Maybe nobody’s business is hotter right now than Cynthia Brothers’.
OK, it’s more of a hobby than a business. But with what’s going on in Seattle these days, “it has ended up kind of taking over my life,” Brothers says.
Brothers chronicles loss. Most days at her website, Vanishing Seattle, she tries to document the city’s “displaced & disappearing institutions, businesses, communities & cultures.” Lately it’s been like taking photos while going over a waterfall.
There was the landmark theater Cinerama, gone. Ballard’s Bop Street Records, with its half-million albums, closed. Bavarian Meats, gone from the Pike Place Market, where it’s been since the World’s Fair. The Rebar, the Seattle club that became a cultural pioneer by realizing it didn’t have to be pigeonholed as either a gay bar or a straight bar, closed and moving out of downtown.
As the pandemic vise tightened again this summer, the sea change appears to be accelerating. The Seattle Times reports that at least 20 more restaurants have folded, including Bill’s Off Broadway, which was there on lower Capitol Hill for 40 years. And unimaginably, Jules Maes Saloon, arguably the oldest bar in Seattle, which had survived in the industrial Georgetown neighborhood since 30 years before the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
“I get overwhelmed at times, at the pace of the loss,” Brothers said the other day during a break in her day job, as a nonprofit program officer.
When she went down to Georgetown this past week to photograph the Jules Maes closing, with its Depression-era pendant lights and mounted deer heads on the walls, she paused to also note the other holes growing in that strip. Guitar lovers’ favorite Georgetown Music, moving out to Burien. The drag queen mecca the Palace Theater, dark for good.
Obituaries like this are being written across the city. Fremont’s Red Door, one of the first craft beer bars in the country. The Big Picture, a speakeasy-style movie theater near the Market. Innervisions, the U District poster shop that has decorated generations of dorm rooms.
Even the infrastructure has felt of late like it’s slipping away.
“We’re praying for you West Seattle Bridge,” read one Vanishing Seattle post.
Brothers, 38, started Vanishing Seattle in 2016, to mark how her home city was being remade by gentrification and development. It was essentially a site about how money was changing the physical landscape, removing the old buildings, the dumps, the dive bars, all the stuff in the way of shiny new tech Seattle.
“Just walking around and seeing what was here disappearing, I had an urge to document it,” she says.
[ed. Oh NO. Jules Maes' is closing. I can't belive it. It's everything best about Seattle, along with Georgetown itself. Just so, so sad. See also: The Bar That Won't Go Away (The Stranger)]
OK, it’s more of a hobby than a business. But with what’s going on in Seattle these days, “it has ended up kind of taking over my life,” Brothers says.
Brothers chronicles loss. Most days at her website, Vanishing Seattle, she tries to document the city’s “displaced & disappearing institutions, businesses, communities & cultures.” Lately it’s been like taking photos while going over a waterfall.
There was the landmark theater Cinerama, gone. Ballard’s Bop Street Records, with its half-million albums, closed. Bavarian Meats, gone from the Pike Place Market, where it’s been since the World’s Fair. The Rebar, the Seattle club that became a cultural pioneer by realizing it didn’t have to be pigeonholed as either a gay bar or a straight bar, closed and moving out of downtown.
As the pandemic vise tightened again this summer, the sea change appears to be accelerating. The Seattle Times reports that at least 20 more restaurants have folded, including Bill’s Off Broadway, which was there on lower Capitol Hill for 40 years. And unimaginably, Jules Maes Saloon, arguably the oldest bar in Seattle, which had survived in the industrial Georgetown neighborhood since 30 years before the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.“I get overwhelmed at times, at the pace of the loss,” Brothers said the other day during a break in her day job, as a nonprofit program officer.
When she went down to Georgetown this past week to photograph the Jules Maes closing, with its Depression-era pendant lights and mounted deer heads on the walls, she paused to also note the other holes growing in that strip. Guitar lovers’ favorite Georgetown Music, moving out to Burien. The drag queen mecca the Palace Theater, dark for good.
Obituaries like this are being written across the city. Fremont’s Red Door, one of the first craft beer bars in the country. The Big Picture, a speakeasy-style movie theater near the Market. Innervisions, the U District poster shop that has decorated generations of dorm rooms.
Even the infrastructure has felt of late like it’s slipping away.
“We’re praying for you West Seattle Bridge,” read one Vanishing Seattle post.
Brothers, 38, started Vanishing Seattle in 2016, to mark how her home city was being remade by gentrification and development. It was essentially a site about how money was changing the physical landscape, removing the old buildings, the dumps, the dive bars, all the stuff in the way of shiny new tech Seattle.
“Just walking around and seeing what was here disappearing, I had an urge to document it,” she says.
by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Danny Westneat / The Seattle Times[ed. Oh NO. Jules Maes' is closing. I can't belive it. It's everything best about Seattle, along with Georgetown itself. Just so, so sad. See also: The Bar That Won't Go Away (The Stranger)]
