MISCmedia for 6/27/00
Dot-commodification

EVEN IF THE DOT-COM STOCKS all go phhhhht, as some have threatened to do of late, we'll still be left with an urban landscape shaped by high-tech bucks and high-tech aesthetics.

We've already discussed many of Paul Allen's pet projects (and will do so again tomorrow.) But for today, here's a glance at a couple of other buildings redone for tech people's work and/or play, and some other buildings near them.

Pier 70, now reopened for dot-com offices and a swank restaurant, was one of the central waterfront's first shipping piers, and one of the first to be coverted to non-cargo uses. In the '70s, the Pier 70 bar and disco (known in its final mid-'90s incarnation as the Iguana Cantina) was the site for leisure-suited guys to attempt the polyester rub-across with lime-green-dressed gals. But the touristy mall lost ground to retail-and-restaurant sites further south on the waterfront. MTV's 'The Real World' got to use a large part of the pier because it would soon be closed for remodeling.

Shakey's Pizza Parlor and Ye Public House was a circuit of some 300 family pizza restaurants that dotted the west from the early '60s until 1991. Besides the pies and pitchers of beer, it was known for piped-in "rinky-dink" piano music, pseudo-rustic decor, and supposedly hand-lettered wooden signs inside ("Shakey made a deal with the bank. Shakey doesn't cash checks, the bank doesn't make pizza.") The restaurants' looks were modernized in the '80s, but even that couldn't help the chain survive industry turmoils and shakeouts. Many ex-Shakey's sites (identifiable by the shield signs) survive as independent restaurants, including RC's on the Seattle waterfront.

The long waterfront building known today as the Seattle Trade and Technology Center (housing Real Networks, Discover U, and part of the Art Institute of Seattle) was originally an American Can Co. factory. Kids on their way to a birthday meal at the Old Spaghetti Factory up the street would often stop and stare at a skybridge connecting the can plant with a pier across Alaskan Way. You could see unlabeled steel cans on a conveyor belt, traveling single file on their way to being boxed up and shipped to food and beverage processors.

The Edgewater Inn, where you once could "Fish From Your Window," was built as part of a local hotel-building boom in preparation for the 1962 World's Fair. The Edgewater first gained a "rocker hotel" reputation when the Beatles stayed there in '65. This rep was cemented in the early '70s as the setting of the Zappa song "Mudshark," relating the raunchy tale of a fish and a Led Zeppelin groupie. Its neon, block-letter "E" was a waterfront landmark for more than three decades, until new owners replaced it with this fancy, "upscale" revision.

The Ace Hotel opened in early 1999 with management vowing to make it THE place for visiting rock musicians to stay. (The hoteliers' own musical tastes, if its opening-night party was any indication, tend not toward rock but to thumpa-thumpa DJ music.) The building originally housed a soft-drink bottler; that's why the side has faded dual 7 Up and Pepsi billboards. Later tenants included a costume shop, a home-neon-lights store, and the Seattle Peniel Mission (which helped ex-cons re-enter society and stay out of the slammer). The mission luckily owned an interest in the building; so when the building was upscaled, the mission got some decent relocation money in the deal.

TOMORROW: A review of the Experience Music Project PR hype.

ELSEWHERE:

• You know how much I love Japanese snacks. Now you can get them online (though they make no guarantees about the stability of chocolate products in summertime shipping)....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• As the tech stocks churn, a fantasy about a potential post-dot-com society.
• Parts one and two of an appreciation of the great Irish wit Flann O'Brien.
• Will the real Idiots please stand up?
• Mulling a possible new format for this site.
• Differences between the real world and the world of movies.
• That other monopoly Paul Allen used to co-own.
• Results from yet another of our fun little questionnaires.
• What you're reading, besides this site.
• Will WTO-protest nostalgia become as tiresome as Woodstock nostalgia? It's easy to foresee....
• Some activities that just aren't as much fun in one's forties.
• How rap music morphed from celebrating black intelligence to white stupidity.
• Some more possible Microsoft penalties.
• Never mind Never Mind Nirvana.
• A few things you might think are true but which are not.
• Why Seattle (hearts) film.
• The city Paul Allen's building.
• The typeface that's taking over the world.
• Napster-mania.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• The origin and future of MISCmedia