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PARTY OFF, DUDE?
Mar 2nd, 2001 by Clark Humphrey

SEATTLE’S PIONEER SQUARE MARDI GRAS began in the mid-’70s, under the Anglified/sanitized name “Fat Tuesday.” It was intended less as a public celebration than as a promotion for the neighborhood’s music clubs and their already-calcified formula of superficially aggressive but ultimately tame all-white “blues” bands.

After the first year, the New Orleans-style rowdiness so incensed the powers-that-be (a notorious Times headline called it “Lawless Tuesday”), that the organizers scaled back their offerings to special nighttime promotions within the bars and family-friendly, daytime-only outdoor events (such as the Spam carving contest and the “Miss No Fat” beauty contest).

But revelers in recent years have refused to be denied. They began to hold their own informal, unofficial “real” Mardi Gras bashes in the streets, here and in a few other big cities.

Last year’s Seattle bash, three months after WTO, felt a lot like WTO without the politics–young folk getting rowdy and mean; cops getting stern and meaner.

So this year (from which all of this page’s pictures date), Paul Schell’s Forces of Order announced plans to harshly deal with any attempts to create a giant outdoor moshpit in the streets. The result, last Saturday night, was a lot of rowdy overgrown boys (and a few flash-happy ladies), a few drunken fights, heavy police over-reaction to the fights, and heavier crowd reaction to the police-heightened violent atmosphere.

Monday night was a kind of halftime in the revelry, with more cops than partiers on the streets.

Then came Tuesday night.

Thousands crammed the area. Most were young and male. Some were attracted by hopes of a Woodstock ’99-style “rage rock” riot. Some, including the small but particularly violent black street gang the TV cameras particularly loved to point to, apparently wanted to hit at anyone and anything in sight. Some just showed up hoping to get shitfaced and to scream at women to raise their tops.

Most just wanted to share a non-mellow, non-rational bacchanalia–a universal human desire, and one for which any community worthy of the name provides regular outlets.

Yes, there were fights and other assorted rowdinesses. A poilce department (like New Orleans’s) trained for such an event would spend less effort tryng to impose order, and more effort stopping specific looting and fighting incidents while letting the rest of the crowd get happy, naked, and/or stupid.

For that matter, a city that was truly comfortable with human behavior in this “Xtreme” age would be prepared to welcome and channel this energy, to curate a celebration that would let young adults vent their energies in a more sociable manner, with folk having fun together without turning against one another.

The old Seattle image of an overgrown small town where everybody was a mellow, upscale, white baby boomer was never as real as the media and the politicians wanted it to be, and now has become a dated cliche.

So let’s lot fear or try to re-ban a big outdoor Mardi Gras, but instead start planning now to make it better.

We’re more diverse than we used to be, but we’re still not particulalry overflowing with cajuns, Latinos, or Catholics. The pre-Lenten excuse for Mardis Gras doesn’t really work here except on a rent-a-culture basis.

But we can purposefully stage a big, fun, inviting tribute to the lengthening days, the slightly drying climate (in most years), and the chance to get back outside. Imagine a spring-equinox party, only as long as a month before depending on the wandering Passover/Lent season. Let the noisy boys and flashy girls show up, but also make it inviting to a wider swath of the populace. Have mood-setting music, art, dance, street performers and other elements to add an infusing/diffusing element that would discourage violence more effectively than any baton-holding police stormtroopers ever could.

IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.

NEXT: Handicapping the mayoral race.

ELSEWHERE:

  • You show me a historical pattern of white hipster-wannabes pretending to be black, and I’ll show you a “minstrel cycle….”
SHAKING IT UP
Mar 1st, 2001 by Clark Humphrey

(NOTE: Today’s previously-announced contents have been delayed to a later date, for obvious reasons.)

EARTHQUAKE IRONY #1: It happened just as Mayor Schell was going to announce plans to re-ban outdoor Mardi Gras celebrations, after Pioneer Square got taken over the previous night by non-laid-back, non-mellow, non-baby-boomer-generation people (some of whom, admittedly, got really stupid and started moshpit-like fights against one another, but who probably could’ve been disuaded from such dumbness with saner civic and poice policies). (More about this in tomorrow’s installment.)

Schell was probably going to bemoan the couple of broken windows and bashed cars from the previous night, when Nature provided its own show of rowdiness.

Earthquake Irony #2: One of the most damaged buildings was the Fenix Underground, Ground Zero of the Mardi Gras raucousness.

Earthquake Irony #3: Just about all the big local institutions hated by local lefties got visibly caught up in the Ash Wednesday Quake:

  • The second really big damage spot was the former Sears catalog warehouse, now Starbucks’ HQ. (Lotsa bricks fell from the 1906-vintage building, but recent structural retrofitting worked and the thing stayed up.)
  • The third big damage spot was one of the buildings on 1st Ave. S. Paul Allen’s bought as part of his big football-stadium project.
  • And Bill Gates was shaken at the Westin Hotel, during a big presentation trying to sell software to schools.

My Own Story: I was in a high-rise when things started shaking all over. I immediately took to protect the computer I was working on. The coffee cup and other objects on the desk were less lucky. It took about five minutes just to clear my way through the fallen books and shelving to get to the elevators, which were shut down, and from there to schlepping my way down a dozen flights of stairs.

Once outside and among the teeming masses of temporarily displaced downtown office workers (such as the city employees at Key Tower photographed on this page), I shot a few pics of stray bricks and abandoned, broken home belongings such as the TV set depicted here.

Returned home to find a cheap but fondly-remembered little piece of statuary broken. Otherwise, things had been knocked about and tossed to the floor but remained intact.

As I’m writing this, my nervous system is still giving me a little shellshock. I can’t say it was fun, but at least there was only one death (that we know of at this point), lots of kids are getting a day off from school today, most of the seismic-reconstruction work around here has proven sound, and I (and, I hope, you) survived shaken but not stirred.

(OK, OK, I’m understating the emotional/visceral dislocation I experienced, not at the time but starting about 15 minutes later and continuing for several hours afterward. If I’d been a dog I’ve been yelping and jumping and annoying my owner all day.)

IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.

NEXT: Pioneer Square Mardi Gras–WTO without the politics?

ELSEWHERE:

THE MORE-OR-LESS ANNUAL 'I LOVE SNOW' PIECE
Feb 19th, 2001 by Clark Humphrey

LONGTIME READERS KNOW one of my regular schticks here is the ode of praise to that rare and precious treat, snow in Seattle.

Yes, I know I could see and play in snow any day from Thanksgiving to Easter (most years) with just a short trek to Snoqualmie Summit. But the whole point of my urban-snow adoration is to have the white stuff here, temporarily reshaping the city’s landscape and its patterns of life and attitude.

Normal life becomes well-nigh impossible. Automotive transportation, the basis of almost all aspects of everyday existence in the western U.S., becomes first risky and then futile.

Throughout the city, children and even adults learn to just forget about whatever they thought was so important and to instead enjoy the evening, the day, the unplanned vacation. The speed and intensity with which ordinary, drudgery-stricken Seattle citizens turn into joyful, heartful, true human beings is truly an astounding thing to behold.

It’s not a raucous, violent energy but a playful one, in which everyone becomes fast friends sharing the spirit of play amid a bright, quiet, serene setting. A city of isolated individuals and families becomes, for one or two days every one or two years, a real community.

So, of course, the local powers that be and their media minions fear and loathe it.

Every winter, the TV newscasts run huge scare-mongering “Snow Alerts” any time there’s even a hint of coldness and precipitation occuring in the Puget Sound basin at the same time. Ninety percent of the time, these alerts prove wrong; leading blow-dried anchorpeople to snicker in “relief” the following evening.

Then, on those rare occasions when snow does fall, and it does stick to the ground, and it does accumulate, the media coverage emphasizes themes of disaster, terror, and major inconveniences.

(One notable exception this time: NorthWest Cable News, which juxtaposed its usual car-crash stories with call-in segments from regional citizens who couldn’t stop saying how beautiful their neighborhoods had become and how much fun they were having.)

But, alas, this momentary interruption of daily drabless with a glimpse of our full potential to live and love is as short-lived as a snowman. And we’re lucky to even have a momentary interruption.

If Seattle had snow more often, or for longer periods of time, the citizenry (and the governments running the region’s street systems) would be better prepared to make car travel, and hence work and everything that goes with it, continue as normal without interference.

Snowstorm 2001 didn’t last for five days like Snowstorm 1990, but it was the biggest, most beautiful Seattle snow in four years. I was out in it until 1:30 Friday morning, because I knew it could start to melt away by midday. Which it did.

But for one exhilarating night and one beautiful day, the city knew what it was like to know play, to know real passion, to know, just for a moment, real life.

NEXT: University Way’s latest crisis.

ELSEWHERE:

A LITTLE 'LIGHT' READING
Jan 26th, 2001 by Clark Humphrey

AS I’VE PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN, I’m working on a coffee-table picture book about my town (tentatively titled City Light). I hope to get it out in September, coinciding with Seattle’s 150th birthday. I’ll be writing the text (short, pithy odes to my favorite local neighborhoods, places, people, and historical tales). I’m also taking some of the pix, with one of them newfangled digital camera thangs.

But for the book’s big showcase photos, I’m grateful to be working with a great photographer and local native named Lori Lynn Mason. She creates huge 4-by-6-inch color shots, mini-masterpieces of light and color. But even more importantly, she shares my love of Seattle and concern for its accelerating changes.

We’ve been on three or four shooting sessions thus far, assembling a sample chapter on Aurora Avenue (the spine of old Seattle’s heart and soul) to show to prospective publishers or investors. (Color photo books cost a bit more to print than the two monochrome, text-based volumes MISCmedia has published to date.)

As you can tell from these shots (including the above, shot during a 29 Live cablecast at the public access studios), it’s going to be vastly different document from the tourist-oriented Seattle photo books you may know. It’ll be about people of all stripes living, working, playing, and creating around here. It’ll celebrate the ideas, the spirit, and the ambitions of our formerly-fair city.

My only regret is I didn’t start on it sooner.

Not only because we’re on tight deadlines to get this out by September, but because darn near every week a valuable piece of the city’s heritage goes away (such as the Pioneer Square pergola, destroyed inadvertantly by a semi truck earlier this month.)

NEXT: What we know about the new Administration after a week.

ELSEWHERE:

DOWNTOWN NON-RETAIL BUILDINGS
Sep 26th, 2000 by Clark Humphrey

MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate. This time, three buildings that aren’t primarily used to sell stuff, and one that is.

Only a few corners in today’s downtown Seattle are devoted neither to making money nor to celebrating those who have a lot of it. One of these is the YWCA, whose ’30s-era building still bears two pairs of terra-cotta reliefs honoring women’s strength (symbolized by a warrior woman with a shield) and women’s wisdom (symbolized by a seated woman reading, deep in contemplation). While the current YWCA logo emphasizes the “W” in the organization’s name, nobody’s likely to confuse this handsome brick building with the stark-black W Hotel just down the street.

The Olympic Hotel, built in 1923, used to advertise itself as “the hotel Seattle calls home.” It was THE place for important business meetings, posh wedding receptions, and stays by government dignitaries. It was also the original flagship of a regional chain, Western Hotels, which after several corporate morphings became Westin and which sold the Olympic in 1980 to Canada’s Four Seasons chain. It’s now officially called the Four Seasons Olympic. Northwest old-timers still call it “the Olympic” for short; only clueless newbies (and the hotel’s management) call it “the Four Seasons.”

Amid today’s hoopla over the proposed “world class” new downtown library, one may forget the library we have now was originally thought the most modern thing one could imagine. It had replaced a grandiose old Carnegie-funded structure which, by the early ’50s, was considered too small and too worn-down. Instead of the old library’s bricks and pillars and a neo-classical facade, we got a structure of clean lines, neutral pastel colors, bright fluorescent lighting, and the same “efficient” construction methods that have helped make all of downtown Seattle’s government-built buildings of the period into prematurely collapsing eyesores.

Amid the classic gas-station signs adorning the General Petroleum Museum on Pine Street is one vertical sign advertising not gas but “V-I-D-E-O.” It’s a remnant of the video store that used to be in the building’s street-level storefront, where a couple of retro furnishings shops stand now. The sign was refitted in the ’80s; it originally spelled out R-A-F-F-‘S, the name of a shoe store previously in the space. A horizontal Raff’s sign has been moved to the building’s roof; you can see a portion of its script letters from certain angles the streets below.

TOMORROW: The possible end of the Olympic Games as we know them.

ELSEWHERE:

BELL SYSTEM NOSTALGIA
Aug 30th, 2000 by Clark Humphrey

FOR THE FIRST TIME ALL SUMMER, we resume our occasional habit of looking for meaning in real estate.

A Bell System ad from the late ’40s claimed, “It takes 500 tons of equipment for just one telephone exchange” (that is, for the central-office connections among the 10,000 phone numbers sharing one prefix). As you may have noticed, electronics are a lot smaller these days. So, even with the explosion of phone numbers due to modems, cell phones, and fax machines, US West didn’t need all the downtown buildings it had inherited when Ma Bell was broken up. One of these buildings was extensively reworked (with exterior windows and other amenities) to become the Hotel Monaco.

The view of downtown Seattle from the Camlin Hotel’s top-floor Cloud Room was forever ruined in the early ’70s by Pacific Northwest Bell’s new headquarters tower. Originally, it was officially billed as being at the made-up address of “1600 Bell Plaza,” confusing out-of-town phone company officials and everyone else who didn’t know it was really on 7th Avenue. With the Baby Bell spinoffs in 1984, the building went from PNB’s head office to a mere divisional outpost of the Colorado-based US West–which, in turn, was just acquired by the long-distance provider Qwest (no relation to the Quincy Jones-owned record label of the same name and spelling.)

The Bauhaus Cafe complements its retro-modern appearance by posting its phone number with a lettered prefix. These were remnants from the early days of telephony, when local service was hard-wired into named “exchanges” of no more than 1,000 lines. Before the rotary dial was invented, callers were initially put through to an operator, who manually patched a switchboard to connect the caller to the number he or she verbally asked for. As phone use grew, exchanges grew and numbers got longer. The Seattle Times, for instance, had the successive numbers over the years of “Main 300,” “MAin 0300,” “MAin 2-0300,” and “622-0300,” before the paper installed a new office phone system that required a block of separate numbers.

The El Gaucho steakhouse and cigar bar’s in a building that used to service a different end of the management-labor equation, as the meeting hall of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. Its downstairs (now the Pampas Room and the Big Picture) was the Trade Winds, an irony-free tiki lounge whose back bar was decorated with exotic coins from around the world, collected from sailor patrons. A small sculpture in front of the building, in the form of a beret adorned with union badges (including that of the radical Industrial Workers of the World) remembers the site’s heritage.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, black empowerment became a rallying cry in the suites as well as on the streets. African-American-owned banks started popping up in cities across the U.S., including Liberty Bank in Seattle’s Central District. It sold home loans to people and neighborhoods underserved by the big banks; it provided business-banking services to the black-owned construction companies that had emerged to do affirmative-action subcontract work on government building projects. But the big banks soon went after the more profitable segments of Liberty’s business. A reorganization under the name Emerald City Bank didn’t last; it was sold to Key Bank in the late ’80s.

TOMORROW: Real Seattle fiction.

ELSEWHERE:

  • They’re making a movie with a computer-animated character in an otherwise live-action setting. They claim they tested real actresses for the role but none of them were right. That, of course, is the excuse Broadway casting people always use when they reserve all starring “ethnic” characters on stage to white actors….
DOT-COMMODIFICATION
Jun 27th, 2000 by Clark Humphrey

EVEN IF THE DOT-COM STOCKS all go phhhhht, as some have threatened to do of late, we’ll still be left with an urban landscape shaped by high-tech bucks and high-tech aesthetics.

We’ve already discussed many of Paul Allen’s pet projects (and will do so again tomorrow.) But for today, here’s a glance at a couple of other buildings redone for tech people’s work and/or play, and some other buildings near them.

Pier 70, now reopened for dot-com offices and a swank restaurant, was one of the central waterfront’s first shipping piers, and one of the first to be coverted to non-cargo uses. In the ’70s, the Pier 70 bar and disco (known in its final mid-’90s incarnation as the Iguana Cantina) was the site for leisure-suited guys to attempt the polyester rub-across with lime-green-dressed gals. But the touristy mall lost ground to retail-and-restaurant sites further south on the waterfront. MTV’s ‘The Real World’ got to use a large part of the pier because it would soon be closed for remodeling.

Shakey’s Pizza Parlor and Ye Public House was a circuit of some 300 family pizza restaurants that dotted the west from the early ’60s until 1991. Besides the pies and pitchers of beer, it was known for piped-in “rinky-dink” piano music, pseudo-rustic decor, and supposedly hand-lettered wooden signs inside (“Shakey made a deal with the bank. Shakey doesn’t cash checks, the bank doesn’t make pizza.”) The restaurants’ looks were modernized in the ’80s, but even that couldn’t help the chain survive industry turmoils and shakeouts. Many ex-Shakey’s sites (identifiable by the shield signs) survive as independent restaurants, including RC’s on the Seattle waterfront.

The long waterfront building known today as the Seattle Trade and Technology Center (housing Real Networks, Discover U, and part of the Art Institute of Seattle) was originally an American Can Co. factory. Kids on their way to a birthday meal at the Old Spaghetti Factory up the street would often stop and stare at a skybridge connecting the can plant with a pier across Alaskan Way. You could see unlabeled steel cans on a conveyor belt, traveling single file on their way to being boxed up and shipped to food and beverage processors.

The Edgewater Inn, where you once could “Fish From Your Window,” was built as part of a local hotel-building boom in preparation for the 1962 World’s Fair. The Edgewater first gained a “rocker hotel” reputation when the Beatles stayed there in ’65. This rep was cemented in the early ’70s as the setting of the Zappa song “Mudshark,” relating the raunchy tale of a fish and a Led Zeppelin groupie. Its neon, block-letter “E” was a waterfront landmark for more than three decades, until new owners replaced it with this fancy, “upscale” revision.

The Ace Hotel opened in early 1999 with management vowing to make it THE place for visiting rock musicians to stay. (The hoteliers’ own musical tastes, if its opening-night party was any indication, tend not toward rock but to thumpa-thumpa DJ music.) The building originally housed a soft-drink bottler; that’s why the side has faded dual 7 Up and Pepsi billboards. Later tenants included a costume shop, a home-neon-lights store, and the Seattle Peniel Mission (which helped ex-cons re-enter society and stay out of the slammer). The mission luckily owned an interest in the building; so when the building was upscaled, the mission got some decent relocation money in the deal.

TOMORROW: A review of the Experience Music Project PR hype.

ELSEWHERE:

  • You know how much I love Japanese snacks. Now you can get them online (though they make no guarantees about the stability of chocolate products in summertime shipping)….
DIME STORE NOSTALGIA
Apr 17th, 2000 by Clark Humphrey

HERE ARE SOME MORE visual glances at recycled real estate; this time with an emphasis on the now almost-disappeared middlebrow sector of downtown retail in my town.

Before it moved to its current site in 1928, the Bon Marche had two prior downtown buildings. The first, at First and Cedar, survived until the 1980s. The second, at Second and Pike, became a J.C. Penney from 1930 to 1982 (for many of those years, it was the chain’s largest store). Vacant almost a decade, it was finally razed for a condo tower and indoor mall called Newmark (as in “New Market,” implying the developers hoped to draw shoppers from the nearby Pike Place Market). Newmark’s mall and movie theaters failed; the space was turned into bank offices.

In the middle of the Great Depression, the F.W. Woolworth Co. built what it modestly called “The Wonder Store” at Third and Pike. The two-level emporium offered everything from clothes and jewelry to candy and toys, all at bargain prices. But more than that, its architecture and interior design told its customers they deserved to be welcomed and pampered in a shopping environment just as handsome as those of the “carriage trade” stores for the rich. The Woolworth chain staggered to a final collapse in the mid-’90s; the parent company now calls itself Venator and runs such mall-based stores as Foot Locker. The downtown Woolworth site’s now a Ross Dress for Less.

During the Woolworth chain’s heyday, it had many variety-store rivals. One of the biggest was the S.H. Kress Co., which built many stores across from Woolworth’s bigger outlets–including one at Third and Pike in Seattle, now housing a Sam Goody record store among other tenants. Founder Samuel Kress amassed a huge collection of mideval and baroque-era religious art, which he donated to several museums (including the Seattle Art Museum). The Kress chain was eventually bought by financier Meshulam Riklis (then-husband of singer-actress Pia Zadora), who shut down the stores so he could make more money from the real estate.

Back when Nordstrom was just a shoe store, Rhodes of Seattle advertised itself as “Seattle’s Home-Owned Department Store.” (The long name was meant to differentiate it from the separately-owned Rhodes store in Tacoma.) By the ’60s, it had become part of the M. Lamont Bean family’s local retail empire (Pay ‘n Save Drugs, Ernst Hardware, Pizza Haven, et al.). In the early ’70s, as the Boeing recession struck Seattle and Nordstrom grew into a full-line clothing store, the Beans closed Rhodes’ downtown store (now housing a Kinko’s and a Seattle’s Best Coffee) and renamed its suburban branches “Lamonts” (now owned by others and in financial troubles).

TOMORROW: USA Today turns 18, asserts its adulthood with a style makeover.

ELSEWHERE:

REEL PLACES
Jan 18th, 2000 by Clark Humphrey

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….

ELSEWHERE:

THE RETAIL THEATER
Dec 27th, 1999 by Clark Humphrey

IN THREE PRIOR OCCASIONAL INSTALLMENTS, I’ve shown and told about some of the reused and recycled retail spaces around my town.

Since this past Xmas season featured so many attempts to make the “retail theater experience” ever more elaborate, let’s ponder the intersections between retail and theatricality.

One downtown store unaffected by the recent WTO protests was Jay Jacobs. It had closed forever on the day before the protests, and was left untouched by the Nov. 30 window breakers (perhaps because it had been a local clothing chain that had failed against the onslaught of multinational retailers). After the last merchandise was removed on the last day of business, workers preparing for the store’s fixtures sale prominently placed three mannequins inside the store’s main window. The figures were placed belly-up, just like the company.

The front of this parking garage at 5th & Olive once housed a Seattle Trust Bank branch, since vacated by successor Key Bank. The building’s back identifies it as the Fox Garage–the parking annex of the old Fox Music Hall theater a block away. The Music Hall was demolished in late 1991, supposedly for a new hotel project, after years of noble bureaucratic struggles by preservation advocates. The site remained a mere parking lot until the summer of 1999, when office construction finally began there. You can again use the Fox Garage on your way to a movie–the Pacific Place multiplex is across the street.

The grand re-opening of the Cinerama Theater in May 1999 may have struck non-Seattleites as a bit odd. Other towns have preserved or restored some of their golden-age movie palaces; but the Cinerama, on the outside just a plain 1963 concrete box, is the biggest downtown cinema Seattle’s still got. The refurbished Paramount, Moore, and 5th Avenue theaters are used for touring concerts and stage shows, not films. A few other theater buildings have been kept for other uses, such as the Banana Republic store in the old Coliseum Theater (believed by some historians to be the first U.S. building constructed specifically for showing movies).

While some theatrical structures get rebuilt as retail and office buildings, other buildings get turned from mundane uses into entertainment joints. Entros, the gaming-themed restaurant-bar, occupies part of a former Van de Kamp’s bakery plant. At one time, most every supermarket in Washington bore the familiar blue neon windmill sign advertising Van de Kamp’s goods. The company’s delivery people, and the clerks at its outlet stores, even wore fake Dutch farm-girl costumes. As the big supermarket chains built up their own bakery units, Van de Kamp’s faded. The trademark is now owned by an L.A. frozen-foods company.

The Fraternal Order of Eagles began in Seattle in 1898 as a men’s “fraternal organization,” a social-bonding place where guys (women were relegated to a wives’ auxiliary) met, gave one another fancy titles, drank (at one time, liquor-by-the-drink could be had in Washington only at private clubs), played games, and raised charity money. Eagles world HQ, built in 1925, hosted jazz bands in the ’40s, hippie bands in the ’60s, and punk bands in the ’80s. The building became part of the Washington State Convention Center in the late ’80s; A Contemporary Theater moved into the auditorium in ’96. Eagles Aerie #1 now meets in Georgetown.

Charles Herring was Seattle’s best-known TV news anchor when he retired in 1968. Immediately following the end of Herring’s farewell broadcast, he reappeared on screen as a spokesperson for White Front, a California discount-store chain moving into the Seattle market. Herring’s name recognition proved little help to the chain, which collapsed in the early ’70s (the Aurora White Front became a Kmart, which was recently remodeled). One minor subsidiary chain started by White Front’s owners survived the parent chain’s collapse–Toys “R” Us.

Former single-screen movie-theater buildings are in use as retail spaces across North America. When the Broadway Theater was acquired by the Pay n’ Save drug chain (now Rite Aid), they didn’t bother to flatten the theater’s sloping floor. Instead, they just kept the facade and marquee; the whole rest of the building was razed and rebuilt. The drugstore people did try to maintain a tribute to the site’s past inside, by putting up murals depicting classic movie stars–including, right by the pharmacy counter, that famous prescription-sleeping-pill abuser Marilyn Monroe.

TOMORROW: Punk vs. neopunk.

IN OTHER NEWS: Just one thought about Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos as Time’s Man-O-The-Year: For the past quarter-century or more, certain hibrow blowhards have bemoaned the supposed Death of Reading in a supposed Post-Literate Society. Yet as the whatever-you-want-to-call-it epoch closes, the arguably most famous individual merchant in the most hyped-up merchandising venue of the day is, primarily and most profitably (or, rather, least unprofitably), a bookseller.

ELSEWHERE:

BANK SHOTS
Dec 14th, 1999 by Clark Humphrey

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.

ELSEWHERE:

RETAILS FROM THE CRYPT
Oct 12th, 1999 by Clark Humphrey

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.

Hillcrest Deli-MartOriginally, 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.

Starbucks CenterThe 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.)

Tower Books 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.”

Planned Parenthood buildingIn 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.

Fluke buildingRegional 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?

ELSEWHERE:

SURVIVING RELICS
Sep 21st, 1999 by Clark Humphrey

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.

Sigs Barber ShopIn 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.

C.H. Cleaners

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.

Richlen's Super-Mini 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.”

Unocal Site

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.”

Shurgard buildingSeattle 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.

ELSEWHERE:

  • “Fuck Disneyland. When I pinch out a litter of kids, I’m taking them to the car wash….” (Found by Kottke)….
  • Yeah, alcohol can adversely affect your entire life and the lives of everyone you love. But it can also be way fun, or at least seem like it for a while. Note this site sticks a phony URL on its page-name line, and describes Citizen Kane as “one of the greatest films ever made, and is always

    worth seeing, but it doesn’t really make it into the pantheon of great drunk chick movies.” (Found by Andrew….)

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