Our youngest wanted to spend her birthday money at UNIQLO. She turned 13, and clothing is now her purchase of choice. Baggy muted colors are in; think the nineties acid wash GAP with chunky chains.
Downtown Seattle post-pandemic is not a pleasurable visit, but we drive down and park in a garage on 2nd and Union. UNIQLO is on 4th and Pine.
We walk to 4th up Union. A man uses a buzzer to cut another man's hair. It's plugged into an electrical outlet in a parking garage, and the man getting the buzz sits on a milk crate. Curly hair falls around his worn sneakers, and a light breeze off Elliot Bay blows a gray coil down Union.
#RetailScars
Drug behavior is open and disturbing. People slouch, arms hanging, precariously standing, bent into painful and uncanny contortions. Tranq, a mix of fentanyl and the animal tranquilizer Xylazine, is killing swiftly through the country. The zombified countenances cluster along the walls of empty storefronts as tourists holding children's hands scurry toward Pike Market with Mariner’s gear on.
The Public Market sign appears over the street horizon line, the only destination that seems to defy the blight surrounding it. Even when we entered the tinted doors of UNIQLO and passed security guards, the dichotomy of the consumer sheen was striking: bright lights, aisles of merch, tourists looking to buy anything that will make their trip worthwhile even though they can buy the same item in any city.
Rummaged clothing is refolded by hovering sales associates, then rummaged by new customers and refolded. A nostalgic, heavily-researched music mix of late seventies punk rock hits jingles from speakers in the industrial heights of the store. That revolution hits shoppers like Buddy Holly hit me in the early eighties.
I respect Warhol 🥫 and Basquiat 💀and their contributions to art, but today, their estates license their works as bubblegum. Any discourse of their work has been subsumed by time and ™️, and their images connote safe cool, like a millennial wearing a Motorhead tee. It's accessorizing, not authentic fandom.
The City Council has proposed exclusion zones to curb dangerous drug and prostitution activity in high-prevalence areas. This plan would push people to other places without addressing the root causes, and law enforcement is already understaffed. But I understand that without a concerted multi-pronged plan, downtown Seattle will continue to suffer civically and economically.
There are opportunities to rethink downtown to be more resilient like more mixed-income housing, multi-use real estate, and urban redesign to improve safety and foster human connections.
We leave UNIQLO and walk directly to our car to get outta Dodge, but first, we stop at a bubble tea shop called Tiger Sugar. It’s a railroad-style space on 2nd Avenue with floors of unused vertical commercial space. To me, it symbolizes the hollowed-out feeling of Downtown Seattle - empty buildings with shiny glass facades.