From Dave Brigham:
This is the fifth, and final, post in my series about Seattle, a beautiful and fun city I visited with my wife and kids back in April. This series is by no means meant to be an exhaustive survey of the Emerald City. It just features a lot of the stuff I saw while annoying my family by taking so many pictures. For links to the four previous installments, see the bottom of this post.
My wife, kids and I stayed in a funky hotel near Seattle Center, home to the Space Needle, the Armory, the Chihuly Garden and Glass, a monorail station and more. We also ate dinner and walked around the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, which is located slightly north and west of Seattle Center. Here's some of what I saw in each area.
Let's start with a few from Seattle Center:
The Seattle Center Armory has an amazing entrance. Built in 1939 as the Seattle Fields Artillery Armory, the massive building once held half-ton tanks and featured an indoor firing range. For the 1962 World's Fair the building was converted to a mall and food court. In 1985 a children's museum was added to the space. There is also a stage for free public performances.
This isn't the greatest view of Memorial Stadium, but it's the best one I could get. Taken from the Space Needle, this pictures shows the sports palace that was built in 1947 for high school football. During the aforementioned World's Fair, the stadium hosted the opening ceremonies. In the ensuing decades, Memorial Stadium was home to the Seattle Sounders of the North American Soccer League as well as another soccer franchise. Currently the stadium hosts Seattle School District high school football games and adult recreational leagues, and is the home field for the Seattle Cascades of the American Ultimate Disc League, per Wikipedia.
The Seattle Center Monorail was built specifically for the World's Fair. There are only two stations, but it's a nice ride from Seattle Center to a spot near the Pike Place Market I profiled in my first post in this series. The system was built by Alweg, a German transportation company.
Here's a close-up of the articulation between two monorail cars.
OK, let's move on to the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood.
As I often do when visiting a new place and staying in a hotel, I woke early on the first full day in Seattle to go on walkabout (I shouldn't use that term, as it has deep meaning to the Australian Aboriginal culture, but I just love the way it sounds).
Established in 1967 and located just a few blocks from our hotel, Big Mario's Pizza has three locations, including this one that features a cocktail lounge. As for the term "apizza," it means "the pizza" and seems to be used to describe New Haven-style pizza, which is a coal-fired, thin crust pie.
Open since 1973, Werner's Crash Shop is a body shop working on foreign and domestic vehicles. I love the saying at the bottom of this very cool sign.
A short hop away I found another cool sign.
Two months after I shot this picture, Crow Restaurant & Bar closed after 15 years in business. I saw a crow around the corner while on my walk. There are those who believe crows portend bad events or an unlucky future. Just sayin'....
I suspect the house in the photo below may not be there any more.
The house in this photo, however, is a wonderful little oasis. Notice the black flamingos.
The photo below is boring, I know. But hang on just a second.
The Queen Anne Retirement Community is, I hope, a luxurious place with amazing amenities as it advertises. But my interest in this community is spelled out on the bottom of the sign: "Site of the Seattle Public Schools administrative center 1949-2002, and the Mercer Grammar School 1890-1940, on part of the Thomas Mercer donation land claim of 1852."
In 1852, Thomas Mercer traveled from Princeton, Illinois, to Seattle seeking a new life. Near the end of his six-month journey, his wife died, leaving Mercer's four daughters without a mother. Mercer opened a dairy and a delivery business and served as a probate judge. He died in 1898.
The final picture I took during that first morning's walk was of a very cool mural on the front of a restaurant.
This is Bahn Thai Restaurant, which gets great reviews on Yelp.
The rest of the photos I took on an evening stroll with my wife, while the kids trashed the hotel room.
"Alcoholics serving alcoholics since 1929," is emblazoned proudly across the splash page of the web site for the Mecca Cafe. That's a damn long time! Since my visit in April, the bar has changed hands in a somewhat controversial deal. I won't get into the details, but I'll post the linked headline to a story in The Stranger: "Mecca Cafe Owner Explains Why She Sold Historic Diner to Alleged Rapist David Meinert." Read it for yourself if you care to.
Just up the street from the Mecca is this fantastic-looking movie theater. Run by the Seattle International Film Festival, SIFF Cinema Uptown was born in 1926 as the single-screen Uptown Theatre. The cinema "received an Art Moderne style facelift in the 1940’s, including its present marquee," per Cinema Treasures. "In 1984, two additional screens were added in adjacent properties, each seating about 170. The original 500-seat auditorium remained intact. The building next door, that was previously a restaurant was torn down (keeping the original façade) with the building of Seattle’s first stadium seating auditoriums. The Uptown Cinemas screens first-run features, leaning towards art films."
I took this picture of The Kenneth Apartments for a good friend by that name. This lovely building was erected in 1925 and renovated in 1991. There are 24 studio and one-bedroom units.
This installment, and the series, ends with something completely different: two small vans, the likes of which I've never seen.
This is a Honda; I believe it's the Acty, a model that this owner needed to import from Japan. The SODO-MOTO stickers on the rear and side windows are for a dealership in the city's SoDo (South of the Dome) that imports and sells practical and collectible vehicles from the Land of the Rising Sun.
This is a Mitsubishi Delica, a van in production since 1968 but only available on limited import basis in the U.S.
For more backside cars, see: October 2, 2011, "Parking Lot Limbo," about an unregistered Cadillac that, eight years after I posted about it, still hasn't moved; and April 2, 2010, "Time Capsule Car," about a decomposing vehicle in the woods of Torrington, CT.
Here are the four previous installments in this series:
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