At 4 a.m., a wiry figure appears out of the shadows behind the Undre Arms Apartments on Capitol Hill. It's Marty McDermott, who picks up a spent beer can from the sidewalk out front and does a lap around the building, presumably to check on whether it's survived the second day of Block Party mayhem.
Kevin Casey
Filmmaker and tenant Tyson Theroux stands in front of The Undre Arms, which has embraced the Internet, but little else in the way of modernity.
Kevin Casey
The Undre Arms used to be surrounded by blue-collar businesses, most of which have long since withered.
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When a few drunk kids cross his path, McDermott, a self-identified hobo with a straggly length of beard and just a couple surviving teeth, gleefully cackles a greeting: "I'm like a rooster out here—cock-a-doodle-damn-doo."
On McDermott's cap, which he made himself, there's a small, loosely fastened baby figurine. As he heads to his regular morning gig clearing trash from the Pike Street & Broadway Shell station's parking lot, he explains after some prodding that the figurine is a symbol of his staunch belief in Catholic doctrine opposing abortion. It's also the cap he wears to weekly protests at Planned Parenthood's Madison Street clinic. McDermott, who at 63 looks like a more weathered version of Willie Nelson, doesn't care that, on über-progressive Capitol Hill, an anti-choice stance makes him an oddball.
"Fuck anybody that has a problem with it," he says, defiantly.
Between trips to the dumpster, he shares stories of his past lives: hippie, tramp (the hitchhiking kind), cab driver, and house painter. He picked peyote bulbs in south Texas. He managed a music venue in Austin. Of course, that was before the "Jew-boys and gaysters took over and drove everyone out the industry."
When pressed, McDermott makes no attempt to apologize for his colorful language. Being a "white-boy warrior preacher" who has been "sucking hind-tit" his entire life, his task is to tell it like it is. While working odd jobs to survive, he lives in the Undre Arms' basement, where he's bunked off and on rent-free since meeting the residence's former owner, Paul McKillop, at a Catholic mass for the homeless around 25 years ago.
The Undre Arms is not included in the city of Seattle's database of historical properties. It is, however, considered by some a landmark—though as Michael Wells of the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce puts it, "not necessarily the kind of landmark people love." It's the beige, decrepit, two-story apartment building that sits on the wedge-shaped island at the nexus of Union and Madison Streets and 11thAvenue. The complex has a home on the World Wide Web at theundrearms.com, a bare-bones site started by one of the tenants that reads: "We, the residents of the charmingly ratty Undre Arms, are not responsible for the opinions held by our landlord, who is the one with 'the sign' in Apt. 1."
Until recently, "the sign"—which read "Abortion Kills Children"— was the Undre Arms' most memorable feature, conspicuously placed in one of the side windows by McKillop. It's gone now, replaced after McKillop moved out. After 36 years of owning the place, McKillop sold the Undre Arms in 2007 for a cool $1,873,700 to 11th & Madison, a limited-liability company with ties to Olympia-based construction firm Berschauer Phillips Construction. Two years ago, before the recession really took hold, the company submitted a proposal to the city Department of Planning and Development (DPD) to replace the Undre Arms with a six-story, 105-unit apartment building complete with underground parking and a few thousand square feet of downstairs retail space.
But three years after the sale, the Undre Arms is still standing—a reminder of Capitol Hill's humbler past, and one of a handful of similarly reprieved buildings that provide a space for people and businesses that might otherwise be pushed out of the neighborhood.
Inside the conference room at the Lifelong AIDS Alliance, located directly across the street from the Undre Arms, director of finance Katherine Kizer shows off framed black-and-white photo prints of what Union Street used to be. One dated 1959 shows the Lifelong building back when it housed the Seattle Tool and Supply Company.
The pictures illustrate an era in Seattle before Capitol Hill became the city's gay epicenter. In the 1950s, the strip of Union Street that the Undre Arms occupies was home to a string of car-repair shops and other auto-care businesses. Some, like German Auto Repair, are still there. Others, like Complete Auto Care, have changed location, their former homes repurposed and taken over by fledgling restaurants like Po Dog, a mecca for lovers of highbrow encased meats, and its conjoined sports bar, Auto Battery.
Lifelong moved in 10 years ago, and employees and volunteers have been getting voyeuristic entertainment daily from Undre Arms tenants ever since. Notably, there's the guy who for years could be seen through his first-floor windows in various stages of undress lifting weights, and the thin guy with the tangled beard—McDermott—whom Kizer has seen getting off the bus with his guitar. Then there's the building itself: "I'm a little surprised that the place hasn't fallen down yet," says Kizer.
For just over a century, the Undre Arms has stood mostly unchanged while Capitol Hill has evolved around it. Longtime scenester Marcus Wilson bartends at Pony, a boozy den of homo-hipsters that opened last summer a few blocks east of the Undre Arms. Harboring a long-standing fascination with all things seedy, Wilson says he's often thought about moving in. McKillop's sign kept him away—but that doesn't mean he won't miss the building if it goes.
