Gentrification, triangulation, and public urination, oh my!
Such were the underlying themes of civic life in Seattle during the allegedly halcyon days of the dot-com boom. And such was the backstory on the date in focus here, when roughly 75 local homeless citizens and advocates invaded the downtown Nordstrom store (then in its original Westlake Center location) and the brand-new NikeTown wearing bathrobes and shower caps and bearing rubber duckies and toothbrushes. These activists were ostensibly searching for a place to take a shower, but in fact they were engaging in a protest action to draw public attention to Seattle City Council plans to defund a proposed downtown public hygiene center that could have been used by our city’s homeless population.
The protest, which took place at noon, was strategically scheduled that day to coincide with a meeting of the council’s Health, Housing, Human Services, Education and Libraries Committee, in which the committee planned to vote on the disputed location of the hygiene center. The facility, as proposed by its advocates, would have been located in the basement of the Glen Hotel, a vacant remnant of Old Seattle at 1413 Third Avenue. However, certain city mothers and fathers, heavily influenced by the pro-business Downtown Seattle Association, then fought both overtly and covertly for “dispersed” bathing and toilet facilities spread among the outskirts of downtown, safely concealed from the city’s financial and retail core.
Such moneyed maneuvering was of a piece with Seattle City Hall’s attitude towards the homeless during the 1990s, as best exemplified by a set of proposed “civility laws” banning economically unproductive loitering and public urination downtown. And such were the ways in which our city government so gleefully wizzed all over the city’s poor folks while rolling out the red carpet for the rich — as best exemplified by the $23 million of public money then being given away behind closed doors to none other than Nordstrom for the construction of the private parking garage that now stands at Sixth Avenue and Pine Street as part of the Pacific Place retail complex.
The following day, apparently responding to the attention brought by the protest, the council committee relented somewhat and informally agreed to install public toilets at the Glen Hotel site. Eventually, the proposed hygiene center would surface elsewhere downtown as the Urban Rest Stop. Today, the Glen Hotel survives as a single room occupancy apartment building for low-income individuals, with shared bathrooms. Meanwhile, now that Seattle’s economic straits are much more dire than those of 1997, our city’s homeless citizens are still waiting for a truly fair break — despite the apparent sympathies of our current mayor.
Sources: Joe Mooney, “Cleanliness proves next to impossible for some downtown,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 22, 1997, p. B1; Linda Keene, “Restroom protest at Nordstrom — Homeless advocates seek downtown hygiene center,” The Seattle Times, January 22, 1997, p. B1; Neil Modie, “Panel favors public toilets at hotel,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 23, 1997, p. B2; Timothy A. Gibson, Securing the Spectacular City: The Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle (Lexington Books, 2003).
