Slog

As you walk east on Northeast 50th Street, the houses get noticeably shittier the closer you get to UW. Well-manicured lawns and flourishing gardens give way to properties marked by worn, torn pleather recliners in the front yards of the obvious student houses on the east end of the street. The Happy Lucky Place, a house famous for its parties and infamous with police and ave rats, sits near the east corner of 50th that looks out onto the interstate.

Several weeks ago, I was forwarded an e-mail titled: “Police Harassment at Happy Lucky Place.”

“Can’t we all just get along?

The Happy Lucky Place has been harassed by Seattle police for almost a year and a half. Is there no one who will speak out for us?

It all started on New Year’s Day 2006. We found a crackhead camped out in our basement. We asked him to leave. He refused. The police became involved.

The e-mail claims that police “warned’ residents “that if they ever had to come back to the house, they would make [their] lives miserable” and that officers make a habit of “scanning [the house] with searchlights” and routinely “poke through our garbage, look into our cars” and “walk around our yard whenever they have some free time.”

Squatting crackheads weren’t the only problems faced by residents of the Happy Lucky Place. According to a police report, officers were dispatched at 10:30 a.m. on April 11 after they received calls that someone was firing paintballs from one of Happy Lucky’s windows at cars across the street from the house.

A resident let police into the house where, according to the SPD report, they found “the house was in a condition of disrepair.” The report describes such horrors as missing portion of the oven door, exposed wiring, missing dishwasher panels, a “heavily stained carpet with duct tape, a large amount of dirty dishes piled in and around the sink,” and floors and walls… best described as grimy.”

Officers Bright and Schubeck proceeded to the upper floor of the Happy Lucky Place and woke a male resident who informed them that there were two “unidentified males ‘crashing’ in the house.” The report notes that police found “several items that appeared to be marijuana-smoking devices, such as glass pipes and bongs.” According to HLP residents, the officers told residents that “there’s some stuff we should take, but there’s probably slobber all over it,” and left the paraphernalia in the house.

Police then proceeded down the hall and entered the room where the alleged paintball incident occurred, resident Ken Poirier’s room. Poirier is the lone leaseholder at HLP. The report describes his room as being “in drastic disarray, with clothing and various property strewn about. The report continues, “there was a plastic bag containing a large quantity of orange paintballs” that “matched the paintball marks on the vehicles.” Officers found “multiple knives and swords” in Poirier’s room.

An officer called Poirier and informed him that they “would be notifying the Community Policing Team of the incident…[at] the K house,” referencing a large letter K which used to hang off of the roof of the house. The Community Policing Team, which handles neighborhood issues with rental properties along with narcotics and graffiti, informed the landlord and residents of the Happy Lucky Place of their upcoming visit.

A sign on the back door of HLP

I got a tour of the house from Lauren Kozlow, a “friend of the house” named Ben, and a resident who asked remain anonymous but was okay with appearing in photos.

The Happy Lucky Place (HLP) is not your average U-District party house. Every one of its tenants has left a mark on its bizarrely decorated interior and the house is bursting with a kind of genuine eclecticism that would give Fremont residents wet dreams. Poirier, for example, is one half of the sideshow act “The King and the Beast.” The first time I went to the house, the front porch was practically an obstacle course of construction zone signs, a pinball machine, and a real-life bed of nails.

We started the tour upstairs in “The Shire”—a common room filled with aging TVs and electronic equipment—named for its incredibly low ceiling, and cramped quarters. Ben, Lauren and her roommate told me about their frustration with police. “They don’t really respect this place. People live here. They think we’re all criminals or something,” says Kozlow. The incident with the crackhead clearly touches a nerve: “when we found a crack pipe in his stuff [we] kicked him out. Nobody wants to live around that shit.”

I was told that “the house doesn’t put a lot of pressure on the people that live here.” That it’s “laid-back.” “It’s not, like, a party house really” Kozlow says. Volunteer security guards check IDs because everyone in the house wants “to be able to have an event… and let it be safe,” but they all agree that “we’re not gonna have [parties] anymore” because of all of the attention their house has gotten from police. “There’s no reason to specifically target this house. We had no control over the paintball incident” says the anonymous roommate.

Residents say an “ave rat” entered the house and found the paintball gun in Poirier’s room—who was on tour and out of state at the time—and began shooting at cars, before taking off when police arrived.

Poirier—who looks a bit like a younger, happier Glenn Danzig—said in a phone interview that his original philosophy behind HLP was to create an environment where he could “invite people over to listen to music, have fun, get out of the rain, [and] stuff like that.” He admits that things can get wild at the house: “when you have 60 people in a house on a winter day, listening to punk rock, occasionally a book goes through a piece of drywall.”

Along with chunks of missing drywall, there are several small, round, white metal plates embedded in walls and doors on the ground floor which, residents claim, cover bullet holes left from a police shootout that happened with the house’s previous tenants, long ago.

Ben tells me that the Happy Lucky Place—which accurately describes the mellow and, as Josh Feit would say, “groovy” atmosphere of the house— was named by a former tenant named Kaelin. “We might have been tripping on mushrooms,” Ben adds.

I left the house, planning to return for their inspection, and asked a neighbor if he knew anything about the Happy Lucky Place. He’d mostly heard rumors about the place, but said that the tenants he met seemed “nice.” When asked about the problems the Happy Lucky Place were facing with police, the neighbor responded that “it sounds like they’re a little unlucky these days.”

Just over two weeks after the initial paintball incident, I arrived at the Happy Lucky Place just before 1:00 p.m. The door was open but when I knocked, no one answered. I waited around for a while before the landlord came to the door. Moments later, Officer Testerman arrived. The Happy Lucky Place’s landlord, who asked not to be named, pointed out the work he had done to fix the wiring and dishwasher problems. Testerman, who noted that his “concern [wasn’t] with every little nut and bolt,” explained that “if this was a one time incident, then there’s no problem,” alluding to the alleged paintball incident. “Part of my concern [is that they] don’t know who’s coming into the house. I’d be concerned if I didn’t know who was coming into my home.”

Poirier, Kozlow and another resident stood in the middle of the cleaned-up living room, nodding as Testerman continued. “Have a party, have a good time. It’s your guys’ house [but] it’s not good when I get a report from officers that someone’s shooting paintballs from inside the house.”

Poirier asked Testerman about the officers he claimed had threatened to “make [their] lives miserable.” “I’m not going to comment on anything I wasn’t there for,” Testerman said. “You guys are the ones living here. You’ve gotta be able to [have] control.”

Testerman told me that he would be removing the Happy Lucky Place from his list of problem houses.