Deputy Mayor Darryl Smith, 49, has had much experience to help him connect with Seattle citizens.
Raised in New Jersey in a family infused with jazz, he studied acting at a prestigious San Francisco drama school and came to Seattle in the early ‘90s to be an actor. But when he needed a way to pay the bills, he became a real estate agent and neighborhood activist in Columbia City.
Having studied at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, he tried Los Angeles for a while, but, he said, “I come from a jazz background, a theater background — that is why I came to Seattle.”
He and his former jazz-singer wife, Andrea, looked for a house and found Columbia City was the only place they could afford. They bought a $99,000 bungalow fixer-upper.
But his new neighborhood was half-boarded-up.
“It was cars driving through it at 50 or 60 miles an hour,” Smith said. “There was no activity on the streets, barely during the day and none at night — except for crack sales, prostitution and the occasional stabbing. It was kind of a poster child for neglected business districts probably in all Seattle, and certainly south of the [Lake Washington] ship canal.
“We, as community members, were all doing the same thing — jumping in our cars (or) getting on the bus and going someplace else to do anything. That wasn’t just to see a movie; that was to buy a newspaper, to go to a pharmacy, to do basic necessities of life. None of that was happening in our own neighborhood.”
That was the beginning of his career as a community activist.
Entering the civic arena
Smith and a few others in the neighborhood began considering how to make thing better.
“We had a few fledging restaurants that were still hanging on. It was a very racially mixed. A lot of really good people, but all were suffering from the same thing: We don’t spend our money locally; we spend it someplace else. There is no real reason to be out here.”
At a neighborhood meeting, they talked about projects for the community, including cleaning up the bottles, broken glass and needles in a parking strip across from an elementary school. It has since become a permanent garden and site of the Columbia City Garden Tour.
Smith said he knew there were musicians in the area, so he organized musical events and even sold the tickets for the first Columbia City community event.
“We thought we would do this once,” he said, but it has become the long-running Columbia City Beat Walk.
“Remember, there were no people on the street at night, so to have 200 people on the street at night was unprecedented,” he said. “That was my entry to civic life.”
Later, Smith became chair of the Columbia City Revitalization Committee, and its activities got the notice of then-city Department of Neighborhoods director Jim Diers. Smith said his group began to get a “little bit of help, some technical assistance” from the city agency.
A few years after the changes started in Columbia City, developer Rob Mohn walked into Smith’s real estate office and said something “really cool is happening in Columbia City, and I want to get involved.”
Mohn said Smith was “as central to Columbia City’s revitalization as anyone.”
He said Smith has remained accessible in his new role as deputy mayor, but he doesn’t think Columbia City has gotten any special favors from City Hall. Still, “there’s never any doubt that Darryl continues to care deeply about his neighborhood and will always find time to talk about how things are going.”
Getting out and about
In 2003, Smith said he decided to try politics and ran for a Seattle City Council seat.
He said it was a “tough four-way race” against former council member Judy Nicastro, who eventually lost because of a scandal over campaign contributions. Smith said he ran because he disputed Nicastro’s view on housing.
“I had strong feelings about how the city sets policy on housing, and she was the housing committee chair. Rather than challenge her on other issues, I was mainly talking about the issues.”
Recently reelected council member Jean Godden won the race.
“I was happy I ran, and I ran for the right reasons,” he said recently. “I went back to Southeast Seattle, [where] I had a bigger footprint” because of his candidacy and because he had been on the city planning commission. He was then elected president of the Rainier Chamber of Commerce.
It was as he was running for the City Council that he met Mayor Mike McGinn, then Sierra Club president.
“We hit it off in my interview, but I didn’t get endorsed by the Sierra Club,” he said. “We hit it off because we were both urbanites and [agreed] on urban issues in general.”
After the election, Smith joined McGinn to lead Great City, a strategic urban advocacy group whose website said it believes “smart and responsible urbanism is the solution to many social, economic, and environmental challenges.”
Then McGinn started campaigning for mayor. “When he won, I came with him,” Smith said.
He said he and McGinn worked together to create his new job as deputy mayor for community, an unusual title for a Seattle deputy mayor.
“I went to him and said I don’t think the community has had someone with my skill set, and it is a weird combination of things,” he said. “I was a working artist: I knew what is meant to stand in front of a large number of people and perform. I was a neighborhood activist. I was a small-business person, I had helped to run a couple of organizations; I have been an organizer. So all of those things together basically define this job.”
At first, there was some question about Smith’s qualifications for the job. Crosscut blog publisher David Brewster once told The Weekly, “I don’t think of him as a substantive deputy mayor.”
But Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata has a different view.
“I have seen Darryl in a number of community meetings, carefully and honestly explaining city positions that may not have been popular with some people, and he never lost his cool or became disrespectful. I think he has grown in his position; has become a valuable and effective communicator for the mayor,” Licata wrote in an e-mail.
Smith said he is the “outward member of the senior team. My job is to be out in the community to hear from community organizations and individuals, to understand what their needs and desires are and how they can have a close connection to the city.
“I will have the mayor out in the community 40 to 60 times in 2012, and that is a lot of direct engagement with the community,” he said. “We think it is important to go directly to the people.… Here is real stuff going on at these town halls — things are being discussed, people are asking direct questions. If the mayor can’t answer, his department director is standing right there.”
The future?
Smith isn’t sure what he will do after this job, but he said he expects McGinn to be reelected.
“We are going to work really hard to see that [reelection] happens, but there is no guarantee. Every day you come in, you say, ‘This is another day that I get to make a difference. I get to do something positive.’”
As for what he does when he is not working for McGinn and in the community, he hesitates.
“Because of my job, I am out in the evenings a lot,” he said. “I am kind of the house chef and that has had to go a bit on the wayside lately, but I love to cook. I love to shop for wonderful items to cook. I like wine, and I like to collect wine from Spain and Washington. I read a lot of magazines based on food and wine and travel. When I can, I love to travel.
“I love to watch my kid become the human being she is becoming. Sofia is 15 and very much into art and singing and social justice,” he explained. “Because of where I work, she asks, ‘Dad, why can’t we just do this? Why can’t we change this?’ So we get to have these wonderful conversations at the dinner table.”
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