City's blue-collar past slipping another notch

For Gus Hellthaler, the romance of the Blue Moon Tavern has been all but ruined by reality.

After 24 years, Hellthaler put the landmark tavern that hosted poets, painters and anarchists up for sale. "It was an accumulation of disappointment," Hellthaler, 57, said the other day. "Which snowflake causes the avalanche? The first one or the last?"

Whichever one, most believe it floated over from City Hall. Last year, the city demanded Hellthaler sign a Good Neighbor Agreement (he refused). It also fought the Blue Moon's application for an enhanced liquor license that would have allowed it to serve hard liquor.

"What the city is doing vacillates somewhere between baroque and breathtaking," said Hellthaler, a published poet who, when he's not behind the bar, works as a carpenter.

What worries Hellthaler — and what should worry all of us — is that Seattle is turning into a tear-it-down, build-it-new, tuck-in-the-corners kind of town. Its patience for working-class joints like the Blue Moon is wearing thin.

"The only vibrancy in Seattle now needs two D-cells to keep it going," Hellthaler said. "The Blue Moon is a mnemonic for Seattle's rapidly disappearing, blue-collar past."

Hellthaler sipped his first beer at the Blue Moon in 1970, when he came to Seattle as a college student. He bought the place in 1982 with two partners (they named their corporation "Three Fools, Inc.") for about $65,000.

"I have no idea what it's worth now," Hellthaler said. "The rule of commerce is that something is worth what someone will pay for it."

Mike Meade, the Seattle broker handling the sale, is looking for "someone who finds the look of the place and the history of it to be part of their business enterprise."

The most interested parties so far don't have any money, Meade said with a laugh. "I need to find a retired author or an artist or a Microsoft guy with a counterculture view."

Meade, who has known the Blue Moon for 45 years, once handled the sale of the Comet Tavern on Capitol Hill. "There are only a few gems like that, and the Blue Moon is clearly one of them."

The place has provenance, to be sure. It opened in 1934 in a converted garage that sat just over a mile from the University of Washington, in keeping with state law that banned alcohol sales within one mile of the school.

The Blue Moon is said to have hosted poets such as Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo and was a stop for artists such as Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg. It just missed being named a historic landmark in 1990.

"I suppose it's a landmark as much as Dirty Dick's in London," Hellthaler said.

Oh, it's a bit dirty, but that's all right. It was the people who made the place what it is.

"Mechanically, physically, it's a safe place," Hellthaler said. "And so are the customers."

City Attorney Tom Carr disagrees. He called the Blue Moon "the center of drug activity in that neighborhood."

Their differences came to a head last year, when Hellthaler applied for the enhanced liquor license.

The application was denied, Carr said, because while the bar kept its own "86'd log" of the drug dealers and buyers who were tossed out, bar management never called police to report them.

And Hellthaler refused to sign the Good Neighbor Agreement developed by the city to reduce crime by enlisting the "voluntary compliance" of business owners.

"All we asked them to do is work with us and [Hellthaler] would never negotiate with us," Carr said. "That was our frustration."

Hellthaler called that "an out-and-out lie." The bar submitted a counterproposal to the city's agreement, but the city rejected it, he said.

"They are the ones who refused to cleanly negotiate," Hellthaler said of the city.

Carr thinks the Blue Moon should take more responsibility for what happens once someone is kicked out.

"If you sell alcohol, you have a certain responsibility to your neighbors to control the spillover effect of alcohol," Carr said. "It is good business."

All that said, Carr said he was "sad" to hear the place was on the block.

"I want him to be successful," he said. "I'm an Irish guy from the Bronx. I like bars. The last thing I want to do is close them."

Again, Hellthaler disagreed: "The city is trying to drive me out of business because the developers want the place torn down."

Whatever its fate, Hellthaler will still be at the Blue Moon most afternoons after work.

"There's a lot to be learned from clever working people."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Wednesday and Sunday.

Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

RIP, Roy's Cafe.