On Broadway

Tonight, I hung out on Capitol Hill, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s was ranked as one of the most population dense neighborhoods west of Minneapolis. I lived off Broadway from 1988 to 1993 in a three-story walk-up apartment called The Karma House. It sat on a quiet oasis two blocks east of Broadway, wedged between Thomas and John, major arterials through Capitol Hill  and the next neighborhood up, known as Madison Valley. Even though I ultimately bought a house in the Central District and consider that neighborhood my Seattle home, a big piece of my heart belongs to Capitol Hill. I feel that the blocks between Broadway and Martin Luther King Way comprise a piece of physical geography that I know better than any other place on the planet.

Tonight, my time on Capitol Hill began with a writer's happy hour at the Richard Hugo House, a literary center at 11th and Pine, abutting the Cal Anderson Park, where I used to run laps. Cal Anderson, by the way, was the first openly gay state representative in Washington. He represented what was perhaps one of the most gay-friendly neighborhoods north of San Francisco and west of Greenwich Village through the 1980s and 1990s. It continued with a reading at an anarchist joint known as the Black Coffee Co-op, where three feminist poets -- one of who is my hip-hop book collaborator Anastacia Tolbert and another of who wrote about her experiences growing up in Indiana  -- read work.

Anastacia and I decided to go to Charlie's on Broadway after the reading to put our heads together and talk hip-hop. We walked from the Black Coffee Co-op on Pine Street up to Broadway and headed north across the grounds of Seattle Central Community College. We hit Denny, where the post office where in 1989 and 1991 American flags were burnt as part of anti-governmental protests, and immediately encountered a crowd.

"I didn't know if you knew about this, Himanee," Anastacia said, "but Macklemore is shooting a video here."

"Wow," I remarked. "I didn't know."

"Nobody knew," she replied. "This is word of mouth, at its basic. He called a radio station, 107.7 this morning and said he was planning to shoot a video and could they do a little promoting. And look at what he got."

        Anastacia knew because she has teenage kids who listen to 107.7. One of them was somewhere in the crowd. She tried texting him and calling him. No response. Neither of us worried. The last person a kid wants to hear from on Broadway is probably his mother.

What Macklemore got was a crowd of flash mob proportion. Three and a half huge city blocks between Denny and Thomas Street, along Broadway, were jammed with people, body to body. Police were practicing crowd control, but there was little, if any, cause for concern. One woman, wearing hijabi, shyly approached me.

"Do you know how I can catch the No. 8 bus," she asked. "I can't go through so many people."

The No. 8 is a crosstown bus that runs up Capitol Hill into the Madison Valley and down Martin Luther King Jr., Way, passing within one block of both my former apartment in the Karma House and my former house in the Central Area. The bus route opened for service in 1995, a few months before I left Seattle for Honolulu. When I returned to Seattle, it became one of my life-support systems, transporting me and often my bicycle to downtown Seattle, Cornish College of the Arts, and to numerous locations south into the Rainier Valley. I knew the route almost as well as the back of my hand.

I walked the woman to Pine Street and told her to walk one block up and then turn left. Two blocks to the north and she would be back to John Street, where the No. 8 would pick her up.

Macklemore isn't the first reason I have seen Broadway shut down. In January 1991, I was just about to leave my apartment to go running when my telephone rang. The Seattle Times city desk was calling to tell me that Broadway was wall-to-wall with people protesting the impending plan to invade Iraq on the eve of the first Persian Gulf War. Could I go down, interview some people, and call in a story?

That peaceful protest covered not only the streets but also the sidewalks. Many shops opened their doors and their windows as a show of solidarity. The protest culminated with the burning of the American flag, near the post office. Police patrolled the area, but were more prone to watch than to release tear gas, as they did six years later when protesters from all over the world gathered downtown to try and shut World Trade Organization talks down.

Anastacia and I ducked around Broadway and managed to get around the Macklemore watchers to Charlie's. The waiter seated us at a table overlooking the street, the same table where I had sat in 2008 with my husband after Barack Obama was elected president. We watched the streets fill that night with people dancing in the streets, savoring a sentiment that progressive Americans had finally gotten their act together to do something right.

Dance steps in brass are plastered into the corners of many intersections on Broadway, instructing passersby on the nuances of the waltz, the swing, and the foxtrot. There's nothing that seems obviously hip-hop on Broadway these days, even though the street seems hip-hop like in spirit.

It is the end of a day. I have much more to say, but I will hold off until tomorrow.