A downtown gallery owner, squiring around a group of Japanese art collectors not long ago, drove them to Mark Tobey's former house in the U-District.
"They couldn't believe there wasn't a plaque or anything for this world famous artist," he told me.
Seattle's never been head-over-heals for its past. We knock down beautiful old buildings like bowling pins. But the gallery owner's comment got me thinking: What if there was a walking tour Web site about the salad days of the U-District arts scene? North Beach in San Francisco has such a tour. I think the names Roethke, Tobey and Jeffers can stand up to Kerouac, Ginsberg and Snyder any day. OK, maybe not in a popular marketing sense, but certainly their work more than stands up.
A little research and a walk around the neighborhood with historian and author Paul Dorpat, who knows everything, would do wonders. Maybe this is a marketing baton for the Greater University District Chamber of Commerce to pick up.
True, some people may be tired of hearing about the Northwest School of painters and the 1950s universe of the Great Roethke, but there's a lot of history here just fading away.
Maybe the sometimes-cranky Tobey himself was part of the problem.
"I get terribly sick of so many uncultured and unmannerly people," he said of Seattle, as quoted in Deloris Tarzan Ament's "Iridescent Light."
Edinburgh is still mad at Robert Louis Stevenson for dissing that dour city in print and winding up in the South Seas. And Seattle's still chewing on a cultured Brit's "cultural dustbin" comment of the late 1940s.
But let's pretend we've gotten over our little trauma. What would non-provincials do?
Recognize where one of the seminal painters of the 20th century lived, for starters.
By the way, Tobey lived in the big house on the west side of Brooklyn Avenue North, just south of Northeast 50th before he shoved off for Switzerlandd i the early 1960s. Kyoto Teriyaki, facing Brooklyn, is embedded in the house's east side.
"My happiest timees were no University Way those long winters when I could work and work on painting," wrote Wes Wehr in his memoir, "The Eighth Lively Art." Wehr, painter, composer, paleobotanist and writer, served as Boswell to the local arts scene a scene with international resonance.
In "The Accidental Collector," his follow-up memoir, Wehr wrote: "During the 1950s the Kennedy Building on University Way was a crossroads for artists, writers and musicians. There were plenty who ducked in and out of the doorways, either living there or visiting friends: Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Helmi Juvonen, James Wright, Richard Hugo and one Richard Selig." That doorway in the bland façade down toward the post office carries a multitude of historic associations.
Robinson Jeffers lived at 4215 Brooklyn Ave. N.E. while studying at the UW before World War I. Jeffers went on to become the controversial poet of Carmel and Big Sur country who just wanted to be left alone. These days his work is undergoing a revival of interest.
Poet Theodore Roethke, whose presence changed the local literary landscape in the 1950s as much, the 1962 Worlds Fair changed Seattle, taught his famous workshops in 134 Parrington Hall. One of his students, Nelson Bentley, who himself became a legendary teacher, wrote in an essay, "Thinking About Roethke," "He is gazing out over the Parrington greenhouse like Yeats watching wild swans at Coole; his voice sounds like the lions roaring at the Detroit Zoo, a primal force." Roethke was reading Yeats' "Easter 1916."
And then there's the Blue Moon, of course, which offers up another name to drop: Dylan Thomas.
There are a hundred stories to tell about the artistic side of the U-District. A walking tour Web site might bring more tourists to the neighborhood. It's ironic, but true: A pilgrim seeking to touch base with Seattle's artistic heritage will find more work by the Northwest masters on the walls of Swedish Hospital than they will on a normal day at the Seattle Art Museum.
So much of our artistic history is out of sight or left to fend for itself.
So, all you Web site construction worker entrepreneurs - any takers?
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