"The skyscraper nobody needs," by Rebecca Boren, July 8, 1987: Boren revealed that state pension funds were being used to pay for a risky development that standard financial institutions eschewed. In the process, she showed how developers' greed was leading to an office glut and the overdevelopment of downtown—uncannily prefiguring the citizens' "CAP" rebellion over these issues that would occur two years later.
Local developers, who are both the fierce competition and the best critics of Two Union Square, use a roster of uncomplimentary adjectives to describe this violation of usual form. They variously call it "bizarre," "absurd," and "incredible." Gary Carpenter of Prescott says flatly, "We would never do something like that."
What the state has done, in essence, is agree to lend $130 million without the normal security of a guaranteed income stream. Is there some other security, such as established, successful buildings which have been put up to finance the new one? Is One Union Square the collateral? No, says UNICO's Covey.
"The secret life of the spotted owl," by Paul Roberts, June 12, 1991: A glorious, in-depth portrait of the little bird that changed Washington's timber industry forever. Roberts used science, politics, and poetic description to evoke the owl and its significance to our ancient forests.
Once alerted to prey, an owl locks on its intended target and stares with an intensity that early owl watchers could easily have mistaken as a sign of wisdom. The bird often bobs its head up and down, stretching its neck upward, then lowering its head to the level of its talons. This motion, which doesn't do much for its sagacious image, probably serves as a kind of range-finding behavior; by viewing a target from two distinct angles, owls can more accurately compute the distance between themselves and their prey.
The attack itself varies, depending on the type and location of the victim. If a ground target is spied directly below the perch, the spotted owl often drops, wings partially unfolded, talons down, straight toward the prey, using its wings to break its fall only a split second before striking. For a more horizontal assault, the bird often moves from branch to branch, "laddering" to within range before gliding in to strike, At the moment of contact, a translucent membrane drops over the owl's eyes, protecting them from branches and the claws of an uncooperative meal.
"The co(s)mic-book world of Tom Robbins," by Tim Appelo, November 28, 1984: A giant pop confection of an article that leaps and swoops and makes you laugh and forces you to think about novelist Tom Robbins in a meaningful way.
You can hear her Southern Baptist daddy's preaching in Aretha Franklin's work. In Robbins' you hear the sermons of his Southern Baptist granddaddies—a little bit of soul, and a lot of white logomachy. His mother read to him from the cradle—she'd won a Columbia writing scholarship but never went, and wrote for kids' religious magazines. Her brother, a satyric DJ, was shot by a wronged husband, on the air, right in the middle of Carolina Hayride. Tom's boyhood heroes were Jesus and Johnny Weissmuller. At aptly named Warsaw High in Virginia, Tom was the basketball team's biggest scorer (a Namath nudge'n'wink, here); he went to Hargrave Military Academy (to beat the rebel out of him, perhaps), a school of the arts, Washington and Lee U (the Confederacy's answer to Princeton), and (after pitching peas down his housemother's bosom and bouncing biscuits off her head) to the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, where he acquired his first body of arcane knowledge. His job was monitoring Chinese weather reports. "I used to know all 21 varieties of clouds. The only one I remember is cumulonimbus mammatus, the one with these teats hanging down."
squat to the programmers in the trenches. Yet.
"Seattle's closet history," by David M. Buerge, June 22, 1994: Buerge tells the history of Seattle's first gay bar, the Garden of Allah, which opened in 1946 and featured female impersonators so skilled that one actually subbed for the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Unlike today's drag shows that feature mostly lip synching, the Garden's performers had grown up on vaudeville and aspired to much higher standards. They wrote their own material, sewed their own costumes, and did their own falsetto singing.
In its heyday, the Garden of Allah beckoned as Seattle's most notorious dive, a dimly lit basement cabaret, offering the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah and Babylon, wrapped in sleaze and sealed with a mocking kiss. "It was considered the great forbidden place by most of society in its day, a place that emphasized society's most forbidden subject, and condemned by the military. Some declared it a den of iniquity. For others it was the height of slumming on Seattle's notorious First Avenue. For many it was almost home, and beloved!"
"Drug war on First Avenue," by Eric Scigliano, two-part piece beginning October 31, 1990: In a gritty documentary of the drug trade around the Pike Place Market, Scigliano penetrated a subterranean, guarded world and held it up to the light with his lucid prose.
"Blue" (as he's known on the street) presented a picture that seemed too good to be true. He was very big and strikingly dark, with the build of a weightlifter and the easy poise of a marital artist (both of which he claimed to be). He looked much younger than his 40 years and seemed ineffably calm and self-possessed. He only came downtown in the evenings, after getting off work at a large high-tech firm whose logo jacket he wears. He said he has worked up from sweeping the floor to keying blueprints into a computer, and continues to study at the library on weekends to sharpen his new computer skills.
So what's a nice guy like Blue doing on a Blade like this? He explained that he had been out on the street like everyone else. . . .
