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(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)
My book Walking Seattle, which I told you about here some months back, is finally out.
The big coming out party is Sunday, Sept. 24, 5 p.m., at the Elliott Bay Book Co. This event will include a 30-minute mini walk around the Pike-Pike neighborhood.
When I came up with the idea of a mini-walk, the store’s staff initially asked what the theme of my mini walk would be. Would it be about the gay scene, or the hipster bar scene, or the music scene, or classic apartment buildings, or houses of worship, or old buildings put to new uses?
The answer: Yes. It will be about all of the above. And more.
The reason: Part of what makes Capitol Hill so special (and such a great place to take a walk) is all the different subcultures that coexist here.
A tourist from the Northeast this summer told me he was initially confused to find so many different groups (racial, religious, and otherwise self-identified) in just about every neighborhood in this town.
Back where he came from, people who grew up in one district of a city (or even on one street) stayed there, out of loyalty and identity. But in Seattle you’ve got gays and artists and African immigrant families and Catholics and professors and cops and working stiffs and doctors all living all over the place. People and families go wherever they get the best real-estate deal at the time, no matter where it is.
On the Hill, this juxtaposition is only more magnified.
In terms of religion alone, Pike/Pine and its immediate surroundings feature Seattle’s premier Jewish congregation, its oldest traditionally African American congregation, the region’s top Catholic university, a “welcoming” (that means they like gays) Baptist church, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, and a new age spiritual center. Former classic Methodist and Christian Science buildings are now repurposed to offices and condos respectively. And yet, in the eyes of many, the Hill is today better known for what happens on Saturday night than on Sunday morning.
A lot of Igor Keller’s Greater Seattle CD is a quaint look back at when this city’s neighborhoods could be easily typed, as they famously were on KING-TV’s old Almost Live!
Perhaps you might find a few more franchised vitamin sellers in Fremont, or a few more halal butchers near MLK and Othello.
But for the sheer variety of different groups and subgroups and sub-subgroups, there’s no place like this place anywhere near this place.
•
Though a lot of the time, these different “tribes” don’t live in harmony as much as in they silently tolerate one another’s presence.
To explain this, let’s look at another book.
British novelist China Mieville’s book The City and the City is a tale of two fictional eastern European city-states, “Bezsel” and “Ul Qoma.” These cities don’t merely border one another; they exist on the same real estate. The residents of each legally separate “city” are taught from birth to only interact with, or even recognize the existence of, the fellow citizens of their own “city.” If they, or ignorant tourists, try to cross over (even if it just means crossing a street), an efficient secret police force shows up and carts them away.
It’s easy to see that scenario as a metaphor for modern urban life in a lot of places, including the Hill. It’s not the oft talked about (and exaggerated) “Seattle freeze.” It’s people who consider themselves part of a “community” of shared interests more than a community of actual physical location.
The young immigrant learning a trade at Seattle Central Community College may feel little or no rapport with the aging rocker hanging out at a Pike/Pine bar. The high-tech commuter having a late dinner at a fashionable bistro may never talk to the single mom trying to hold on to her unit in an old apartment building.
Heck, even the gay men and the lesbians often live worlds apart.
It’s great to have all these different communities within the geographical community of the Hill.
But it would be greater to bring more of them together once in a while, to help form a tighter sense of us all belonging and working toward common goals.
from vintageadbrowser.com
illo to hugo gernsback's story 'ralph 124C41+,' from davidszondy.com
As we approach the Century 21 Exposition’s 50th anniversary, Seattle magazine asked a bunch of local movers, shakers, and thinkers what one thing they’d like to see this city build, create, or establish. Contributors could propose anything at any cost, as long they described one thing in one paragraph.
This, of course, is in the time honored local tradition of moaning about “what this town needs.”
In my experience, guys who start that sentence almost always finish it by desiring an exact copy of something from San Francisco or maybe New York (a restaurant, a nightspot, a civic organization, a public-works project, a sex club, etc.).
But this article’s gaggle of imaginers doesn’t settle for such simplistic imitation.
They go for site specific, just-for-here concepts.
Some of the pipe dreams are basic and obvious:
Other dreamers dream bigger:
As for me, I could be snarky and say that what this town needs is fewer people sitting around talking about what this town needs.
But I won’t.
Instead, I’ll propose turning the post-viaduct waterfront into a site for active entertainment.
We’ve already got Myrtle Edwards Park and the Olympic Sculpture Park for passive, meditative sea-gazing and quiet socializing.
The central waterfront should be more high-energy.
Specifically, it should be a series of lively promenades and “amusement piers.”
Think the old Fun Forest, bigger and better.
Think pre-Trump Atlantic City.
Think England’s Blackpool beach.
Heck, even think Coney Island.
A bigass Ferris wheel. A monster roller coaster. Carny booths and fortune tellers. Outdoor performance stages and strolling buskers. Corn dogs and elephant ears. People walking and laughing and falling in love. Some attractions would be seasonal; others would be year-round. Nothing “world class” (i.e., monumentally boring). Nothing with “good taste.” Everything that tastes good.
atlantic city steel pier, from bassriverhistory.blogspot.com
SIDEBAR: By the way, when I looked for an online image to use as a retro illustration to this piece, I made a Google image search for “future Seattle.” Aside from specific real-estate projects, all the images were of gruesome dystopian fantasies. I’ll talk about the current craze for negative futurism some time later.
619 western's exterior during the 'artgasm' festival, 2002
john nagy
When I first started MISCmedia as a registered business in 2000, I rented a private mailbox from a new shop in Belltown, The Home Office. (UPS shipping, fax service, and top ten lists—all under one roof!)
I knew it was my kind of place when I saw the welcome mat outside the door. It read HI, I’M MAT.
That line actually referred to the store’s founder, Matt Hale. He was a charming, genial, soft spoken fellow.
His store was, and is, on the ground floor of the Seattle Heights condo tower. A few years back, Hale sold the store and took a doorman gig at the building’s front desk.
He was walking home from that job on Aug. 3 when five thugs attacked him, really bad.
His attackers haven’t been identified or found.
Hale’s been in Harborview ever since.
Until Wednesday night.
That’s when he showed up at a neighborhood public safety meeting in the Labor Temple, to rousing applause.
Hale went back to Harborview after the meeting. He’s still got a long road ahead of him.
But he’s got a lot of us on his side.
UPDATE: David Nelson has a more thorough roundup about Wednesday night’s event, and about neighborhood businesses who’ve chipped in to help support Hale’s recovery.
In CityArts, Vito’s and Hideout bar and Vital 5 Productions mogul Greg Lundgren says he wants to create “Walden Three,” a “stadium of the arts” in a “vacant building directly across from the Seattle Art Museum.”
He means the old Seven Seas Hotel building (where the Lusty Lady had been).
While that building’s facade should be kept (even if it doesn’t qualify for landmark status), the now totally unoccupied building (which straddles the steep hillside between First Avenue and Post Alley) could indeed hold the 25,000 square feet of space Lundgren envisions as…
A place where artists and thinkers can train, compete, experiment and perform. A beehive that can electrify our creative class and inspire its audience. An urban station that can constantly produce creative content.
It’s good, nay vital, to have art-making spaces. We need to keep replenishing and replacing the ones we lose (cf. 619 Western).
But Lundgren wants more than studio spaces and a contemporary-arts gallery in a high profile storefront location.
He wants cross-genre programming, and workshops, and performances, and multimedia events, and ongoing efforts to promote and publicize creative work.
And he wants to make a documentary film about it all. A big documentary film. One that would cover 10 years of the space’s development and operations.
Indeed, one of Lundgren’s plans is to budget the entire project, from the building remodel/restoration to the exhibits and workshops, as a film shoot, with the Seven Seas building as its “set.”
But if anybody in the local arts scene can put this ambitions scheme together, he can.
With nothing better to do and a strange aversion to getting sunburned, I spent a couple of lazy hours yesterday laying out the Sunday Seattle Times‘ staff-written and local freelance content (no pictures or sports) in a simple newsletter format. It came to 25 8.5″-x-11″ pages, boosted by the magazine section’s big gardening special. If I’d included sports, the total would have been similarly boosted by the annual college-football preview package. I’ll try it again with a weekday edition soon.
Putting it together this way helps to show:
I could tell my old acquaintances still working at the paper about these thoughts of mine.
Well, aside from the probability that they wouldn’t want to hear what I’d tell ’em (i.e., that stubbornly holding on to their square aesthetic and city-hating editorial policy will only keep making their product more irrelevant to more people)….
Another edition of PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) has come and gone at the Convention Center, proving once again that video game players can indeed go out and interact socially.
Just don’t ask why an event whose name is Latin for “peace” has so many images of guns and carnage and apocalyptic scenarios.
from alleewillis.com
Here’s something I haven’t seen in a while. A new print zine. Eight photocopied pages, issued at an attempted regular frequency.
Even the content within it parties like it’s 1999.
It’s called Tides of Flame: a Seattle anarchist paper. Four issues have been produced so far.
Its slogan is “joy — freedom — rebellion.”
The joy promoted here is principally the joy of busting stuff up and calling it a political act. Yep, we’re back with the flashiest (and, to me, the least important) aspect of the ol’ WTO protest, the dudes who confused destructive hedonism with revolution.
Particularly in the first issue, which starts out with a photo of a shattered and tagged window at the Broadway American Apparel store. This occurred as part of a “direct action” episode earlier this summer during gay pride week. The zine describes it as “an unpermitted dance party” staged by “uncontrollable elements within the queer and anarchist circles.”
Why did they hate American Apparel, which puts gay rights slogans in its ads? Because the company’s been “endorsing the legalization and normalization of queers…. Clearly, the attackers had no intention of being either legal or normal that night.”
The first issue also contains a well-composed ode to the contradictions of urban “alt” culture. (Even if the essay starts by referring to “the useless phallus of the Space Needle.” Anyone who looked at its curves and angles can see it’s a feminine symbol!)
Other issues defend the prolific grafitti artist Zeb and promote “fare dodging” (riding buses but refusing to pay).
But mostly they’re against things. Cops. Prisons. Bureaucrats. Banks and the economic elite (an admittedly easy target). Urban gentrification. “Cutesy street art.” Wide swaths of modern society in general.
As with most U.S. “radical” movements built on the wild-oat-sowing of young white people, the Tides of Flame zine and its makers give emphatic simple answers to questions about the outside world, but raise unaddressed questions about their own program.
Can they reach out to make coalitions beyond their own subcultural “tribe”?
Have they got any ideas for building a better world, beyond just smashing this one?
At least there’s a sign the zine’s makers are asking some of these questions among themselves.
That sign is the zine’s regular “Forgotten History” section, recounting past radical actions in the city and region, including the Seattle General Strike of 1919.
(There’s more of this recovered history at the site Radical Seattle Remembers.)
