The P-I blog opens up a can of crusty Seattle nostalgia which I am surprised to find myself sharing. I have been coming here my home whole life and have lived here for fifteen years. It’s clearly the early ’90s pre-grunge landmarks that tug my heartstrings the most.
I’ve never even been to any of these places, but reading about them is making me miss the old, pre dot commie SF. It used to be a real place where people did real stuff. Now it’s a sort of real estate developer’s theme park.
Even though I was in Seattle from 95-99, that list of comments was a real kick to the chest. It had a ton of things on there that I never would have thought of.
My quick list of things I miss there that I know are long gone:
1) The old Speakeasy cafe
2) Twin Teepees, although I never got a chance to eat there. We drove by it all the time and I joked about going there for brunch, but never did.
3) Frontier Room – a total dive, but one of my first all-out blackout drunks was there.
4) The Kingdome. I never saw anything there, but from my apartment on 7th+James, that was the view from my deck, so I saw it every day. I haven’t been back since the implosion, and I think it would be sad to see the area without it.
5) I don’t know if it’s gone or not, but south of the dome, there was this great BBQ stand called Paco’s Pit. I’m assuming it has vanished b/c most of its traffic was the old Amazon.com office, and all of the Dome-related workers. Best pulled pork BBQ EVER.
6) I miss the Denny’s at Northgate, which one day was suddenly torn down. I know there are a million other Dennys’, but the payday ritual was to go to the Silver Platters over there, hand over a ton of money for a stack of CDs, then go to Denny’s for dinner and to open up the CDs. When it closed, it threw off my whole routine.
I think a Bloomington list would be much longer, but I don’t know if you want to go there.