It's hot, it's hip, it's . . .Ballard?

OVER AN IRISH BREW on a sleepy Tuesday night on historic Ballard Avenue, local architect and activist Scott Clark holds forth on his neighborhood's renaissance, saying, "Two years ago, people would have said, 'Ballard? No fucking way.'"

While mainstream developers were neglecting Ballard in favor of younger, more flexible and centrally located neighborhoods, such as Belltown and Fremont, their older, weaker cousin was attracting (by virtue of its perceived warts: depressed retail market, run-down industrial properties, cheap rents) a maverick band of artists and entrepreneurs that gave the community a wholly independent identity.

Now, Clark and a host of others see Ballard as a sleeping giant awakening to the alarm clock of prosperity and popularity—something that should have the rest of the city shaking in its boots. Not everyone is as enthusiastic about change as Clark. But while the old and new Ballard are still battling it out every day, the forces of change seem to have the upper hand.

WHEN I THINK of the term "neighborhood," I think of Wedgwood, the lily-white, upper-middle-class Northeast Seattle community with tall firs and small children where I grew up. Wedgwood proper spanned roughly 20 square blocks, containing lots of four-bedroom houses as well as a couple of taverns, Matthew's Supermarket, Dahl Field, Wedgwood Cycle, the Wedgwood Broiler, and Hunter's Tree Farm. If you wanted clothing, records, or an ice cream cone, you had to schlep to the U District.

By contrast, Ballard blows the traditional definition of "neighborhood" right out of the water. With seven "suburbs"—Sunset Hill, North Beach, Olympic Manor, Blue Ridge, Crown Hill, Loyal Heights, and Whittier Heights—Ballard and its estimated 50,000 residents make neighborhoods like Wedgwood seem puny. While 'hoods like Phinney Ridge or the Central District might have a hardware store and decent restaurant, Ballard makes its own nails and catches its own fish, thank you very much.

Ballard's blue-collar muscles partly come from its incorporation as a city just one year after Washington achieved statehood in 1889. But by 1905, pressure to consolidate with the burgeoning city of Seattle had grown strong, mainly because of Ballard's inadequate water supply.

Anxious to acquire the prosperous mill town that blocked expansion to the north, Seattle used its surplus of water as a bargaining chip. When Seattle gained exclusive rights to Cedar River water in 1906, Ballard bit the bullet. On November 6, 1906, its citizens voted to approve annexation by a narrow margin, 996 to 874.

Dejected, Ballard's City Council met for the last time on May 29, 1907. To amplify their fallen empire's demise in grandiose fashion, locals draped City Hall with black crepe and hung the city flag at half-mast. Neighborhood historian and Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Beth Williamson Miller feels that dark day should be commemorated each year by "raising the Ballard Bridge and leaving it up all day, again expressing our separation."

Ballard never realized its potential. Instead, it became Seattle's remote northwestern frontier, far from the economic opportunities afforded by close proximity to Interstate 5 and the floating bridges.

WHILE BALLARD SERVED Seattle as a vital industrial, maritime, and junkyard hub, proud residents literally cried in their beers for decades, and the area developed a reputation as a rough neighborhood where "you used to have to call the cops to stop drunk sailors from fighting in your entryway," according to Dionne Haroutunian, proprietor of the Sev Shoon Art Center.

Stories of such reckless inebriation ring very true to Kay Ogren, co-owner (with her husband) of the Cajun-themed Burke's Caf頯n Ballard Avenue's north end. Back in the early '80s when Ogren opened her doors, the north end of the street housed what came to be known as the "meat trio" of Ballard Avenue watering holes—the Smoke Shop, Vasa Grill, and the old Sunset Tavern—where hard-core lushes would stumble out of the bars, throw up, and destroy property.

"Do I lament the current lack of people sitting on one of my bar stools and vomiting?" says Ogren of days past. "Not a bit!"

Smoke Shop owner Tommy Conomo refused to comment on the allegedly unruly behavior of the meat trio's patrons, abruptly hanging up the phone upon learning that he was talking to a member of the media. These days, only the reticent Conomo's neighborhood institution is the same as ever. The Vasa is being transformed into a German pub by a Microsoft alum, and the Sunset Tavern has found new life as a white-hot live music venue under former Hattie's Hat bartender Max Genereaux.

But some longtime locals, such as Rob Mattson, a blind, gregarious city employee who has run the Ballard Neighborhood Service Center since 1973, express a mischievous affection for the days when "every bar stool was filled by 6:30am." Known by most as "the Earl of Ballard" for his passionate representation of the neighborhood on civic matters, Mattson and his guide dog, Peso, occupy the "Reserved" corner table at the Smoke Shop each and every morning. Unlike the legendary Smoke Shop patrons, he takes his coffee sans Bailey's.

THE BURKE'S OGREN says it wasn't only the drunks that made life difficult in Ballard at first: When she opened her restaurant, she was quickly labeled a "hippie" for no better reason than that neither she nor her restaurant was Scandinavian. Despite this schoolyard bullying and some lean retail times, Ogren stuck it out and now finds herself in the unlikely position of old kid on the block. It gives her a unique perspective on Ballard—somewhere between people who want lots of change and the neighborhood's traditionalists. "We're not like Fremont—we don't think of ourselves as the center of the universe. We're a parallel universe," says Ogren.