Pike Place Market: A place to call home

Zenith Morningsun rises each day at Pike Place Market. It's the place she credits for saving her life and the only family she says she ever has known.

Mike Smith has lived in the same small apartment in the Market for 21 years. The neighborhood is chaotic and noisy but it reminds him of his hometown of Boise where everyone greeted people by name.

The man, the legend — one-armed wonder Ole Olson — still has a fan club some 25 years since he hung out regularly at the Market, taking more than his fair share of crap from merchants. Hey, it was their way of showing him affection.

You know the Market for its flying fish, fresh fruit and fantastic food.

Morningsun knows it for a clinic that lifted her out of physical and emotional ruin, and for a dining room that offers a dinner-entrée choice of Salisbury steak or fishwich.

Smith knows it for Nancy Nipples, the self-named Pike Place Creamery proprietor who provides dairy products, health foods, hugs and other forms of nourishment to Market residents and regulars.

And Olson, well, he knew probably more than he was letting on. As he once barked to a smart aleck making fun of his one-armed technique of broom sweeping: "I'm not a nut!"

Nearly 500 low-income people, most of them seniors, live in 348 residential units in eight different buildings within the Market's historic district. An additional 64 residents live in an assisted-living center downhill from the Market on Western Avenue.

Countless others — people with involved, often-tragic back stories and seemingly nowhere else to go — also are fixtures at the Market.

They are easy to overlook or look away from.

So this you need to know: Whatever you think you get out of the Market, they get more.

Diversity, in products and people

Before going all glitzy with high-rises, housing in downtown Seattle consisted of small residential hotels with single-occupancy rooms and shared bathrooms. The Spartan living arrangements suited the city's merchant seamen who shipped out for months at a time.

When the Market was threatened by redevelopment in the 1960s, those who sought to save it made a conscious decision that low-income residents were intrinsic to the Market's identity. They wrote into the Market's governing ordinance a requirement that the historic district had to include low-income housing. Since then, Market officials have welcomed social services to support that population, including a clinic, senior center and food bank.

"Every time we survey shoppers about the Market, they say they like its diversity — in products and people," says Marlys Erickson, executive director of the Market Foundation, which raises money for the Market-based human-service agencies. "The Market really is the only place left in Seattle where you can brush shoulders with just about anybody."

Shoppers don't brush shoulders with Morningsun anymore, even though she has lived at the Market for 25 years.

When she arrived in Seattle from California in 1982, she was very sick. The catalysts of her trauma were profound and complex, and she prefers to not publicly reveal a key element of her past.

"If I had been a car, I would have been totaled," she says. "I was physically injured, psychologically damaged, emotionally destroyed and financially at the end of my rope."

Her healing began soon after meeting Dr. Lester Pittle at Pike Market Medical Clinic. "He was a father, brother and doctor to me. And an angel. He still is."

Pittle says when he first treated Morningsun, she had a blocked small intestine and a scarred esophagus from a chronic peptic ulcer that had restricted her eating solids for about 20 years.

Surgery gave Morningsun health, but the Market has given her life.

"The heart of the Market"

Morningsun, who changed her name in 1972 to reflect her spiritual connection to the sun, grew up on a Missouri farm. Her best friends were a buckskin mare and bees that never would sting her as she lay in the Kentucky bluegrass.

Now 79, and with disabling back injuries, she is confined to Providence Heritage House, the assisted-living center on Western.

Morningsun's favorite spot at the Market these days is the Heritage House dining room. Through picture windows that frame Elliott Bay and cruise ships at port, she absorbs the universe out there. Viaduct traffic whizzes by, but she says she doesn't hear it. "Silence can be louder than noise. You hear silence. You deflect noise."

The mutual regard people have for Morningsun is tucked within three drawers — a collection of silk scarves, the signature of her wardrobe, given to her by friends at the Market.

Over the years, she says, nine Market merchants have let her buy goods on credit, trusting her to pay them back when her check arrives. They include Tenzing Momo, an apothecary that makes special deliveries of herbs, tonics and scents she can't do without. Every other Sunday night, Nancy Nipples of Pike Place Creamery drops by with natural foods, such as yogurt, tofu and miso broth.

Nipples is at the center of many feel-good Market stories. Her cheery Sanitary Market store — adorned with multicolored lights strung across the wood rafters and a shepherd-lab mix named Sara splayed across the floor — has been a hub for residents since she took it over in 1975.

"It's the heart of the Market," Mike Smith says. "Nancy creates an unusual retail atmosphere that is much more personal. People come in just for hugs."

Smith began doing graphic art for Nipples about eight years ago, trading work for groceries. He designed the sexpot "Brigid the Milk Goddess" logo on the side of the creamery's van and the shop's annual calendar.

Smith, 51, who was born with cerebral palsy and moved to Seattle when he was 10, is the longest-tenured tenant at the First & Pine Building, which is accessed through a security door between a bagel shop and a store that sells music and movies. His modest apartment has a bed, desk, chair, divider, kitchenette, bathroom and a view of Puget Sound and the "Public Market" neon sign.

Smith served on the Market's Historical Commission for six years in the 1990s and thus has his own Market theories. Merchants come in knowing the Market is a little grungy, he says, and therefore are more accepting of the diversity within it.

Longtime downtown social worker Joe Martin, who works out of the Market clinic, puts it this way: "People can find themselves here where they would be fishes out of water elsewhere. The Market makes room for people who are a little different."

One-armed Ole Olson

Ole Olson was different.

Olson began hanging out at the Market in the 1970s and died in the mid- to late 1980s, providing comic relief for merchants with his crew cut, piercingly high voice, hilarious sayings and foul-mouthed fits. "Goddamn Communist!" he'd label those he didn't like.

Olson lived in a studio across from the Market on First Avenue and his back story might be more parts hyperbole than hard fact.

Lost arm in farming accident. Real name Herman Schultz. Never quite right after that train wreck.

To this day, a few Market merchants remember him on his birthday by walking around with one arm pulled up their sleeve. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. "If I had two good arms, I'd knock your head off!" he'd say.

Olson was the recipient of gruff love from Peter and John Hasson, and their father, Peppy, who ran Hasson Brothers inside the main arcade until selling the produce stall in 1985.

"If you didn't know the players, you'd think it was mean-spirited, but that was the way we treated each other at the Market," Peter Hasson says. "It wasn't gentle."

But the Hassons also gave Olson free fruit and a job sweeping the stall each night. Olson's support system also included workers at a Market newsstand, cheese shop and bakery. Just as they riled him up for their own amusement, they protected him from street punks who made fun of him.

Jack Levy ("Jackieslovakia," as Olson called him) and the gang at Three Girls Bakery made Olson corn chowder every Wednesday. He pronounced it "chooter."

One busy summer day, Olson was chasing Peter Hasson around the Market — as he was prone to do — when an off-duty cop mistook it for an attempted assault. The officer tried to handcuff Olson but when he grabbed Olson's coat sleeve, all he got was air. "I only got one arm!" Olson shouted at the cop.

There must be a million Ole Olson stories.

In the early 1980s, about 20 merchants threw him a surprise birthday party at Hasson Brothers, selling "Ole Olson Fan Club" T-shirts and buttons to buy him a new Zenith TV.

After about a month, Olson sheepishly revealed that he short-circuited the set by watering a plant he had on top of it. When Peter Hasson asked Olson why he didn't have a dish under the plant, Olson exploded: "I didn't know!"

So Hasson and Ralph Bolson, the cheese-shop owner, chipped in again for another TV, which they brought to Olson's apartment.

Olson squinted to make out the brand of his new set.

"S-A-N-Y-O." He harrumphed. "Why isn't it a Sony?"

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com