A mere eight blocks south of the alehouse sits Mel's Tavern. Mel's neighborhood, Hillman City, is but a stone's throw from the wave of prosperity that's transformed Columbia City into a multiracial Wallingford. But this wave has yet to reach Mel's doorstep—and it shows.
Mel's can adequately be divided into thirds: one-third dank pool room, one-third dingy beer counter, and one-third supply closet, with popcorn carts, cookers, and miscellaneous machinery strewn about. That said, the elderly bartender is plenty nice, explaining to all but one of his four customers that his kids live in Florida now on account of Seattle's perennially crummy weather. After a Raul Ibanez homer gives the Mariners the lead on an overhead TV, a tall, bearded, slightly inebriated man wanders over to the bar for one last pop. The bartender asks him if he's driving home. The man says he isn't—enough to earn him another pour.
Tim Schlecht
Welcome to the Zoo.
Details
Related Content
More About
The one person who keeps to himself is a fellow who looks to be of Pacific Islander descent. He's sipping beer and watching the Discovery Channel on a TV hinged to Mel's northernmost wall. Abruptly, the man gets up and walks over to the jukebox, which may or may not be operational. But he has no interest in selecting songs, instead breaking out a digital camera and snapping flash photos of his fellow patrons.
What is at first amusingly odd quickly grows creepy, as the man seems to be focusing his efforts on the lone female patron, and refuses to respond to polite queries about how he intends to use the images he's capturing. When this woman gets up to exit the tavern with her boyfriend, the man with the camera follows. The boyfriend tells him to knock it off, before leaving the building and heading toward his vehicle. After he starts his engine, out pops the man with the camera from a back alley situated behind Mel's, snapping photos until the car is well out of sight.
A mile and a half further down Rainier is the Wildwood Tavern, an establishment that appears out of place even when set against the bric-a-brac aesthetic of that particular portion of the Southeast Seattle strip. With its No. 8 Dale Earnhardt pennants flapping in the wind above a gravel parking lot, it looks and feels like a rural southern Illinois roadhouse—at least until one sits down at the bar on a midweek afternoon.
The Wildwood's bartender is of Middle Eastern descent. As he flips the television sets from an old action movie on TNT to the final game of what would turn out to be a meaningless Mariners sweep of the A's, a Caucasian gentleman enters and begins draining quarters from a video game called Maximum Force. Shortly thereafter, a Filipino guy comes in and orders a bottle of Bud—to go. Then enters a white retiree named Dick, who orders himself a $1.50 schooner of Busch and asks the quarter collector, who looks to be getting on in years, when he's planning on retiring. He responds that he's 58, and is looking forward to the time when he can sit around all day and drink beer like Dick.
JUMPING OFF THE BANDWAGON
These are all scenes from a protracted funeral. Five years from now, urban beer halls like the Sloop, Fiddler's Inn, Red Onion, Chuck & Sally's, the Highliner, the Sundown, the Streamline, the Pioneer Square Saloon, and the Alki Tavern may be ablaze in an inferno of flaming Dr. Peppers, their golden-foamed foundations a mere cog in the booze-fueled money machine.
"One of the problems with just having beer and wine is the hard liquor seems to bring in more females at night," says Tim Sullivan, owner of Sully's Snowgoose Saloon. "I have people who get up and leave when I tell them I don't have hard liquor."
"[The trend toward full liquor licenses] makes everybody think that everybody's going to jump on the bandwagon," says Donna Morey, who owns Fremont's Buckaroo Tavern (her husband and business partner, Keith, passed away not too long ago). "Simply because I'm older, I probably will sell in the next 10 years. For the time being, we're holding out as a beer-and-wine tavern. That is our hope: that we can hold out at least until I'm no longer around.
"We've been a tavern for 70 years," Morey adds. "So we're going to try to keep with our ordinary traditions we've always run on—wine and beer and good cheer."
Wherever he is now, Bill Scott would raise a glass to that.
mseely@seattleweekly.com
Halley Griffin contributed to this report.
