Comments on Say Goodbye
Pawn shops suck, and porn-stores disappeared with the internet shit changes, sometimes for the better.
That corner is my favorite in Seattle, or at least it used to be. At one point, about six years ago (maybe seven), there were, on that corner, the porn shop, the pawn shop (with its signage tilted towards guns), the best wig shop in the city, the best terriyaki joint downtown (crack-whore terriyaki, as its neighborhood regulars called it), a needle exchange and a holy ghost revival. Holy shit, it was a great corner. One of the best in any city in the world.
guns and porn....woah.
Downtown Seattle was so visually rich when I visited in '86. I moved here six months later and spent a lot of time down here. This corner was thriving, the 211 club was still down the block, and Belltown was still intact. Spent a lot of nights at Tugs, the Frontier Room, The Dog House and the Vogue. Those were the days.
Good thing I took a ton of photos. I realize that all major cities have to evolve, but does it have to be so bland and thoughtless? I can't call it progress. The culture I moved here to be part of is almost completely gone. And Nichols and his crew think they're building a better Seattle. What a tragedy.
Thank you for memorializing part of the old, interesting, complicated, sleazy, unsanitized Seattle. There's almost none of it left. Downtown is like Bellevue Square these days, only more fake.
I likes me a porn store, and I'm not ashamed to say it: The sleazy vibe is just the thing when one gets tired of the "world class city" schtick.
True, our porn stores are hopelessly "Washington". I'll spare you the details, but they just don't have much erotic pizzaz. The ones in Portland are much more interesting, but even so, our Seattle stores are a nice break from our increasingly Nordstromized city.
Pawn shops, I can live without. They're all power tools and guns these days. You can't even find a decent accordian in a latter-day pawn shop.
I'm not sorry to see them leave the market area. Ever since they tore down the abandoned Penney's store to build the regrettable Newmark, that area has just been a remnant of its previously tacky/glam self.
R.I.P. Taboo Video, the first US X-Rated book/video store I set foot in on the first day I visited Seattle. A year later I moved here.
Kelly O,
Are you saying change is scaaaaaaareeey?
Time to write for www.crosscut.com
My new line is "I'm trying to fit in, but I'm not buying in." I'm downtown right now in one of the wi-fi spots, feeliing like a fake wi-fey to an upstanding citizen. Speaking of porn, after I arrived circa MCMXCIII by wagon (a stationwagon painted in Ichthyasauruses and a T-Rex), Seattle felt like Disneyland compared to the dustbowl I was familiar with. I'd been London, Paris, LA, NY etc. but had never stayed more than a week. Within a couple of months here, I felt compelled to subject myself to a hardcore gayporn documentary at the Varsity to shake up the emerald veneer.
About twenty years ago, the hottest street punk ever (waist length hair, soulful eyes, alabaster skin) picked me up right in front of Liberty Loan. I will forever treasure the memory.
What was his name, Mark?
Meanwhile, Portland just opened a SECOND old-style bigscreen porn palace, and though a couple of shiny toys are rolling around in the raw old mess, in general it all seems near a perfect mix of new and funky. Enough grit to keep things interesting, enough new blood and money to take it up a notch. Everything I once loved about Seattle is no longer alive there - it's here. Come on down!
From the ST article Kelly linked: a $500 banana-wood soap dish.
WTF?
I doubt I remembered his name a week later. That didn't matter so much then.
I doubt I remembered his name a week later. That didn't matter so much then.
and once in a while, when the wind was right the smell of crack-iyaki would mix w/ the deep fried chicken next to the shrink wrapped shoe store. consider yourself blessed when it wafted together w/ piss and dumpster-pie.
The only time I ever bought a gun was a Liberty Loans. I was making a movie and needed a WWII-era Colt .45 as a prop. I couldn't find a fake one so bought a real one for $300. A year later I sold it to a gun store foe the same amount.
I think the images we all associate with a "real" city are artifacts of the flight to the suburbs that left America's cities as refuges for poor people and artists who needed cheap rent. Now that cities are becoming popular again, everything from the previous 75 years is being wiped away and replaced with the things that wealth and middle class people like: clean, well-lit, safe and expensive.
I think you can have an interesting city or you can have a wealthy city, but you can't have both.
I like interesting better. That's why I live in Tacoma, which is VERY interesting!
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