Death and Life Downtown

 

Beginning a rainy morning with a funeral march isn’t going to brighten the rest of the day. Perhaps the best part of yesterday was meeting a Rottweiler puppy. The worst part was marching in the company of signs made by a man who comes to every protest, Seattle’s Republican co-opter: Support Small Businesses. Although the march was prompted by the murder of a small business owner, this seemed remarkably dissonant. 

The drumming that led us back to my neighborhood was appropriately somber and set a tone of grief for the dead woman, her unborn baby, and the husband and child who live without her. A senseless crime committed by a madman who heard directions coming from an invisible car was punctuated by a statement from a policeman. We knew who he was. 

There’s now a taskforce of fifty police spread over most of this sprawling city: Aurora, the CD, South Seattle, Downtown. That’s twelve police for each area. More lip service from a city that specializes in this.

On the way to the march, I passed a building where a window washer was poised halfway up a glass wall. Below him was a makeshift shelter constructed of motley objects with its inhabitant under an improvised tent made from a blue tarp and blankets. What insanity is brewing within it? Who would be able to stay sane under those conditions?

Later I went to PCC to get a magazine and ice cream that might pierce through the inner and outer darkness. What gave me a little jolt of joy was seeing a long line outside Ludi’s which is open at last. Nobody waiting outside looked like a tech worker and everybody was happy. When I walked back home a few minutes later, a sign on the door announced that they were closed for the day--sold out. By this time today, they will have been open for five minutes and I would bet there’s already a throng behind the waiting line rope.

This is the third business to open downtown in the past six months--Uniqlo, Ben Bridges, and Ludi’s. Because of its history, Ludi’s arrival makes me happiest. Across from the Market for decades as the Turf, a working-class diner and bar, it became Ludi’s when the owner bequeathed it to a Filipino employee. It was displaced for a parking garage and finally found its new home a block away from me, just down the street from the Thompson Hotel, the Moore Coffee Shop, and a building that has become low-income housing. This is what downtown should look like.

So as a vicious tragedy strikes one business, another one opens. This couldn’t have happened at a better time for the residents of downtown who fear that their neighborhood will die from gentrification as much as from crime..

I can’t wait to have a BLT and a beer at Ludi’s.