In Between Places::How to Stop Whining & Live with Gentrification

I never made it to the Copper Gate, known for its “Scandalnavian” appeal: paintings of naked ladies, an abundance of Aquavit, and a plush, red-lit backroom jazz lounge eloquently called The Pussy Room. 
Part of it is currently for sale at the upcycling haven ReStore, but not on offer is the storied Viking ship-shaped bar. In retrospect, I ought have visited a dozen times, but had the misfortune of listening to the Seattleites who claimed that Ballard was just too far. New rules: distance is nothing when given the opportunity to pull up a stool next to a reproduction Viking ship. The old bar’s curvy neon sign can be spotted while wandering past Ballard’s Pacific Fishermen Shipyard, where the North Pacific fishing fleet persists in pointing out that this is still a working man’s town–just.

For every good time, there is a better time–and you will have missed it. If you’ve any sense of history, chances are you’ve felt the sting in a wistful neighbor’s voice: “If only you had seen it…you would have loved it.” Is this what it felt like, to arriving late to the last Gold Rush?
In Seattle, there’s still much to love: trees (fewer of them), old man bars (scant, but with a jar of pickled Polish sausages on the back bar), friendliness (although claims suggest this is a non-native trait, I know otherwise). And then there’s the encroaching truth that this city is suffering under delusions of impersonating another, as old brick falls to the very-ten-years ago look of condos. All of it homogeneously suggests that If you enjoyed Berlin/Auckland/Amsterdam/Bilbao, soon enough all these places may be one.
So what? The what is important enough for anyone who considers architecture the living history of a people, and it’s important to note the things that have made Seattle worthwhile: its cafes are welcoming when you’re cold and tired, and the presence of so much old brick on the Ring of Fire is an anomaly that sets it apart from other cities of the west. Does anyone care that Bauhaus Cafe (in many people’s estimation a perfect third place) can’t take their abundant bathroom graffiti along to their new location? Probably just me, but that shows the importance of so many countless unofficial records, even if they are in the holdings of Instragram accounts. Sic transit gloria, here’s hoping the Wesley Snipes-themed paper towel dispenser in the men’s loo finds a home in their new location.

The timing was right for a Buster Simpson retrospective, and there’s little that is wistful in the show, which just finished its run at the Frye. Here’s a bench that once was a hotel floor, the dead soldiers of a long-gone bar, cast-off bits re-purposed for art. His is a confrontational environmental art that does more than drunkenly recall memory. This is the art that compels: remember this when it’s gone, because you won’t get it back. Simpson is not above the grand gesture, having thrown over-sized, neutralizing antacid limestone tablets into the Hudson, issuing litmus umbrellas that test rain’s acidity. If art acts a conscience of an age, then Simpson is a Bodhisattva, refusing to leave our side unless we get things right. It’s a thankless task, but necessary. He has been here long enough to do more than complain.

How do we not whine when we want what we can’t get back? How to do better next time? The past doesn’t worry over you, don’t imagine that it cares for you or mourns itself. Unsurprising to anyone, the scientific record shows that the rich are poor empathetically because they don’t have to depend on anyone else. The next time you’re standing outside a culturally and historically important building, shouting through a megaphone at a developer looking to cash in on a real estate boom, remember this. I moved to Seattle from San Francisco because that town was increasingly becoming a place where others didn’t meet my eyes, where friendliness turned to favor isolation. I was almost run over while walking–a lot–suggesting that the famously walkable city was once again becoming aggressively unwelcoming to flâneurs. It was time to go. Here in this new-old city, where Norwegian relatives once operated a prosperous downtown mercantile, am I part of the problem or the solution? I can tell myself that my non-profit poverty kept me honest, or that I have primacy here because half my family were pioneers in the frozen north. Culturally, I bring an outsider’s perspective, one of warmer weather and fewer trees, but still grew up with stories of my grandfather, whose logger-roughened hands were a threat that kept errant children in line. No one ever called him a lumberjack, which sounded friendly–he was a logger, and the stories he told were dangerous, like the frontier that defines this place, but is impossible to locate. Failing at coming up with a term synonymous with carpetbagger, I come up short. In the Pacific Northwest, Californian is enough of an epithet.

History can no more be fixed than language, and as cities show, putting a damper on growth means that the eventual long-stalled explosion feels like catastrophe. But it’s impossible to resist comparing past and present, here in Ballard, where history is strong and recent, and largely the gentrification is one of economics, not race. For now it seems a friendlier history, perhaps, one that won’t give you the eye when you leave the lutefisk untouched but take your fill of cardamom bread and gløgg. It’s a strange time to be here, so much to catch up on, in such short time.