…to move baseball’s Montreal Expos to Washington DC? Might not happen after all.

So there likely won’t be a NASCAR track in my ol’ Marysville neighborhood after all. The reason: The city and county balked at the heavy subsidies the developers wanted.

For all the talk this election season about conservative “NASCAR dads” as a target voting block, it turned out the stock-car circuit (via its corporate alter-ego, International Speedway Corp.) shares no self-reliance, private-sector-primacy ideology. It’s just as perfectly willing to live off the taxpayers’ proverbial teat as any factory farm or football team.

Kmart and Sears meet under the blue light, get all smoochy.

Sears, of course, is one of American retailing’s grande dames. Its catalogs once sold cars and complete houses, not to mention nearly everything one could put into a house.

Kmart wasn’t the first discounter, but it was the first national discounter. It began in ’62, the same year as its now-archrivals Wal-Mart and Target. The first big-box discount stores were local indies and regional chains, based on the post-WWII Army surplus stores. S.S. Kresge, a Woolworth-esque variety chain that dated back to the late 19th century, gave the discount store a housewife-friendly brand image, then expanded nationally as quickly as possible.

Each was, at different times, America’s #1 retailer. The combined firm will now be only #3.

…is at its anti-freedom ways again. This time they’re proposing legislation that would, if interpreted broadly enough, make MP3 players illegal.

Read all about the recently-settled trademark dispute between the Postal Service (the rock band) and the Postal Service (the mail-carrying organization).

This week, Capitol Hill’s food-shopping routines changed forever.

First stop: The new Safeway at 21st and Madison. It’s part of a “mixed use” retail-apartment megaplex, urged on by city officials eager to gentrify (i.e., white-ify) one of the last blocks of minority-owned retail north of Yesler Way. It’s across from Oscar’s II, the Af-Am restaurant/lounge that was infamously targeted for closure by former City Attorney Mark Sidran.

The new Safeway itself is large, of course, and designed to be a true “urban” shopping target. The ramp for the underground parking’s in the back. The building’s main corner entails a grand pedestrian entrance. In keeping with the L-shaped block it’s built on, the store’s been designed with alcoves and corners, breaking from the seven-decade tradition of the supermarket interior as a plain rectangle.

Even more un-square: The new Broadway Market QFC, which opened Sunday after a four-month remodel of the former urban mini-mall.

Because it was built from what had been several different retail spaces (Fred Meyer, Gap, Gravity Bar, Zebraclub, African Imports) and the central mall corridor, the new Q couldn’t help but pick up some of the old Nordstrom, collection-of-boutiques vibe. (Crossed, of course, with that Whole Foods luxury-nutrition vibe.)

The big surprise: The former downstairs Fred Meyer variety-store section was retained, as “QFC Home.” It’s better organized than it had been under Freddy’s, and retains most of the merchandise lines Freddy’s had had. (Among the missing: Paint, toys, TV/video, family apparel, underwear.)

The old Broadway QFC (above), and the old Broadway Safeway (below), along with the old Bartell Drugs next to the old QFC, stand vacant and awaiting redevelopment. There are enough people in this neighborhood with money and retail experience. Let’s put something together.

The old QFC/Bartell’s buildings add up to almost a full half block. Let’s start up a home/hardware/variety store there, along the lines of the old City People’s Mercantile with home electronics added.

At the old Safeway site, let’s have a no-frills apparel shop for ladies, gents, and kids. Jeans, tops, dresses, undies, casual shoes, hats, handbags, some local-designer consignments.

…claims “nearly 20% of foreign consumers say they’ll avoid select U.S. products due to America’s position on foreign affairs.”

The Montreal Expos have left with a whimper, not a bang. A three-point-five-decade tradition of bilingual baseball finally sputtered out with the last home game Wednesday night, following four years of threats by Major League Baseball to move or fold the team.

The Expos’ home-game attendance has been abysmal for some time. Their field performance has been abysmal ever since the 1994 labor lockout. One fan, in a letter to the Anglophone Montreal Gazette, blames baseball’s post-1994 business structure, hostile to “small market” teams, for the team’s demise. Yeah, except Montreal’s not a small market but a big city whose media reach extends to six to eight million people.

No. The handwriting was on the wall (or the domed-stadium roof) for the Expos by their ninth season in 1977. It’s a long story, and it involves Seattle.

The Expos were one of four teams added to Major League Baseball in 1969. Among the other three were the Seattle Pilots. After one pathetic season in the long-since-demolished Sick’s Stadium, owner Dewey Soriano sold out to now-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. He moved the team to Milwaukee. The City of Seattle sued the American League. Following years of litigation, the league agreed to award Seattle another expansion franchise, which became the popular and fiscally successful Mariners.

But adding just one new team would’ve screwed up league scheduling. To maintain an even number of teams, the league awarded a second expansion franchise for 1977—the even more successful Toronto Blue Jays.

For their first eight seasons, the Expos had been Canada’s first and only MLB team. They enjoyed coast-to-coast TV coverage and print-media attention.

But once the Blue Jays showed up, the Anglophone Canadian media, and the Anglophone Canadian public, reclassified the Expos into a team of merely local significance within the province of Quebec. The Blue Jays became the “home team” for all the entire rest of Canada, from Labrador to Vancouver Island. The Expos’ newspaper coverage, merchandise sales, and broadcasting contracts all diminished. At one point the team didn’t even have an English-language radio contract.

The Expos never recovered in the marketplace. With reduced sponsorships, they couldn’t get the backing to replace Olympic Stadium, one of those dull domes of fluorescent lights and artificial turf so popular in the ’60s and ’70s among everyone except fans and players. Attendance diminished, as did political support for a new publicly-funded stadium.

The rest was a long, slow denoument, ending with this week’s announcement that the team will move to Washington DC (no team name or owners have been announced).

…this month to Second Avenue Pizza, which lost its lease earlier this month. For six years, it served the best slices in town and hosted hundreds of all-ages music and performance events (one of which involved me). Thanks and godspeed to original owners Jeffrey Smith, Darren Morey and Susan Robb, and to final owner Raine La.

My ol’ hometown of Marysville just keeps getting in the news. The big new casino, weird teen murder cases, and now a potential NASCAR car-racing track. The course, and its 75,000 seats, would be situated four miles due north of the little home on 67th Ave. NE where I grew up.

At the time, I was usually bored out of my skull, frustrated at the quiet rural lifestyle. That all since went away for suburban sprawl long ago, of course. But there are still a few parcels of undeveloped land, still occupied by horses and a few cows. A developer has chosen a block of those parcels, totalling 600 acres, to build its track.

Auto racing was never a huge sport in Washington. Evergreen Speedway (east of Marysville in Monroe) and the old Seattle International Raceway were, even at their peaks, minor stops on the second-tier racing tours. The Indy Racing League has had stops in Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR, but never here. NASCAR, the old stock-car circuit that’s become America’s fastest growing sports enterprise, has ignored our entire quadrant of the continent until now.

The track will only operate four days a year, turning the whole area into a temporary traffic hell. The rest of the time it’ll probably be available for other events (Wrestlemania, The Big Ol’ Used Car Sale, rock concerts, international rugby matches, swap meets, RV parking, performance art, etc.).

There are, of course, folk in the area who don’t want the thing. They want to preserve the area’s country lifestyle, as if it still had one.

And the notion of a NASCAR track in Puget Sound country represents almost a “perfect storm” of everything my conformist-nonconformist pals love to hate—suburbia, pro sports, automobiles, gasoline consumption, rednecks, crowds, noise, urban sprawl, corporate endorsements, straight white males, Southern accents, fast food containing meat ingredients, and (horrors above all possible horrors!) television.

So of course I want it.

From a land-use standpoint, it’d be better if the developers built on an already-paved site, such as that of Evergreen Speedway or some of Boeing’s surplus Renton/Kent land.

And I’ve few illusions about the supposed economic boost of such a facility. Race-goers will stop for food and/or gas on the way to and from the races, but they might not do so in or near Marysville.

But I want them to build it anyway. Anything to bring some excitement to the place.

And besides, city and suburb folk could use some contact with the oft-stereotyped “NASCAR dad” fans. They might learn we’re not really all that different. We all want a better life for ourselves and our kin. We’d all rather not die prematurely, whether due to a lack of world peace or to a lack of health insurance. We all like life, liberty, and happiness-pursuin’.

And a goodly number of us, of all political stripes, like to see stuff go fast.

As has been predicted in local retail circles for half a decade now, there’s going to be no more Bon Marché after January; not even the kludgy name “Bon-Macy’s.” All the stores in the once-proud regional chain will become just “Macy’s,” along with the equally formerly proud Rich’s, Goldsmith’s, Lazarus, and Burdine’s names in other regions.

And it’s not even being ordered from New York, but from Cincinnati, where parent company Federated Department Stores has ordered all its holdings to be consolidated under either the Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s names.

The Bon’s buying, merchandising, advertising, and other Seattle back-office operations won’t be shut down, at least not yet. (A few years ago there were published rumors that all these duties would be taken over by Macy’s California.)

It’s a sad end, and it is an end, to a selling tradition that goes back to 1890, to a little notions shop at First and Cedar (which had become an art studio by the mid ’80s, when it was razed for condos). Early in the 20th century it moved to a string of buildings at Second and Pike. (That became J.C. Penney’s largest-anywhere store, later razed for the Newmark complex.)

It’s been at its current Fourth and Pine site since 1928. The following year it merged with several other regional operators (including Boston’s Jordan Marsh) into Hahn Department Stores, which soon became Allied Stores.

In 1950, Allied built, and the Bon anchored, Northgate, the nation’s first modern shopping mall. The Bon’s arch rival Frederick & Nelson declined to open at Northgate, starting its four-decade decline and fall from market dominance.

Shortly after Northgate opened, the Bon added five stories to its downtown flagship, later appended by the Third Avenue parking garage and skybridge.

In 1965, Allied and the Bon built Tacoma Mall, instantly decimating downtown Tacoma as a retail destination. Southcenter was added to the empire three years later, and soon attained the highest retail traffic in the state.

While Frederick & Nelson was an institution with a mystique of being “more than a store,” the Bon was content to be “Where All Seattle Shops” (as per an old ad slogan). It was the everyday department store, with appliances, TVs, restaurants, a pharmacy, a bookstore, and a bargain basement. All these peripheral departments would be pared down or shut down over the years.

Now, the whole Bon Marché tradition’s going away. Seattle’s taken one more involuntary step toward becoming just another Anywhere USA.

Call or write the Federated home office. Let ‘em know you want a Bon Marché, our own “Northwest Department Store” (as per a recent ad slogan).

It probably won’t change anything, but it’ll be noticed.

…is a disturbingly deep element of the USA’s cultural heritage: The early history of Parker Brothers, one of the many toy-and-game companies now consolidated under Hasbro.

The sixteen-year-old George Parker, it seems, had grown up in Salem, MA being bored by something called The Mansion of Happiness, an early board game invented by one Anne Abbott and designed “to teach moral principles.” (Here’s a small picture of the game board.) Young Parker knew there’d be a market for games kids would actually want to play. He also knew many New England parents didn’t allow their kids to play with regular playing-card decks, because of their association with the vice of gambling. That gave him an opportunity to create his own card game, Banking, in 1883. It had a pseudo-financial payoff, but wasn’t played for real money (at least not in the official rules) and offered parents a pseudo-educational, pro-capitalistic element. And, as an original creation, George and his brother Charles could copyright and trademark it, turning them into intellectual-property tycoons.

Fifty years later, in a recently-disputed sequence of events, the Parkers’ firm added Monopoly to its lineup and secured a place in pop-cult history.

Hasbro, on behalf of its Trivial Pursuit game brand, just held a media event proclaiming Seattle “the City of the ’90s.”

They should know. Hasbro (which now controls just about every famous US toy/game brand except Mattel) spent a small mint in the ’90s buying the locally-based Wizards of the Coast, which made the then-popular Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon card games, only to see those products’ popularity peak and ebb.

Anyhoo, just ’cause we were municipally “hot” five to fifteen years ago, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re “over” now. There’s a lotta life in the ol’ lady yet, I say.

FREDDY’S DEAD, OR IS IT?: The Broadway Market Fred Meyer store is now gone, except for a vestigial pharmacy department. (The last time the site was remodeled, when Broadway Market was built on what had been a freestanding Fred Meyer, the pharmacy remained open in a portable building.)

In the side-entrance window, a Liquor Board application sign lists Fred Meyer as applying for a grocery beer-wine license at the site. We’d previously been led to believe Kroger (parent of both Freddy’s and QFC) would simply move and enlarge its existing QFC into the Broadway Market building. The application notice implies an alternate plan, to fill the building with an expanded Freddy’s that includes a grocery department. I’d like that much better.

…we still haven’t been told what caused the mysterious late-night fire that destroyed the Hillcrest deli-mart on East Olive Way. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, to hear that the building might be razed and condos might be put up in its place.

(UPDATE: Since this item was first posted, I’ve been informed that the Hillcrest’s owners may very well rebuild and reopen.)

The Hillcrest, a former pre-supermarket-era Safeway, had a full food selection at decent prices, and had the best convenience-store fried chicken and jojos in all Seattle. I miss it, and hope it comes back.

IN OTHER NEWS, the Museum of History and Industry quietly announced it would like to lease out the 117,000 square feet of exhibition-office space it owns near the Convention Center, which had been used for the temporary downtown library these past two years. The statement implies MOHAI’s raised nowhere near enough money to move in there itself.

There’s another one of those research reports out that claims nobody’s reading in America anymore. And, like most prior reports of its type, its findings aren’t as dire as its headlines suggest.

Actual book sales, it turns out, have been flat or slightly increasing during the recent economic sadness. And that’s not counting audio books, e-books, and the good ol’ Internet (which is for the most part a reading exercise).

It’s the consumption of “literature,” that amorphously-defined area of non-genre fiction, that’s not kept up with population growth, or even fallen a bit, over the past two decades. (Although its audience decline in that era is not nearly as precipitous as that of network TV in the same period.)

I’m currently trying to get a PR job in a book-related company. What I’ll tell them is what I’ll tell you: Books aren’t going away any time soon. They are, as a character on Max Headroom once said, “a non-volatile storage medium.”

As for “literature,” it’s always been a specialty taste in this country. When book people wax nostalgic for the days when NYC publishing was run by tweed-suited gentlemen in funky little offices, they’re pining for a day when the book biz was so small and concentrated as to have been a boutique industry. The peak years of fiction book sales, roughly the ’50s through the ’70s, coincided with the peak years of mass-market paperbacks, when everything from Orwell to Salinger could be found on the drugstore spinner racks.

Among consumer-product industries in this country, the book industry is among the most resistant to change. Yet change it must, if it’s ever going to achieve its full potential as a business and as a force for influence on the culture at large.

More about all this later, maybe.