I'm in a nostalgic mood again.
And it's not just because I've got another photo history book coming out. (It's "Seattle's Belltown," due in November from Arcadia Publishing. Thanks for asking.)
It's also post-equinoxal time. Time to settle in, hunker down, turn on the indoor heating, and reminisce. And this particular week is when we say goodbye to the recently departed Walt Crowley, who began his public life documenting student radicals, then in recent years devoted himself to preserving a whole city's memories at HistoryLink.org.
So here are a few Broadway memories, dating from my own first impressions of the street from the mid-1970s.
It's simple to say the street was "funkier" or more rough-hewn, back then. But it's not entirely accurate. There were several high-end retailers on Broadway, particularly in the "Furniture Row" stretch of stores near Denny Way (Del-Teet, McBreen's, Mr. Esky's, Seattle Design).
There were upscale dining-drinking spots, particularly the "fern bar" places such as Lion O'Reilley's and BJ Monkeyshines, or Boondock's, Sundecker's and Greenthumb's.
Yet there were also more proletarian businesses. Each end of the Broadway business strip sported a rotating orange 76 ball. There was an indie TV-stereo store and a Rexall drug store (with a soda fountain!). QFC had just taken over a Broadway corner from A&P, America's once-ubiquitous mass market grocer.
Ernie Steele's and Andy's Cafe served up heaping plates of cheap, honest American food at almost all hours, alongside weak coffee and strong cocktails. I knew several "hipster" young adults who inhaled the booze (and the first- and second-hand cigarette smoke) at both places, but who insisted they loved their bodies too much to eat the food served there.
In Metro Transit's infancy, there was no direct bus route from Broadway to the U District. The original No. 9 Broadway bus went from downtown, up Pike to Broadway and north from there. It stopped south of the University Bridge on Eastlake Avenue, where you had to wait to transfer to one of the three different routes all signed No. 7. That transfer point could be a very dark, rainy, lonely place.
By the late 1980s, you could directly bus it from University Way to Broadway. That's what I was doing one weekday afternoon, when a young woman stood vacantly at a bus stop. The bus I was on stopped briefly.
The woman just stood there. The bus drove off. The woman, dressed in a flowing orange robe of the type associated with followers of Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, started running after the moving bus. She jumped onto its front bumper and grabbed onto a windshield wiper. She held on until the next bus stop, at which point the driver pulled over and radioed for the police.
This was a couple of years after another memorable street scene. I was spending a leisurely late Saturday night inside Jack in the Box and was treated to a "floor show" of sorts. Dozens of teens and young adults, one or two at a time, barged into the building, past the counter and straight to the restroom doors. They discovered the restrooms were now locked to non-customers. They all turned around and barged straight out of the restaurant, without buying anything or speaking to anyone.
This went on for the entire half hour I was there. It presumably continued the rest of the evening.
The late, beloved Broadway Theater, with its long, narrow auditorium and intimate dimensions, housed untold cinematic memories. But my strongest images of the place occurred outside
it. For some reason, police cars always swarmed around the Broadway prior to the local premiere of any film featuring one or more African American stars; as if the mere sight of Richard Pryor in "Bustin' Loose" was bound to cause street rampages.
Another dust-up that never was occurred when a new, small business opened in the second level of the Alley complex, an adult book and "novelty" store, tastefully appointed to attract more female purchasers. A few self-appointed neighborhood watchdogs publicly asked how could such an establishment could be allowed to exist, so far from Seattle's almost-official sleaze district of First Avenue.
That store didn't last. But, as you may have noticed, others of its type have, and in higher-profile locations.
Then there was this little store upstairs from Pizza Haven. It was called Videophile. It sold hit movies you could own and play in your own home. Amazing what people thought would make money back then.
Clark Humphrey's column appears in the first issue of each month. His long-running website on local popular culture is www.miscmedia.com. Reach him at editor@capitol hilltimes.com.
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