MISCmedia for 12/27/99
The Retail Theater

IN THREE PRIOR OCCASIONAL INSTALLMENTS, I've shown and told about some of the reused and recycled retail spaces around my town.

Since this past Xmas season featured so many attempts to make the "retail theater experience" ever more elaborate, let's ponder the intersections between retail and theatricality.

One downtown store unaffected by the recent WTO protests was Jay Jacobs. It had closed forever on the day before the protests, and was left untouched by the Nov. 30 window breakers (perhaps because it had been a local clothing chain that had failed against the onslaught of multinational retailers). After the last merchandise was removed on the last day of business, workers preparing for the store's fixtures sale prominently placed three mannequins inside the store's main window. The figures were placed belly-up, just like the company.

The front of this parking garage at 5th & Olive once housed a Seattle Trust Bank branch, since vacated by successor Key Bank. The building's back identifies it as the Fox Garage--the parking annex of the old Fox Music Hall theater a block away. The Music Hall was demolished in late 1991, supposedly for a new hotel project, after years of noble bureaucratic struggles by preservation advocates. The site remained a mere parking lot until the summer of 1999, when office construction finally began there. You can again use the Fox Garage on your way to a movie--the Pacific Place multiplex is across the street.

The grand re-opening of the Cinerama Theater in May 1999 may have struck non-Seattleites as a bit odd. Other towns have preserved or restored some of their golden-age movie palaces; but the Cinerama, on the outside just a plain 1963 concrete box, is the biggest downtown cinema Seattle's still got. The refurbished Paramount, Moore, and 5th Avenue theaters are used for touring concerts and stage shows, not films. A few other theater buildings have been kept for other uses, such as the Banana Republic store in the old Coliseum Theater (believed by some historians to be the first U.S. building constructed specifically for showing movies).

While some theatrical structures get rebuilt as retail and office buildings, other buildings get turned from mundane uses into entertainment joints. Entros, the gaming-themed restaurant-bar, occupies part of a former Van de Kamp's bakery plant. At one time, most every supermarket in Washington bore the familiar blue neon windmill sign advertising Van de Kamp's goods. The company's delivery people, and the clerks at its outlet stores, even wore fake Dutch farm-girl costumes. As the big supermarket chains built up their own bakery units, Van de Kamp's faded. The trademark is now owned by an L.A. frozen-foods company.

The Fraternal Order of Eagles began in Seattle in 1898 as a men's "fraternal organization," a social-bonding place where guys (women were relegated to a wives' auxiliary) met, gave one another fancy titles, drank (at one time, liquor-by-the-drink could be had in Washington only at private clubs), played games, and raised charity money. Eagles world HQ, built in 1925, hosted jazz bands in the '40s, hippie bands in the '60s, and punk bands in the '80s. The building became part of the Washington State Convention Center in the late '80s; A Contemporary Theater moved into the auditorium in '96. Eagles Aerie #1 now meets in Georgetown.

Charles Herring was Seattle's best-known TV news anchor when he retired in 1968. Immediately following the end of Herring's farewell broadcast, he reappeared on screen as a spokesperson for White Front, a California discount-store chain moving into the Seattle market. Herring's name recognition proved little help to the chain, which collapsed in the early '70s (the Aurora White Front became a Kmart, which was recently remodeled). One minor subsidiary chain started by White Front's owners survived the parent chain's collapse--Toys "R" Us.

Former single-screen movie-theater buildings are in use as retail spaces across North America. When the Broadway Theater was acquired by the Pay n' Save drug chain (now Rite Aid), they didn't bother to flatten the theater's sloping floor. Instead, they just kept the facade and marquee; the whole rest of the building was razed and rebuilt. The drugstore people did try to maintain a tribute to the site's past inside, by putting up murals depicting classic movie stars--including, right by the pharmacy counter, that famous prescription-sleeping-pill abuser Marilyn Monroe.

TOMORROW: Punk vs. neopunk.

IN OTHER NEWS: Just one thought about Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos as Time's Man-O-The-Year: For the past quarter-century or more, certain hibrow blowhards have bemoaned the supposed Death of Reading in a supposed Post-Literate Society. Yet as the whatever-you-want-to-call-it epoch closes, the arguably most famous individual merchant in the most hyped-up merchandising venue of the day is, primarily and most profitably (or, rather, least unprofitably), a bookseller.

ELSEWHERE:

• How does an editor for a Libertarian magazine express sympathy for WTO protesters? If you're ex-Seattle Scroll guy Jesse Walker, you bemoan the municipal-government crackdown while letting other contributors defend the pro-corporate WTO policies the protesters were originally protesting (found by Rebecca's Pocket)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Thoughts from having lived with Christmas for two months.
• Disposable tabloid zines of highbrow literature.
• Another look at movie restaurants and what they oughta serve.
• Indie film's potential resurgence.
• Last-minute gift ideas with a twist.
• What might really be behind announced massive mass-transit cuts.
• Why digital cable TV ought to have more than just movies.
• Unadvisable holiday gifts and cards.
• The relics of bank merger-mania.
• Some bad beers I have known.
• In the Brave New Seattle, every new building must be monumental, "world class," and tastefully outlandish.
• Imagining life after Microsoft, and exploring the roots of the Gates personality cult.
• The first and second parts of our visit to an imagined Northwest theme park.
• Parts one, two, three, and four of our WTO protest post-mortem; a list of WTO-protest links; and the earlier preview piece.
• Parts one, two, and three of a look back at Ed Bellamy's Looking Backward, which promised that by now we'd have complete socio-economic equality but not computers.

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