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The Seafair Torchlight Parade is more than a relic of “a simpler time,” or an opportunity for Seattle merchants and restaurants to make money from visiting suburbanites and exurbanites.
It’s an opportunity for all of us to get back in touch with the values and aesthetics that helped make this city great.
At a time and place where these values are often scoffed at, Seafair proclaims there’s still plenty to admire in squareness.
Squares gave us the Space Needle. Squares gave us Boeing (and, hence, the “international jet set”). Squares gave us computers and software.
Towns at at least a little removed from the metro core still understand the positive aspects of squareness, and revel in them. I come from one of these.
Remember: Square DOES NOT necessarily equal boring or white. Values of family, tradition, and togetherness cut across all ethnic and subcultural lines.
There are three special things to mention about this year’s parade. The first is the Seafair Clowns’ heartfelt tribute to Chris Wedes/J.P. Patches.
The second thing was something I’d previously noticed last month at the gay parade—spectators using cam-equipped iPads to get a better-than-the-naked eye view of the proceedings.
And finally, what was Grand Marshal (and Fastbacks drummer #2) Duff McKagan doing in a horse and buggy? Wouldn’t a bitchin’ vintage muscle car be more his flavor?
This is the UW’s Lander Hall dormitory, where thousands of students over the past four-plus decades have slept, drank, toked, screwed, and even studied. It’s being razed this summer so the U can build a new (though not necessarily less ugly) residence-hall complex. It was really time for the building to come down. So much so, that a big slab of a concrete wall cracked off during demolition last Saturday. It crashed down on the closed cab of the excavator machine. The operator is still in the hospital.
Cafe Racer was first opened by Kurt Geissel and then business partner Staci Dinehart in 2003, originally as the Lucky Dog Espresso.
First with Dinehart and then with longtime manager Ben Dean, Geissel built it into a place that was everything to many people—a coffeehouse, diner, bar, dual art-exhibition space (both permanent and rotating exhibits), eclectic live music venue, and gathering place for both Ravenna/Roosevelt area locals and for several citywide subcultures.
Geissel kept his outside day job all that time, pouring everything the cafe made back into it. It made the front page of the Sunday New York Times arts section for its Sunday all-ages improv-music shows, the “Racer Sessions.”
Some of the other people most responsible for Racer’s rise have included:
As you all know, Meuse and Keriakedes were at the cafe the morning of May 30, when a mentally unstable former customer came in and started shooting. He killed Keriakedes and three other people, and shot Meuse. He fled, shot and killed a woman outside Town Hall, took her car, and was finally found by police in West Seattle, where he fatally shot himself.
Geissel has said he was actually making more money with Racer closed, thanks to insurance. But friends and loyal customers pretty much demanded he reopen. After take a couple of weeks off to get his own head together, he and a crew of volunteers cleaned up and repainted the place and installed a new bar.
Reopening day was all hugs and smiles and closure. There seemed to be a collective sense, not of “normalcy” but of triumph. Meuse was working. Woodring was on hand.
So was Geissel, hauling in fresh supplies of hamburger buns and Tater Tots.
He’s said that not reopening would be letting “the bad” win. Bringing Cafe Racer back, he’s also said, was a process fed by “the tremendous love” expressed by everyone who’s frequented it.
(Cross-posted with City Living.)
Target (or rather “City Target”), which had its “soft opening” on Wednesday, is the biggest new retail opening downtown since 1998, when Pacific Place opened and Nordstrom moved into the old Frederick & Nelson building.
It’s the first new downtown “department store” since Nordstrom expanded from shoes into clothes in the 1960s.
It’s the first “general merchandise” store downtown since Woolworth’s national demise, and the first in Seattle’s urban core since Kroger turned its Broadway Market site from a small Fred Meyer into a large QFC.
And it’s the first downtown toy store since the fall of FAO Schwarz.
It’s on a historic half block of Second Avenue between Pike and Union streets. That’s where The Bon Marché (sigh) occupied a series of buildings between 1912 and 1929. That complex was taken over by J.C. Penney, and housed that company’s biggest-in-the-nation store until it closed in 1982.
When the Newmark condo tower was built there in the 1990s, the original concept for the retail space was to have been a concourse of shops; an unofficial “New” annex to the Pike Place “Market.” Instead, a PayLess Drug store and a multiplex cinema came in, both short-lived.
Target announced in 2010 that it was moving into all three floors and 96,000 square feet. It’s taken that long for them to completely retool the space.
The company says it’s also spent a lot of time and money determining what merchandise to put in the place, which is about two-thirds the size of a normal suburban Target. (I’m sure the arrangement will be revised once the first sales figures come in.)
The lower (Union Street) level is groceries (and storage and parking). It’s strong where the nearby Kress IGA is weak (prices of packaged-food items) and weak where Kress is strong (meat and produce selection).
The main (Pike Street) level is women’s casual wear, drugs, sundries, office and school supplies (yes, there are downtown residents with kids).
Upstairs (connected by the same shopping-car escalator mechanism seen at the Northgate Target), there’s men’s and kids’ wear, casual home furnishings, DVDs, toys, and electronics.
And throughout on day one, downtown workers and residents strolled and checked prices and met up with one another.
City Target helps fulfill a longtime wish of civic leaders to better connect Pike Place to the retail core.
And it fulfills a slogan mounted on the store’s T-shirt and tourist-merchandise section: CITY LOVE.
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P.S.: I’ve mentioned it before, but the dysfunctional-family aspect of the Target company is always fun to relate.
Target was originally an outgrowth of (the now-Macyfied, alas) Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis. (Thus, the chain’s current “City” push is a return to roots of a sort.)
A scion of that family, Mark Dayton, is a prominent progressive Democrat. In 2011 he became governor of the great state of Minnesota.
Target’s current management spent a whole bunch of PAC money supporting Gov. Dayton’s losing (and virulently anti-gay) Republican opponent.
From Universal’s 1939 serial The Green Hornet, based on the radio show of the same name.
This is as close as I got to Thursday’s appearance by Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis at the Local Color coffeehouse on Pike Place.
Nice that their handlers chose a cool independent beanery to plug their new movie The Campaign.
What’s hard to understand is the sheer enormity of the turnout. Besides Pine Street (as seen here), crowds were sardine-packed along Pike Place, Pike Street, and even First Avenue.
Even Ranger Rick, the venerable kiddie eco-icon, showed up, eager for a captive audience to spread his conservation message.
cafe racer, june 20, 2012
Cafe Racer reopens this Friday.
Here’s the press release by owner Kurt Geissel:
A note from Cafe Racer’s owner: “No one needs to be reminded of what happened at Café Racer on May 30, 2012. Each day the grief of losing our loved ones lessens, but not our love for them or the love they brought into our lives. Drew, Joe, Kim, Don and Gloria were people who gave more of themselves than they ever received. This is why the community was so devastated by their loss. This is also why that community of which they were a part of will carry on. The outpouring of love and support from this community was astounding to me. Not only for the loss of our loved ones, but for the love and concern for Café Racer itself. It became clear to me that the café is more than just a place to pick up a coffee, food or have a drink, but it is a part of the community. The love didn’t just come from the ones we lost, it comes from everyone. This is the main reason that I’ve decided to keep the cafe open, to forge ahead with the vision that is Café Racer by providing a place for diverse people and groups to come together and have a loving, safe place to gather. There may be some physical changes to the cafe, the main ingredient which makes Café Racer unique will remain the same, Love. There is no way I can express my thanks to the hundreds of people who gave me, and everyone who is involved with the café, their love and support. YOU make Cafe Racer what it is.†– Kurt Geissel Owner, Café Racer Friday July 20th –Seattle: Café Racer will be re-opening its doors to the public
A note from Cafe Racer’s owner:
“No one needs to be reminded of what happened at Café Racer on May 30, 2012.
Each day the grief of losing our loved ones lessens, but not our love for them or the love they brought into our lives. Drew, Joe, Kim, Don and Gloria were people who gave more of themselves than they ever received. This is why the community was so devastated by their loss. This is also why that community of which they were a part of will carry on.
The outpouring of love and support from this community was astounding to me. Not only for the loss of our loved ones, but for the love and concern for Café Racer itself. It became clear to me that the café is more than just a place to pick up a coffee, food or have a drink, but it is a part of the community. The love didn’t just come from the ones we lost, it comes from everyone.
This is the main reason that I’ve decided to keep the cafe open, to forge ahead with the vision that is Café Racer by providing a place for diverse people and groups to come together and have a loving, safe place to gather. There may be some physical changes to the cafe, the main ingredient which makes Café Racer unique will remain the same, Love.
There is no way I can express my thanks to the hundreds of people who gave me, and everyone who is involved with the café, their love and support.
YOU make Cafe Racer what it is.†– Kurt Geissel Owner, Café Racer
Friday July 20th –Seattle: Café Racer will be re-opening its doors to the public
There was a competition going on for short films about Seattle. Some of the entrants (at least they seem like they could be) are showing up online. F’rinstance, here’s a poetic ode to the city by Riz Rollins; and here’s Peter Edlund’s Love, Seattle (based on the opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and dedicated to team-and-dream stealer Clay Bennett).
Tuesday was WB-Day in greater downtown Seattle and much of the south end.
In this case, I mean not Warner Bros. but Wave Broadband, the locally based company that’s taken over the bankrupt, inferior-in-so-many-ways Broadstripe Cable.
On Tuesday, starting about 12:20 a.m., the new Wave channel lineup began to “propogate” on my DVR.
Some of the new channels are walled behind new pay-tiers. These include Boomerang (retro cartoons), Ovation (arts and classical music), Comcast SportNet (Portland TrailBlazers basketball), and the Fox and MGM movie channels.
But there are still new fun attractions on the basic and digital-basic tiers, channels Comcast customers have had for some time: IFC, Current, This TV (KOMO’s digital sub-channel).
But the big (or rather, wide and crystal-clear) news is the added hi-def lineup. We now get the HD versions of KSTW (at last), CNN, MSNBC, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, AMC, TCM, Discovery, the Science Channel, and several more.
The Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Whale Wars, and the like are the sort of big-country spectacle that’s just not worth watching in ordinary-def when you can get it in fabulous-def.
Then there’s the likes of Factory Made and Build It Bigger. I’ve come to call these shows “Work Porn.”
You watch them in the day, when you’re sitting with the TV in the background and a laptop in front of you, staring at online job applications.
You see them working. Up and about. Doing stuff. Making stuff.
You get to live vicariously through their active days.
Then when it’s over you realize you’re still sitting with a laptop in front of you at home.
Found in a Hong Kong newspaper.
Happy 7/11 everyone! And we’ve got a new place to get our free regular Slurpee® on this only-comes-but-once-a-year day. This brand new 7-Eleven franchise is on Virginia Street between 8th and 9th, in the cusp between Belltown, the retail core, South Lake Union, and the Cascade district. It’s got all your favorites—burritos, Big Bite® hot dogs, $1 pizza slices, bizarre potato-chip varieties, coffee lids with sliding plastic openings. It closes nightly at midnight, though (sorry, hungry Re-bar barflies at closing time).
Amid all the continuing flap about historic Seattle buildings threatened with doom, there’s one building a lot of people here would like to get rid of, as soon as possible.
It’s a lovely building for what it is. It’s perhaps the architectural ideal of its type of structure.
It’s just in the way of something a lot of people want.
It’s a long, low, large, rustic, wooden industrial building, with an arced roof and bare support beams. A delightfully rundown-looking front office emits that vital “we don’t waste our customers’ money” look.
It’s called United Warehouses. (Not to be confused with the old United Furniture Warehouse, of once-ubiquitous musical TV commercials.)
Since its opening in 1954, the structure has provided short- and long-term storage for the makers and distributors of all sorts of stuff. In recent decades, United Warehouses’ CEO Tom Herche has expanded the operation into six facilities throughout the Northwest region, plus trucking and freight-forwarding services.
The place has a new landlord. And as you might have heard, he’s got big plans for the property. Storing supplies of gardening tools and energy drinks isn’t among them.
Christopher Hansen, a local boy who made good (if you call hedge funds a “good” thing), acquired it and a couple of adjacent parcels, as a site for the big new basketball and hockey arena he wants to build.
As Hansen proved at the fan rally he staged on June 14, he’s got a lot of support among the local populace. There were thousands of never-give-up lifelong Sonics fans, who’d just love to again shout such old team slogans as “Not In Our House!” Hockey fans too, who’ve supported minor league teams and now want the NHL here.
The warehouse building stays put and in use until the arena’s ready to go up, which Hansen insists won’t be until at least one of those teams is a sure thing.
A moved NBA basketball franchise would probably be the first to arrive, because any “new Sonics” could hold court temporarily at KeyArena. That place is still a perfectly fine place for basketball (except to the league’s moneybags), but lousy for hockey.
Even then, the soonest you’ll get to see a game at the ___ Arena (Hansen will undoubtedly sell the naming rights) will be 2017.
Heck, the building hasn’t even been designed yet. I personally hope the new complex incorporates a gently arced roof design as a nod to what came before it.
And the city and county councils want their say on a complex plan to kick in $200 million in bonds to pay part of the arena’s construction, with the funds to be paid back by tax revenue the arena will generate. So far, City Councilmember Richard Conlin appears to be the most hard-to-convince, but this situation fluctuates nearly daily.
Then there’s the little matter of neighborhood traffic, as publicly moaned about by the Port of Seattle and others.
This has to be fixed anyway, as is known to anyone who’s tried to get to downtown from the south end on a Mariners game day. In that regard the arena plan is an opportunity, not a problem. And it’s best to plan and execute that road revamping in the immediate future, during or just after the viaduct replacement mess.
There’s another aspect to all this maneuvering. While it hasn’t been publicized much, the community has already benefitted from Hansen’s dealmaking.
Tom Herche’s privately-held company got nearly $22 million for the United Warehouses property. The proceeds will, in part, help Herche and his wife Mary maintain their lifelong personal commitments to local causes.
The Herches are major supporters of Childhaven, the Healing Center (a grief support community), Rebuilding Together Seattle (providing home repair for low-income homeowners), the National MS Society’s regional chapter, and the Rotary Boys & Girls Club (they host a fundraising picnic for it at the warehouse every August).
Whether or not any puck ever drops or any free throw ever rises at the United Warehouses site, Seattle has already come out a winner.
via david haggard at flickr.com
Nothing says freedom, pride, and independence like being able to crack jokes about how nothing says freedom, pride, and independence like watching stuff get blown up.
Especially if it’s at someplace as beautiful and as centrally situated as Lake Union.
Did we mention yet how there was a great huge full moon in a cloudless sky, on the night after the first warm day in weeks? Well there was.
For the first time since the Washington Mutual implosion, Seattle’s fireworks had a big-name sponsor this year (Starbucks). Last year, a local tech-job placement company stepped in; the year before that, local talk radio hosts successfully pleaded for donations to keep the show going.
So: One more “best show ever.” Twenty minutes of color light and noise on a grand scale. And unlike the San Diego show, the rockets didn’t all go off at once.
In case you had a TV on during a home viewing party but muted the sound after the fireworks were over, the band playing live to round out the telecast was Pickwick. They’re the current neo-neo-neo-blue-eyed-soul sensations around town.
A scene from the South Korean film Untold Scandal (2003; dir. Je-yong Lee).
