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pride parade viewers at the big popsicle
(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)
Another summer, another Seafair Torchlight Parade, the oldest, biggest, and (alas) clothed-est of Seattle’s three big summer parades.
It’s been billed by some local wags as a taste of the suburbs in the middle of town. But that’s not quite the case. A lot of the “forgotten Seattle” shows up too. Working families, even with children. Public school children even.
Some attendees chose to forego the standard T-shirts and shorts uniform.
Teachers’ union picketers showed up to appeal to the family friendly crowd, campaigning for increased school funding and fewer state-mandated tests.
Then the parade itself got underway with its new title sponsor, Alaska Airlines (replacing rival Southwest). In keeping with nostalgia for pre-TSA era air travel, Alaska featured an all-flight-attendant drill team.
Mr. Drew Carey was a thorough professional, shaking hands, kissing babies, selling soccer scarves.
Then, at last, came the real entertainment. The drill teams.
The marching bands.
The floats.
The Clowns and the Pirates.
Yes, the parade could become “hipper” (even while remaining G rated).
But why should it?
Squares need some celebration in their lives too.
…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces. And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.
…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.
And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.
The Belltown Messenger, the scrappy li’l neighborhood monthly for which I wrote and edited for some six years, has just put out its last, online only, edition.
Publisher Alex R. Mayer, who’s now running a pro-pot rag called Mary Jane, had kept the Messenger going on the interwebs after the last, newsletter-sized, print Messenger came out last August. (I was not a part of the latter, unprinted, incarnation.)
The Messenger’s spiritual roots go back to the late 1980s and Belltown’s Brain Fever Dispatch, published by Elaine Bonow out of her dance studio.
At the time, there were a few scattered condo towers going up, but the ol’ Regrade was still largely a half square mile of print shops, small apartments, car lots, and artists’ studios. It was the latter milieu, that of the painters and musicians and clothing designers in their rustic lo-rent spaces, the original Dispatch covered.
The Messenger’s era of Belltown also contained art and music and fashion, plus a lot of creative “foodie” restaurants.
And it had a lot of other things.
It had the region’s hottest “HI-NRG” bar scene, which was covered more completely in Exotic Underground and later in D List.
It had the high-rise rich (and the merely affluent, spending as if they were rich). The regional slick magazines catered to these consumers’ spending needs much more closely.
And it continued to have more than its share of the various “street” subcultures, chronicled and advocated for in Real Change.
What Belltown didn’t have were some of the things “neighborhood” papers spend a lot of time covering, such as public schools, parks, kids, and community centers.
In the end, the “place” covered in the Messenger wasn’t so much a geographic region as a state of mind.
Any attempt to bring back something like it, which I’m considering, would have to keep that in mind.
Many in Belltown are pleased to see the state’s shut down V Bar, site of one fatal shooting and several other violent closing-time confrontations this past year.
But many of us are saddened that Kelly’s Tavern, the neighborhood’s last true “sleazy dive bar,” has apparently closed for good. Its longtime owner has died, and her heirs reportedly don’t want to carry on.
Main stage at Seattle Founders Days
Seattle Founders Days, Belltown’s entry in the neighborhood summer street fair game, have come and gone.
And, in my opinion, they succeeded.
Its instigators were wise not to attempt the scale of the U District or Fremont fairs, at least not in Founders Days’ first year. They were also mindful to concoct a name with potential citywide appeal, and to have both day and evening event schedules.
There was a single main performance stage, right at Second and Bell. It was flanked on Second’s surrounding blocks by a couple dozen tented merchant booths.
In lieu of a separate, fenced off beer garden, attendees were invited into the street’s existing sidewalk bar tables and to the Buckley’s patio (with its own tiny live-music stage).
Along with the on-stage acts, costumed performers milled about. There were civic pioneer characters during the day, more nightlife-esque characterizations by night.
The main stage performers were a good mix of top local bands, rising stars willing to work cheap, and extremely talented friends (Mark Pickerel) and relatives (Ramona Freeborn) of the fair organizers.
Thus, on two of the year’s hottest days, a few dozen to a few hundred people at any one time milled about along the closed street blocks. They enjoyed the sun, the music, the food and drink, the art, and the low-key fun atmosphere. The evening sessions complemented, and contrasted with, the more high-energy partying along First Avenue.
It was all a big advertisement for Belltown, specifically for the artier, Second Avenue aspect of Belltown.
And it said to the rest of the city: Come on down and have some fun. Belltown’s not really that mean, scary place in all the news reports. It’s safe. We’ve got more cops now. We’ve always had great food and different kinds of bars. We’ve got a whole lot of things to do, even if you don’t like to get all pushy and rowdy.
In all, it was a great debut for what organizers plan to be an annual affair.
Yet there’s plenty of room for future growth, even with the single stage layout.
There could be more merchant booths and food booths. Now that Founders Days will be on the regular regional street-fair schedule, the event can attract some of that circuit’s regular vendors. It can also lure in some of the vendors from the Punk Rock Flea Market and from Occidental Park’s monthly art bazaars.
And once Bell Street’s been rebuilt into a “park boulevard,” with less car space and more people space, Founders Days will get space for still more growth. (Though I’d like to see the Second and Bell intersection still closed off, and I’d like to see the Second Avenue bars and galleries still incorporated into the fair’s site.)
Indeed, the future Bell Street can become a site for year-round (or at least dry-season-round) outdoor events and performances of all types.
And Founders Days can become the keystone event of this seasonal series.
(Cross posted with the Belltown Messenger.)
Patrick Alan McRoberts, 57, a longtime Belltown fixture and Seattle political advocate/consultant, died in his sleep on May 26, following a lingering heart condition.
A former longtime staffer in the public relations firm Gogerty Stark Marriott, he also co-founded the local history Web site HistoryLink.org and the literary zine Point No Point.
In the 1980s, he occasionally performed in the SPKN WRDS performance series at the Two Bells, where he remained a regular customer. He was also a performer in a couple of goodtime rock/folk/blues bands, the DelVros and the Peptides.
So far, the only McRoberts obit online is the one supplied by his family to the paper in the Iowa town of his birth.
As the cool among you know, the venerable German noise band Einsturzende Neubauten takes its name from the “collapsing new buildings” built quickly and cheaply in the two postwar Germanys.
Now we’ve got one of our own. Just nine years in existence, the McGuire Apartments, all 25 stories and 272 residential units and four storefronts, are going down.
And the biggest irony: It was co-developed by the Carpenters Union, on the Belltown site of its old union hall. Union crews built the building, which contains a small union office and hiring hall on its ground floor.
But it was co-developed with Harbor Properties. I don’t know who chose the building materials, including the cables and concrete that have proven to be of suboptimal quality. The whole structure’s been covered in scaffolding for exactly one year. Finally, its management decided that in the current apartment market, fixing the place would not be worth the cost.
As an all-rental property, the McGuire is legally easier to vacate, and hence to raze, than it would have been if its units had been sold as condominiums.
But this WILL happen to a condo building in the region, sometime this decade. And that’ll be an attorney employment scenario for sure.
As the Elliott Bay Book Co. prepares to leave Pioneer Square a business neighborhood without an “anchor tenant,” the Square’s major retail industry, big rowdy bars, is also in decline. The J&M shuttered altogether (it’s rumored to be reopening under new management as less of a bar and more of a cafe). Others are rumored to be in trouble.
I remember the glory days of the Square’s nightlife scene. I remember that milieu’s signature street sound. You’d stand in front of the pergola around midnight on a Saturday. You could hear, from five different bars, five different white blues bands, each cranking out a mediocre rendition of “Mustang Sally,” each band slightly out of tempo with the others. It was a cacophany only avant-garde composer Charles Ives could have dreamt up.
That scene was already waning before the infamous 2001 Mardi Gras melee gave the Square a bad PR rep.
Fast forward almost a decade. Today’s loci for bigtime drinking are Fremont, Pike/Pine, and especially Belltown.
Belltown’s bar scene has its own signature street sound. It’s the arhythmic clippety-clop of dozens of high-heel shoes trotting up and down the sidewalks of First Avenue. Creating this sound are many small groups of bargoers, small seas of black dresses and perfect hairdos.
These women, and their precursors over the past decade and a half, are the reason Belltown won the bar wars.
In my photo-history book Seattle’s Belltown, I described the rise of the upper First Avenue bar scene:
“After the Vogue proved straight people would indeed come to Belltown to drink and dance, larger, more mainstream nightclubs emerged. Among the first, both on First Avenue, were Casa U Betcha (opened 1989) and Downunder (opened 1991). Both places began on a simple premise: Create an exciting yet comfortable place for image-conscious young women, and the fellows would follow in tow (or in search).”
To this target market, the Square was, and would always be, too dark, too grungy, and too iffy. The condo canyons of Belltown, in contrast, were relatively clean (if still barren) with fresh new buildings and sported (at least some) well-lit sidewalks.
The state liquor laws were liberalized later in the 1990s, leading to more and bigger hard-liquor bars. Casa U Betcha and Downunder gave way to slicker fun palaces, all carefully designed and lit, with fancy drinks at fancy prices to be consumed while wearing fancy out-on-the-town clothes and admiring others doing the same.
And, aside from the occasional Sport, nearly all these joints sought to attract, or at least not to offend, the young-adult female market.
You’re free to make your comparisons here to the high-heeled and well-heeled fashionistas of HBO’s old Sex and the City.
I’d prefer a more local comparison, to Sex In Seattle. In case you don’t know, that’s a live stage show that’s presented 17 installments since 2001. Its heroines are social and career strivers, less materialistic and less “arrived” than the Sex and the City women.
And they’re Asian Americans. As are Sex In Seattle’s writers and producers.
As are a healthy proportion of the clientele at Belltown’s megabars these days.
These customers want many of the same things Belltown residents want. They like attractive, clean, safe streets with well-lit sidewalks.
They may make a little more noise outside than some of the residents want to hear.
But we’re all in the same place, geographically and otherwise.
Alaska Airlines is sponsoring an official fan site for Belltown’s own Olympic speed-skating champ, Apolo Anton Ohno. The site’s name, “followapolo.com,” reminded me of this novelty classic.
I’m on a marathon temp job this week and next. Until the 24th of this month, I’m basically doing little but working, commuting, sleeping, and perhaps eating. Expect few if any posts during this time.
Instead, consider a peek at writer-composer Igor Keller’s new blog, Hideous Belltown. Keller claims to have just recently noticed that a lot of Seattle’s artificially flat neighborhood “is downright hideously ugly.”
Well, it always was such, ever since Denny Hill was removed early last century and the resulting lowland became downtown’s low-rent district. It became a place of printing plants, car lots, union halls, social service agencies, warehouses, storefront taverns, and a few stoic lo-rise apartments and hotels.
Belltown was the unassuming generic cityscape in between the Space Needle and the downtown towers. It was what the Monorail helped you bypass between downtown shopping and Seattle Center entertainment. It was a relative nothing, in the middle of everything.
Which is precisely what made Belltown so attractive to artists and musicians in the 1980s and early 1990s.
It was a place of (relatively) cheap rents, funky loft spaces, dive bars, and endless possibilities.
Of course, real estate developers also saw the possibilities.
After a few starts and stops, successive mayoral administrations succeeded in pushing Belltown as a hi-rise residential mecca.
And, either in spite or because of the gentle nudges of city zoning policies, the neighborhood’s big new buildings were generally just as homely as the small old buildings they replaced.
Which, of course, is part of the area’s enduring charm. Seriously.
Yr. humble scribe attended two private events in Belltown on Tuesday.
In the morning, the Escala condo project (Seattle’s last still-under-construction residential highrise) held a “topping off” ceremony on its roof, 31 floors above Fourth Avenue. A city official was there to praise the project as a key component in Mayor Nickels’s “center city strategy.” (Since when did we start calling our downtown “center city” anyway? Sounds like Norm Rice’s failed attempt to rebrand the waterfront as a “harborfront.”)
The ceremony was followed by a champagne toast down in the project’s sales office nearby. Two scale models of the finished building showed it as a shining beacon of quality living. A chart on one wall listed one third of the project’s 270-some units as sold. Another third are currently available. The rest are on hold, withdrawn from the market pending an upturn in conditions.
The second big event came that evening at the Crocodile. It was an invite-only bash honoring the 50th birthday of Kim Warnick, the legendary Fastbacks/Visqueen singer-bassist. The joint was packed with folks who’ve loved Warnick and her work. An all-star lineup of Seattle musicians paid tribute to her on stage.
Here’s the climactic moment of the evening, with Warnick joining in with her ol’ band members Kurt Bloch, Lulu Gargiulo, and Mike Musburger.
And here are more musical moments from the evening.
The contrast between that scene and the Escala fete reminded me of what Jonathan Raban said about NYC as a city of “street people” and “sky people.”
In his definition, “street people” weren’t just those who lived ON the streets but also those who walk and converse and meet friends on the sidewalks, who live in the street-level milieu of bars and shops and cafes.
The “sky people” of NY are those for whom, as Fran Lebowitz described it, “outside” is what’s in between the building you’re in and the building you’re going to. Sky people live in the rarified air of high rises, have household staffs to shop for them, and socialize at private clubs and exclusive bistros. The Escala will have a private club, the first new one in town in 20 years (I believe since the Columbia Tower Club).
Times have been tough for street-level citizens for several years.
Now, they’re becoming tough for sky people as well.
The thing is, we who live close to the ground know how to survive. And to have a helluva good time while doing so.
