Funky Town -- Pike-Pine Corridor Comes Alive With Diverse Shops, Cafes

On East Pike Street and East Pine Street, in the revived commercial corridor cradled by Broadway and East Union Street, everything new is old again.

Some of the new is not so old, except to people who were in high school during the Bush administration. At Rudy's Barber Shop, they give you a clipper cut for $10.

Some of the new is a bit older. The Puss Puss Cafe displays an etagere of clunky vases that look as if they were stolen from 30 grandmothers.

A bit of the new is ancient. That would be the Green Man Cafe, the "pagan coffee shop" on Pike. It features a local importer's beans, baked goods from the manager's friends, and a wooden altar topped by a fountain. There, the manager invites customers to contemplate "earth religions" and other old-timey sects.

Many of the new entrepreneurs in this neighborhood define themselves by what they are not, which is Broadway, which was then.

The Pike-Pine corridor is off Broadway, Capitol Hill's main commercial thoroughfare, and it is now, very now. It has been now for the past few years when, to the west of Broadway, 26 businesses have opened. Others have opened east of Broadway as well. The number of vendors at the 1-year-old Capitol Hill Street Market, on 10th Avenue between East Pike and East Union, has doubled to almost 50. The newcomers have transformed an area once dominated by car dealers, garages and print shops - some of which survive and thrive - but also by more run-down shops and gone-to-seed apartments.

"Broadway is rotting from the inside out," said Chuck Zimmerman, co-owner of the Puss Puss Cafe, a Pine Street coffee shop where the sideburns are long, the java strong and some of the fare whipped up from the "Joy of Cooking."

"Broadway is a mall without a roof. There's a lot more spirit down here," he said. "Here, people are willing to take a chance. You can afford to take chances with the lower rents, of course. The businesses are still personal, and they're all still pretty informal."

The neighborhood's new business class is largely young. Zimmerman, at 34, is known as "the old man." Many are former clerks or assistant managers from Broadway businesses, and many are openly gay. The cafes, galleries and book shops target mostly youthful customers, though new stores with pet supplies or cheap furniture draw all ages, including the longtime residents of nearby First Hill. Median income levels in the area (the city combines First Hill, Capitol Hill and Madison Park into a population of 42,500) are lower than citywide: $23,089 compared with $29,353.

From the corridor's sidewalks, the renaissance would appear to be driven by imagination alone. The impression is cemented by the Partridge-Family-bus storefronts, and the windows stocked with red-leather corsets and Naugahyde ottomans. The considerable number of gay shop owners and investors are a cozy group - happy to give the old-boys' network a 1990s spin - and they are proud to help build a neighborhood not historically associated with gay residents and businesses, as is the case elsewhere on Capitol Hill.

While many merchants here strike "alternative" poses, however, they offer traditional business logic for their descent on the area: Dollars are carried by the foot traffic between Broadway and downtown and First Hill; rents in the neighborhood are one-half to one-tenth of Broadway; and residents on First Hill and in the refurbished and new apartment buildings just west of Seattle Central Community College are reliable walk-ins.

"It's kind of like Broadway 15 years ago," said Peter Hiatt, a real estate broker with Westlake Associates. "It had fun little shops, the rent was cheap, and they had a lot of bizarro things."

The neighborhood's bristling diversity demands the attention of even the most casual visitor. Across from Toys in Babeland, the sex shop that invites the clientele to test-drive goods in its dressing room ("Don't worry, only LOUD sounds penetrate these walls," a sign says) is BMW Seattle, with its humming symbols of brilliant success.

"In the past few years," said Stephen Norman of BMW Seattle, "this neighborhood has only improved about 837 percent."

Tucked in amid Beyond the Closet gay and lesbian bookstore and the upscale Price Ragen garden-furnishings shop are the garages and print-shops. Those are the sort of businesses that once dominated the neighborhood. Incense mixes with the smell of ink and motor oil here. Walk down the street, and the thump of urban dance music gives way to the scream of the power wrench.

Like a vacant lot brightened with dandelions, the neighborhood has blossomed from scruffiness. The area around Belmont and Pine used to be known as a fairly rough spot. The same is true for some nearby stretches of Pike.

"When I first got to the Odd Fellows' building," said Jim Paulsen, manager of the building at 915 E. Pine and president of the Pike-Pine Improvement Association, "there were a lot of vagrants around. People sleeping in door steps, trash all over."

"In the last four years, I've noticed a marked difference in how people are taking care of their property. You've got a community college here with 10,000 people, and another college, Seattle University, with another 5,000 or 6,000 there, and you have a lot of young people, a lot of artists and artsy-craftsy-actor-type people that are moving into the neighborhood."

"This area just has this funkiness," said Rachel Venning, the University of Washington MBA-holding co-owner of Toys in Babeland. "It's new businesses from new people without a lot of money. All kinds of hole-in-the-wall places."

Change is coming

Two City of Seattle land-use signs on either end of the corridor portend great change for the neighborhood.

One sign advertises the Harvard Market retail project at Broadway and Pike, which is scheduled to open in December 1995. The other heralds the Wintonia Hotel project at Melrose Avenue and Pike, a home for homeless people and alcoholics that is supposed to open in September.

The Harvard Market developers have announced that a QFC supermarket will anchor their project. That announcement has raised a chorus of thanks from First Hill residents, who now must venture many blocks to shop for groceries. Business owners are smiling, too.

"I think the neighborhood could use a a supermarket, and it will bring in a lot of foot traffic," Venning said.

But the Wintonia project is expected to draw a less desirable kind of foot traffic. So say some merchants who routinely shoo away homeless non-customers from their cafe tables or clothing racks. Zimmerman, Puss Puss co-owner, calls the Wintonia a "warehouse for drunkards."

Others use the gentler language of the neighborhood to describe the people they would prefer not enter their establishment. When talking about the most insistent panhandlers, Pike-Pine people refer to "the type of energy" they experience on Broadway.

The 96-unit Wintonia will be a home for alcoholics and homeless people, as well as provide drug and work counseling for them. The project's cost is estimated at $9 million, and it involves virtually all levels of government as well as several not-for-profit organizations.

Neighborhood residents already have complained that the area hosts more than its share of social services. There are halfway houses, a detoxification center, work-release offices and homeless-assistance programs. Despite the objections of a group called Capitol Hill Association for Parity, the project moves toward completion.

The $24 million Harvard Market project is generally welcomed, but no one has illusions about what a successful, upscale retail project at Broadway and Pike might mean for businesses such as Vintage Voola or Beyond the Closet Bookstore, both on Pike.

The issue is not competition. QFC will not challenge Vintage Voola's ownership of the market for old bowling shirts and end tables shaped like boomerangs. Rent is the question.

"For a while, we'll all do very well," said Ron Whiteaker, who owns Beyond the Closet, "and the landlords will realize the wealth they're sitting on, then all of our rents will go up, and we'll all have to move on."

"It would hurt little businesses like this," said Cheryl Farlow, owner of Vintage Voola. "It'll just become a another Broadway down here."

Norman, at the BMW dealership at 714 E. Pike St., sees a mostly positive scenario unfolding. The 94,000-square-foot Harvard Market is being developed by Milliken Development Corp. of Vancouver, B.C. It is the same group behind The Marketplace at Queen Anne, at Mercer Street and First Avenue North.

"I would bet that the funky businesses here might be replaced by funky things with more economic strength," Norman said. "But for the next five years, I would not project any significant change here at all.

"Eventually, I think it will increase all our values and there will be no option for property owners other than to upgrade their properties. This is going to turn into the high-class neighborhood that it was 50 years ago."

Norman draws some of his views from his experience in buying the two-story building in the 700 block of East Pike that housed the Ramrod Tavern and two floors of apartments. Before fire gutted the building in October 1992, Norman said his car lots were littered with drug paraphernalia. His employees were bumping into homeless people every morning in the businesses' doorways. When the fire razed the building, the neighborhood improved, he said.

"Across the street, we've gone from just terrible retail places to several great little shops and the Rosebud, the restaurant in there now," he said.

The new entrepreneurs have deep reserves of fix-it-up energy. The Pine-Pike Merchants Association held flea markets this year to raise money to produce a map of area businesses.

Some businesses on Pine Street are lobbying for pedestrian lighting to replace the current lighting, which is primarily designed for vehicular traffic.

Pike shop owners pestered the city for more than a year before a few bicycle racks were put up. Similar requests resulted in parking meters along Pike.

Those meters have made it difficult for merchants to park. But more important, they have opened spots for would-be customers. No longer do people park all day in front of the small businesses and walk downtown to work.

The merchants here recognize the importance of their businesses complementing each other. Tommy Stone, owner of Sin, the fetish-clothing shop on Pine, knows his storefront benefits from being next door to the buzz-cutting hipsters at Rudy's Barber Shop.

"We complement each other. They do tattooing and hair next door, and we do piercing and have fetish clothing," Stone said.

The bond between the gay busi- nesspeople also defines the corridor. The same political and social-agency leaflets are thumbtacked to bulletin boards in the different businesses. Banners from Gay Pride festivities last month still flutter from storefronts. Because the area already had a few gay bars, it's not surprising that gay businesses would also locate in the neighborhood.

The feeling in Pike-Pine is that shared political-personal beliefs contribute to a sense of shared responsibility for the district.

Angela Pfeil, who moved here from Baltimore and started The Feed Bag on Pike, said "there's a tolerance in Seattle and in this neighborhood in particular that we're comfortable with. We look out for each other here. It can lead to a lot of good things."