Credit where credit is due

So, it seems the Central Library has had a bit of a remodel, and at least one element of it is a major improvement.

Some of you may recall a post on this very blog from about two years ago, describing (among other disappointments) my attempt to navigate from the Third Floor/Fifth Avenue entrance of the building to the First Floor/Fourth Avenue entrance. Here's an excerpt:

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Well, today I was once again downtown, killing time between conducting research for the Summer Enterprise™ and having lunch with a pal, and I once again found myself at the uphill entrance to the library. Upon entering, what to my surprise lay before me but a bright yellow escalator heading downwards. I stepped on the moving tread and took the trip: it left me out on the First Floor directly in front of the downhill entrance.

Behold, the power of the blog!

It was amazing. Finally, at long last, the library is in alignment with the prevailing architectural culture of most buildings in hilly downtown Seattle, which values providing a throughway to traverse the slopes. Bravo for that!

The rest of the building is still pretty much a nightmare, but I'm not going to go into it again.

One other note: when the library opened in 2004, I noted how cheap the furniture was and predicted it wouldn't last ten years. I noticed today that all of the "armchair" groupings had been been replaced, the IKEA-quality, seventies-airport-style, square-cushion boxes in orange and gray swapped out for molded plastic Cape Cod chairs in purple and green. I remember when library furniture was crafted from indestructible hardwood; I don't expect that, but these new pieces look like they were purchased from the patio department at Home Depot.

I guess I still don't like the place very much.

Foundations

So, while looking for something else completely, I tripped over the striking factoid that Volume 13, Number 42 of the Frederick's of Hollywood catalog (published in 1958) carried images of both Jayne Mansfield and Tina Louise.

Frederick's catalogs are a cherished memory of my adolescence. Mr. Frederick had what I considered then to be an enviable job*: purveyor of preposterous undergarments for women. His catalogs were a treasure trove of titillation: pages and pages of somewhat amateurish drawings of women in lingerie and girdles and bathing suits and other sorts of unmentionables (as well as some outerwear). Each item had a more improbable construction than the last, designed to support, accentuate, amplify, or frame. Had Mr. Frederick been an architect, his buildings would have looked like something out of Dr. Seuss; as an clothing designer, he created pieces that were sexy only in some old-fashioned, naive sense of the word.

I have no idea how I came upon the catalogs; neither my mother nor any of my sisters ever wore any of the Frederick line, as least not to my knowledge. (Although some women must have, since Frederick's is still in business today.) Perhaps Ma just got on some mailing list after ordering something from Fingerhut, but however they made their way to my hands, in a Catholic household of that pre-Internet age, they were worth more than gold to a pubescent boy.

Jayne Mansfield is, of course, an icon of American pop culture. Purportedly possessing an IQ of 163, her career as sex symbol highlighted her less intellectual but no less outstanding attributes. Famous for a string of mostly bad movies as well as for being the subject of a pithy introduction from Jack Paar (written by Dick Cavett), the costar in an awesome photograph with timeless beauty Sophia Loren, the focus of a wonderful throwaway bit between Glenn Ford and young Ron Howard in The Courtship of Eddie's Father, and the hero of one of my favorite comic books, Jayne holds a special place in my heart as an underrated talent.

Tina Louise, is, of course, the embodiment of one of the eternal dichotomies of pop culture: Ginger or Maryann? This choice ranks up there with Betty or Veronica? as a pop-pysch litmus test of attraction, and Tina's movie star character on Gilligan's Island had more than enough Hollywood smolder to counterpoint Dawn Wells's Kansas wholesomeness. Like Jayne, Tina's career never created the kind of success that she seemed to want; Gilligan was not the show for her in any sense, and The Stepford Wives was probably the closest she came to critical acclaim. But she always worked, and she was another fixture of my growing up.

That all three of these threads had come together for one fleeting moment, that there existed some ephemera that connected these different strands - this was a thing that needed to be found. The Internet did not fail me this time.

 

I guess some things are better left unfound after all.

*In 1989, I actually applied for a job in public relations at the Bali Bra factory in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

I wasn't hired, and that was the closest I ever came to being Mr. Frederick.

Landscaping

Our modern urban environment is a jumble of a jillion different elements. Many of them are transitory: cars parked on our street come and go, signs in store windows change regularly, garbage cans and dumpsters and bike racks and parking meters are moved or removed or replaced, contruction cones and crews appear, taking over traffic lanes or sidewalks for a day or for months before disappearing again.

Even the supposedly permanent features of our daily world change. Sometimes this happens in small ways: a floor covering store becomes a bank, a boutique becomes a hamburger joint, a Craftsman bungalow is remodeled unrecognizably. Sometimes the big changes happen in big ways: a supermarket is torn down for a train station, or a block of single-family houses is replaced by an apartment building.

What all these changes have in common is that they are often unnoticed, or at least so assimilated into our daily routine that the original state of affairs is only a dim recollection.

Didn't there used to be a bike shop on this block? Oh, that moved to where the Tibetan gift store was. That's gone? Really? Yeah, about six months ago, I think. Man, I liked that store.

The image of our landscape in our minds and the physical reality is often vastly different: either we think something that has been gone for a while is still there, or we have mostly forgotten that it was ever here on the first place, substituting the details of the present reality whenever we try to recollect the past.

Didn't we used to walk to a QFC near here?

It's nice to once in a while encounter evidence of this transience beyond those "Then & Now" photo essays that once graced the magazine sections of newspapers. I was brought face-to-face with this lifescape evolution recently.

When Coco and I drive, we often use an app to send the other a GPS display of our location; it's useful for letting the person at home plan dinner or otherwise get their act together when someone is on the way home, for example. On a trip not too long ago, I was at home, and observed the following image on Coco's tracking display:

What the what? She hadn't called or texted to tell me that she had been off-roading through an empty field. Then I realized what it was: for over a year, we had been driving through construction in this area as they redesigned the road pattern. This tracking program had the roads in the right (new) places, but was using an outdated photograph for the satellite view: this image shows the site at the very beginning of construction, with the old road still in place. The changes to the road placement had been so incremental, and so obfuscated by traffic cones and lane closures and flaggers, that we had never realized how drastic a change it actually was.

I scouted around a bit and found a more recent aerial shot that showed how the main road had been straightened and moved closer to the river. This makes it clear that the route the app showed Coco taking through an empty parcel is actually the new roadway:

This whole process reminded me that the empty parcel used to be a commercial center: there had been a McDonald's, an Indian restaurant, a ski shop, and some other stuff I can't remember in a big parking lot. Poking around a little more, I could find an even older photo that not only showed the old road layout, but showed the buildings that had been removed to create the empty space for the new road to run through.

I'm glad I found this stuff. I know that someday I'll be driving through that area and someone will say Didn't there used be an Indian restaurant around here? and I'll have something more than wispy memory to base a reply on.

One detail down, a jillion to go.

The Man who Went to Dinner

So, when I was about 13 or 14, I visited my brother in Michigan. He's a lot older than me - 14 years or so older - and he was an urban planner working either for the city of Flint or Genesee County. At some point in my trip we took a drive down to Ann Arbor to meet up with a bunch of his grad school buddies from Michigan State University and enjoy the music of Lisa Silver and the Honky Tonk Angels at the Pretzel Bell restaurant. The Pretzel Bell had a kind of roadhouse feel, all dark and woody, and even the menus came bound between thick wood covers with leather lacing.

We were a crowd of 12 or more, as I recall, at a long table, and the waitress came staggering over with a load of these heavy menus like she was shifting a pallet of dimensional lumber. She set this stack of menus, about 2 feet high or so, on the opposite end of the table from where I was sitting. It start to shift, tilting over, as the top menus fell past the center of gravity and the whole thing began to stretch across the table like a tentacle. It disturbed very little until the very top menu slid squarely into my water glass, which was knocked totally off the table, spilling not a drop anywhere else as it dumped its contents right into my crotch. Let me tell you, being a cool thirteen-year old out with your brother's twenty-something friends is hard to pull off when you look like you have just wet your pants. It was a fairly miserable evening after that, notwithstanding my nascent crush on Lisa Silver.

Tonight's dinner experience wasn't that bad, but I think it might have been in the same area code.

A server who was over-friendly and under-professional? Ambiance that verged on too loud and too frantic? Food that was fairly corporate? Check, check, check. We are not surprised by these things at many places in Seattle.

But the dropped water glass that drenched the table and catapulted a serving dish of ketchup onto my pants? The immediate response that seemed to call for the table to make the server feel better for her embarrassment rather than attend to the diners? The manager's follow-up check-on-us that seemed to be intended to limit liability rather than make apology? The lack of an immediate offer of a comp of something or a free drink? Well, maybe we expect those, too, but we do so with a little more disgruntlement.

But let's not fret over those details. Tonight, I got to share a meal with Coco and four other people who are very dear to me: family and friends, one and all, who have participated in each other's weddings in a daisy chain of affection, who have shared good times and bad times and drinks and meals, with hopefully many more gatherings to come, and who perhaps don't get together, jointly or severally, as much as we could or should.

Michale Pollan has said that “The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture." I have found this to be true, and I am glad of it, because tonight family and community were felt deeply and genuinely.

Good thing, too, because the rest of the experience was close to a fiasco from my perspective.

Key Lime Pie or triceratops skull? You be the judge.

We couldn't tell by tasting it.