flat tires.
• The Olympia Oyster House: It’s not a drive-thru restaurant. Someone apparently didn’t know this.

…to purchase a freshly autographed copy of Seattle’s Belltown or Vanishing Seattle will occur this Friday solstice evening, 6:30-8:30 p.m., in the exotic Wallingford district at Not A Number Cards and Gifts. Can you say “last minute gift ideas for the impossible-to-please”? I knew you could.

The Moore Theatre threw a delightfully casual centennial party Monday evening. It was a textbook lesson in how to mount a fun, populist gala. It hewed to the spirit of the Moore’s original purpose as a vaudeville palace.

The above view is from the now seldom-used top balcony. Originally, this was the only part where black patrons could sit; it was accessed from a separate side entrance.

Theater personnel gave informal tours of backstage areas. Buskers performed outside and throughout the lobbies. Free drinkies and snackies abounded. Original posters and playbills hung everywhere.

Civilians were invited to consume wine and popcorn on stage, while one act after another appeared: Operetta, tap dancing, trapeze, burlesque, modern dance, standup comedy, folk music, soul music.

The night started with an old-time theater organist. It closed with a pick-up rock band, including guitarist Kurt Bloch and singer Kim Virant.

Would that all theatrical parties were this much fun. (Hint hint, Seattle Repertory Organization.)

…who attended our intimate soiree and book signing Thursday evening at M. Coy Books, celebrating the release of Seattle’s Belltown. I even got to meet longtime local arts patron Polly Friedlander.

As you might have perceived from the new image added to the top of the left-hand column, we’ve got another amazing, stupendous, enticing tome for your perusing pleasure.

Seattle’s Belltown is about exactly what you think it’s about. It covers 1.5 centuries of falling hills, rising buildings, homes, bars, theaters, hotels, P-Patches, streets, shops, and life. Get your copy now.

Our OFFICIAL PREMIERE is Thursday, December 6, 5-7 p.m., at M. COY BOOKS, 121 Pine Street. Be there or be trapezoidal.

The passing parade witnesses the demolition of the former Frederick Cadillac showroom, used more recently as the Teatro ZinZanni dinner theater, for a mega-high-rise condo project…

…and the arrival of what’s officially called the Seattle Streetcar, but is already unofficially known as the South Lake Union Trolley (for the acronymic possibilities), on a test run up Westlake Avenue. Passenger service is still tentatively scheduled to commence some time in December.