“This Isn’t a Victory Party.”
Anti-monorail activists past and present celebrated the death of the monorail Wednesday night at the Rosebud restaurant on Capitol Hill, where they watched The Simpsons (“Marge vs. the Monorail”), munched on hors d’oeuvres (including cheese cubes and cold roasted vegetables), and gave each other awards (including numerous stuffed animals, magnifying glasses and Sherlock Holmes hats, and a plate of brownies.)
Walking along Broadway toward the Rosebud earlier that night, I’d run, serendipitously, into Christian Gloddy, the founder of the pro-monorail group 2045 Seattle. Gloddy was heading to Cafe Septieme to meet up with Kristina Hill, the head of the moribund SMP board. Septieme, as it happens, was the last place I’d spoken to Hill - for a post-election interview in which Hill was alternately bitter, defeated, and defiant.
You’d think that, at a time when the monorail agency is putting dozens of people out of work and selling off its properties, the people who killed it might display a little humility. Instead, the scene at the Rosebud was a pageant of schadenfreude: Backed by a sign reading “stop the lies” and a screen displaying Power Point slides of anti-monorail trivia, the monorail opponents - among them Monorail Recall campaign leaders Tim Wulf and Liv Finne, Second Avenue property owner Howard Anderson, light rail fanatic Richard Borkowski, and ex-transportation commissioner Virginia Gunby congratulated each other profusely, eventually applauding nearly everyone who was present (including me) and some who weren’t (including P-I reporter Jane Hadley, whose front-page story on the SMP’s $11 billion financing marked a turning point for the agency). Then a guy who had just informed me he “liked the monorail, but hated the financing” passed out champagne, and everybody drank a toast “to the death of the monorail.”
About the only person in the room who didn’t seem downright jubilant about the monorail’s demise was ex-city design commissioner Jack Mackie, who told me, “We didn’t win anything. This isn’t a victory party.”
There was no mistaking the scene at Septieme, where we headed next, for a victory party. Huddled over beers in a back booth, Hill and Gloddy were in good spirits but understandably a little low at their first meeting since the monorail’s defeat. Perhaps the saddest thing since the election, Hill told me frankly, has been dismantling the monorail agency headquarters piece by piece. Everything that hasn’t gone to state archives including two monorail costumes agency volunteers used to wear in parades is up for grabs. “Those foam monorails that used to be outside the board meeting room are available,” Hill told me glumly. “Do you know anyone who wants an SMP notepad? We have hundreds of them.”
I guess I ate my last meal at Rosebud.