I’m on a marathon temp job this week and next. Until the 24th of this month, I’m basically doing little but working, commuting, sleeping, and perhaps eating. Expect few if any posts during this time.
Instead, consider a peek at writer-composer Igor Keller’s new blog, Hideous Belltown. Keller claims to have just recently noticed that a lot of Seattle’s artificially flat neighborhood “is downright hideously ugly.”
Well, it always was such, ever since Denny Hill was removed early last century and the resulting lowland became downtown’s low-rent district. It became a place of printing plants, car lots, union halls, social service agencies, warehouses, storefront taverns, and a few stoic lo-rise apartments and hotels.
Belltown was the unassuming generic cityscape in between the Space Needle and the downtown towers. It was what the Monorail helped you bypass between downtown shopping and Seattle Center entertainment. It was a relative nothing, in the middle of everything.
Which is precisely what made Belltown so attractive to artists and musicians in the 1980s and early 1990s.
It was a place of (relatively) cheap rents, funky loft spaces, dive bars, and endless possibilities.
Of course, real estate developers also saw the possibilities.
After a few starts and stops, successive mayoral administrations succeeded in pushing Belltown as a hi-rise residential mecca.
And, either in spite or because of the gentle nudges of city zoning policies, the neighborhood’s big new buildings were generally just as homely as the small old buildings they replaced.
Which, of course, is part of the area’s enduring charm. Seriously.
Yr. humble scribe attended two private events in Belltown on Tuesday.
In the morning, the Escala condo project (Seattle’s last still-under-construction residential highrise) held a “topping off” ceremony on its roof, 31 floors above Fourth Avenue. A city official was there to praise the project as a key component in Mayor Nickels’s “center city strategy.” (Since when did we start calling our downtown “center city” anyway? Sounds like Norm Rice’s failed attempt to rebrand the waterfront as a “harborfront.”)
The ceremony was followed by a champagne toast down in the project’s sales office nearby. Two scale models of the finished building showed it as a shining beacon of quality living. A chart on one wall listed one third of the project’s 270-some units as sold. Another third are currently available. The rest are on hold, withdrawn from the market pending an upturn in conditions.
The second big event came that evening at the Crocodile. It was an invite-only bash honoring the 50th birthday of Kim Warnick, the legendary Fastbacks/Visqueen singer-bassist. The joint was packed with folks who’ve loved Warnick and her work. An all-star lineup of Seattle musicians paid tribute to her on stage.
Here’s the climactic moment of the evening, with Warnick joining in with her ol’ band members Kurt Bloch, Lulu Gargiulo, and Mike Musburger.
And here are more musical moments from the evening.
The contrast between that scene and the Escala fete reminded me of what Jonathan Raban said about NYC as a city of “street people” and “sky people.”
In his definition, “street people” weren’t just those who lived ON the streets but also those who walk and converse and meet friends on the sidewalks, who live in the street-level milieu of bars and shops and cafes.
The “sky people” of NY are those for whom, as Fran Lebowitz described it, “outside” is what’s in between the building you’re in and the building you’re going to. Sky people live in the rarified air of high rises, have household staffs to shop for them, and socialize at private clubs and exclusive bistros. The Escala will have a private club, the first new one in town in 20 years (I believe since the Columbia Tower Club).
Times have been tough for street-level citizens for several years.
Now, they’re becoming tough for sky people as well.
The thing is, we who live close to the ground know how to survive. And to have a helluva good time while doing so.
Spent a couple hours at tonight’s big P-I employee wake at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne. At least half the staff had drifted in while I was there. Hugs and toasts and loud Blethen-bashing all around.
Whilst we were all looking forward to the big inauguration late last month, I failed to notice that Broadstripe Cable’s filed for bankruptcy. Rumors that Broadstripe would sell out to Comcast Belltown viewers would finally get On Demand) have been denied.
(Based on a rough draft written in a packed Spitfire bar this morning): I never saw so many people in a bar prior to 9 a.m. since the last soccer World Cup. It’s now 10:37 a.m. and the place is still quite full, just not to standing room only. According to reports, the scene was just as packed and festive at the other viewing parties around town and around the country. Lots of hugging and kissing and clapping and cheering. A spontaneous chorus of “Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey, Goodbye” ensued when the Bushes boarded the helicopter. A lot of people, including myself, seem not to want this moment to end. Yet it must.
Or must it?
What if the joy, the celebratory spirit, carries over into people’s everyday lives? To work, school, commuting, recreation, family, lovemaking, feeding, grooming, worshipping, checkbook balancing, and all the other things normal American humans do in their normal lives?
I’ve never known such a world. The many corporate attempts to create all-positive spaces (Disneyland, malls, casinos, porn) invariably reveal a heap of sadness, a face of tragedy glaring from behind the comedy mask.
But Obama’s positive thinking is a very different flavor from an incessant/manic corporate positive thinking—and from the neocons’ bullyish swagger.
It’s a positivity that recognizes the negative, while vowing to overcome it. Not to hide troubles behind slogans and forced smiles, but to solve them. To create a new reality the hard way, the only way that ultimately works.
Thus the call to begin the real work, invoked by Obama during the eat-your-vegetables passages of his inauguration speech.
How far will he, and we, get about rescuing the economy, health care, education, and the planet?
One thing we do know: That incessantly repeated Pepsi commercial with the song “My Generation” totally blows.
Yet the fact that one of the world’s most aggressive marketing companies wants to hop on the hope bandwagon reveals something. I don’t know what exactly, but something.
Here’s what I’m writing for the November Belltown Messenger:
Due to the vagaries of newsprint periodical publishing (a threatened but still noble industry), this is being written before the big humongous election, but most of you will read it afterwards.Thus, I cannot exhort you all to get out and exercise your citizenship (or, thanks to vote-by-mail, stay inside and exercise your citizenship). Nor can I offer up expert analysis of what will surely be the fantastic and history-making results. What I can give you are some verbal snapshots of the tense pre-election weeks: The sprawling beehive of activity that is King County Elections, in an otherwise quiet strip-mall and car-lot district just east of the former Longacres horse-track site, where I’ve worked as a temp this past month. The place was especially exciting on the last day of in-person voter registration, when the line snaked outside the lobby and deep into the parking lot. The reduction of the once-mighty right-wing propaganda machine into ever increasingly-shrill and decreasingly-sane appeals to naked fear and bigotry. The satire industry’s ease at mocking the McCain campaign’s crash and burn, combined with its collective inability to find anything to mock about Barack Obama. (That infamous New Yorker cover spoofed the right’s fictionalized Obama, which had already become absurd.) Bill Maher said it best when he pleaded with Obama to reveal at least one slight aspect of imperfection. (Fret not, Bill: His flaws will appear soon enough.) A tearful late-night phone call I took from a disillusioned Obama supporter. She was fearful that her year of activism and fundraising was all for naught, just because Obama had supported the Wall Street bailout. I tried to console her that bigtime politics has always been a realm of compromise and deals, but it’s far better to have a politician who sometimes betrays his higher ideals than one who doesn’t have any. The various fearful “we’re doomed” cries and sobs in the last weeks, with decreasing relation to the polling trends or the early-voting statistics. These desperate progressives absolutely know the Bushies will steal another election, no matter how improbable.Apocalyptic dread has been part of the American psyche, particularly the left-O-center American psyche, since before I was born. The Bomb was gonna doom us all; then it was the energy crisis; then it was inflation; then it was the Nixon junta. Since then we’ve feared nuclear meltdown, expensive oil, cheap oil, peak oil, the New World Order, Y2K, and the end of the Mayan calendar (not necessarily in that order). But what if we’re not doomed? What if every Bush-junta attempt to destroy democracy from within proves futile? What if we win? In the immortal words of Robert Redford in The Candidate, “What do we do now?”
Due to the vagaries of newsprint periodical publishing (a threatened but still noble industry), this is being written before the big humongous election, but most of you will read it afterwards.Thus, I cannot exhort you all to get out and exercise your citizenship (or, thanks to vote-by-mail, stay inside and exercise your citizenship).
Nor can I offer up expert analysis of what will surely be the fantastic and history-making results.
What I can give you are some verbal snapshots of the tense pre-election weeks:
But what if we’re not doomed?
What if every Bush-junta attempt to destroy democracy from within proves futile?
What if we win?
In the immortal words of Robert Redford in The Candidate, “What do we do now?”
In recent months, the local news media have rediscovered crime in Belltown. This happens every year or two. By year’s end, they’ll surely cycle back to ranting about exurban meth labs and copper-wire thieves at construction sites.
The situation here will remain.
For decades, the City’s unofficially moved drug dealers and streetwalkers (whose industries cannot be eradicated) along to wherever they’d seem less visible—from Chinatown to lower Pike Street, then to upper Pike/Pine, then to Second and Bell.
As long as this was a sparsely populated commercial district, unsightly forms of commerce could occur in relative discretion.
But Belltown is now a high-rising abode for the affluent.
It’s also a nightlife zone, where the legal drug of alcohol is sold and consumed in quantity.
This brings a lot of people here. At night.
Some of them get noisy and rude, especially after closing time. Some of them also consume non-legal drugs. (Remember, illicut-drug buyers are often rowdier than illicut-drug sellers.)
So what can be done?
A consistently stronger police presence can help deal with the 2:15 a.m. fights, and could drive illicit-drug marketing further into the shadows. But the underlying situation would remain.
Our little half-square-mile will still have drinkers and druggers and street people and frat boys and little-black-dress girls and corporate executives and people who belong to two or more of these categories.
It’ll be a piece of work to get all these folks to coexist more peacefully.
And that would really be a news story.
…speak my mind about the “Belltown Crime” YouTube videos.
The clips in question, no longer publicly viewable, were placed by an anonymous 26-year-old white female who moved into an apartment here and was shocked to find poor people hanging out in the alleys.
That’s a snarky sentence, I know. It makes the videographer sound like one of those upscale couples who move into quaint country houses near picturesque cattle pastures, then complain about the wafting aromas.
Please note the videographer’s not claiming the persons in ehr video clips had directly threatened any crime against her own self. Nor was she overtly ranting about the poor or the homeless, but about what she calls “crackheads.” She’s not dissing them for existing but for existing while (allegedly) drugged up.
Yet, to the untrained (suburban) eye, the behavior of a disoriented, mentally ill, or simply out-of-sorts man or woman, particularly if the man or woman has an unkempt appearance, can be mistaken for the behavior of a frizzled-out drug user.
Downscale people have existed in Belltown long before upscale people did. There have been three traditional newcomer responses to the downscalers’ existence:
1. Ignore, shy away, close the curtains, cross the street, don’t talk to them, don’t look them in the eye, pretend you didn’t see anything.2. Harass, belittle, demonize, call for police crackdowns, alert the media, evict social-service agencies, demand Someone Do Something Now. 3. Empathize, donate, seek positive solutions (no matter how incomplete).
1. Ignore, shy away, close the curtains, cross the street, don’t talk to them, don’t look them in the eye, pretend you didn’t see anything.2. Harass, belittle, demonize, call for police crackdowns, alert the media, evict social-service agencies, demand Someone Do Something Now.
3. Empathize, donate, seek positive solutions (no matter how incomplete).
You can probably discern which category I believe the videographer has chosen, and which I believe you should choose.
…a fountain of snowflakes descend upon the frozen tundra of Green Bay, I knew the gods would be with the other team, not with ours.
In other Sunday nooze:
