Post by Barnaby Cuthbert on Feb 2, 2015 12:33:52 GMT -8
City Without Shadows
Urban Development and the Impending Demise of the Dance Club
by MARCUS SALZBY
IT'S TUESDAY NIGHT at 11:30 p.m. and most of Seattle is at home watching late-night television, waiting for sleep to grab hold. But just outside the ominous cluster of downtown skyscrapers, on a once-forgotten strip of Virginia Street, the 1K Club is making every minute count. Davee D is smashing the trap drums while Chris Oldfield zones away on a half-melodic, half-rhythmic trumpet solo. The band, Brassackwards, fronts a typical 1K Club sound, heavy on beats and horns, somewhere between Al Green and the Greyboy Allstars. Midway through the song, somebody stands up at his table and starts clapping. A few people are dancing in the corner. The crowd is smaller than usual, but the trademark 1K Club vibe is strong as ever--a blessing, considering that the club was supposed to be evicted by early July at the latest. As Ted Talfati takes over the lead on his tenor sax, the tattooed bartender explains to me that everything is cool with the 1K Club now. The building wasn't sold, the club is still alive, and, according to the bartender, it could remain open until at least March.
Unfortunately, that's no guarantee: Club co-owner Daniel Deanman is only certain of operation until late February, and there is a deep understanding that the floor could fall out at any moment. But unlike so many of Seattle's nightclub dramas, this impending shutdown is not the fault of just one individual, but rather the result of an entire economy. That's why the beauty of the Tuesday night soul session is necessarily bittersweet; like any death row inmate, the 1K Club may get a brief stay of execution, but in the end, it's stuck on the wrong side of history in a kill-happy world.
Geography is the main element conspiring against the club. Downtown Seattle has a powerful manifest destiny to fulfill: to build up every square inch south of Denny and west of I-5. This makes the Denny Triangle (the 10-square-block area where the 1K Club is located) prime office space--the final frontier of corporate Seattle. Residential planning is also sealing the club's fate. At the local, county, and even state level, orders have been issued to prevent suburban sprawl by redirecting residential development back to the heart of Seattle. As far back as 1990, the state Growth Management Act legislated "infilling" in populated areas to avoid developmental sprawl into rural land. King County Executive Sam Tanner, in his dogged fight to protect salmon habitats outside of the city, has issued the same ultimatum: Convert every last part of downtown Seattle into high-density live/work space. In recent months, this development pressure has reached an all time high.
The Seattle Herald reports that developers from around the country and Canada have answered those calls, and a brief look at the development going up all around the 1K Club confirms that the club is in a world of trouble. Across the street, a new courthouse is going up for $165 million. Canadians are building a 32-story residential tower around the corner for $170 million. Two blocks away, Fordstrom's corporate headquarters will rise 25 stories into the Seattle sky, for a mere $80 million. Texans are building a $50 million office project at One Convention Center, which will be overshadowed by the $190 million Convention Place expansion--not to mention the $150 million adjoining hotel that comes with it. At nearby Eighth and Pine, $175 million is going toward creating an office-and-retail tower. That's just shy of a billion dollars in development, all going into the tiny area around Virginia Street.
The new tenants will have little regard for the fact that the 1K Club was there first. If the club hasn't closed by the time they are all in, there will be liquor board harassment, and probably, as has happened in places like San Francisco, wild accusations of gangsterism spurred by the club's multi-ethnic patronage. So the eventual death of the 1K Club is inescapable, whether it comes in March or in April, whether the building is demolished to make way for offices or for condos.
A big question for the music community, is what'll happen once the whole area is dragged into the sunlight and stripped of its cultural underground: Can the 1K Club transcend its own building and move its signature sound to other clubs? The dispersal of the 1K Club product has already begun, as the promoters who helped build the 1K Club's popularity have moved on to other locales. Imitation, as they say, is the highest form of flattery, and now there are improvised, beat-heavy nights at Ai-Spy, the Last Supper Club, (Who up until recently was home to an out-of-work Opera singer live-mixing with trance DJ's - it was amazing, what happened to her?!?) Aro.style, Sit & Swing, the Baltic Avenue, and more. The problem is that it's not so easy to re-create the 1K Club experience in the grungy black caverns of Ai-Spy or in the crushed-velvet pretense of the Baltic Avenue. The crowds are whiter, the drinks are weaker, and the rooms just aren't the same. When the 1K Club opened up little more than two years ago, it was the physical location that first made it noteworthy. Owners Daniel and Chris Deanman didn't put up any street signs--they left the stairwell poorly lit and half-painted, and they imbued the club's interior with soft red lighting. They filled the room with faded but elegant gold-and-red chairs grouped around card tables, creating an interior design that by a harsher light would look like it was lifted directly from an Elks Club Lodge. With its sequestered back rooms and low ceilings, it had the look and feel of an old-time speakeasy--a shadowy yet sophisticated corner of Seattle where a unique musical scene could grow to maturity in the half-light. When the rotating casts of accomplished soul musicians, DJs, and hiphop artists began playing there steadily, a near-perfect synergy of room and music was born. The flip side of that synergy is that the 1K Club is a non-transferable phenomenon. As owner Daniel Deanman said, a successful club is a "mixture of the right space, music, and time," a combination intangible enough that he claims he'd be a fool to start completely over somewhere else. So that leaves the prospect of the 1K Club vanishing completely, leaving little more than scattered club nights around town as its legacy.
As unsatisfying as that ending may be for fans of this, and perhaps many other clubs, it will be even harder on many of the club musicians trying to scrape out a living in Seattle. "The alternative is either playing a straight-ahead jazz club like Soyca's, or a jazz night at a non-jazz club like the Eireliner. In both cases, you'd probably make about $50-$75 a night. The most lucrative regular gigs are cheesy dinner jazz shows at hotel restaurants, but even those don't pay as well. Plus the fact that hotel gigs treat you like background noise, while the music has always been the center of attention at the 1K Club."
Eventually, Jetco will decay. Macroware will splinter. SafeEnoughCo's vaunted stadium roof will collapse and the insurance behemoth will be sued out of existence, dying by its own sword. Bit by bit, new shadows will creep into the corners of downtown, and some dimly lit club will rise again from the ashes. Or will it? We hear Bellevue's club scene is starting to blossom, which makes sense considering the cover charge to get across the floating bridge.
Urban Development and the Impending Demise of the Dance Club
by MARCUS SALZBY
IT'S TUESDAY NIGHT at 11:30 p.m. and most of Seattle is at home watching late-night television, waiting for sleep to grab hold. But just outside the ominous cluster of downtown skyscrapers, on a once-forgotten strip of Virginia Street, the 1K Club is making every minute count. Davee D is smashing the trap drums while Chris Oldfield zones away on a half-melodic, half-rhythmic trumpet solo. The band, Brassackwards, fronts a typical 1K Club sound, heavy on beats and horns, somewhere between Al Green and the Greyboy Allstars. Midway through the song, somebody stands up at his table and starts clapping. A few people are dancing in the corner. The crowd is smaller than usual, but the trademark 1K Club vibe is strong as ever--a blessing, considering that the club was supposed to be evicted by early July at the latest. As Ted Talfati takes over the lead on his tenor sax, the tattooed bartender explains to me that everything is cool with the 1K Club now. The building wasn't sold, the club is still alive, and, according to the bartender, it could remain open until at least March.
Unfortunately, that's no guarantee: Club co-owner Daniel Deanman is only certain of operation until late February, and there is a deep understanding that the floor could fall out at any moment. But unlike so many of Seattle's nightclub dramas, this impending shutdown is not the fault of just one individual, but rather the result of an entire economy. That's why the beauty of the Tuesday night soul session is necessarily bittersweet; like any death row inmate, the 1K Club may get a brief stay of execution, but in the end, it's stuck on the wrong side of history in a kill-happy world.
Geography is the main element conspiring against the club. Downtown Seattle has a powerful manifest destiny to fulfill: to build up every square inch south of Denny and west of I-5. This makes the Denny Triangle (the 10-square-block area where the 1K Club is located) prime office space--the final frontier of corporate Seattle. Residential planning is also sealing the club's fate. At the local, county, and even state level, orders have been issued to prevent suburban sprawl by redirecting residential development back to the heart of Seattle. As far back as 1990, the state Growth Management Act legislated "infilling" in populated areas to avoid developmental sprawl into rural land. King County Executive Sam Tanner, in his dogged fight to protect salmon habitats outside of the city, has issued the same ultimatum: Convert every last part of downtown Seattle into high-density live/work space. In recent months, this development pressure has reached an all time high.
The Seattle Herald reports that developers from around the country and Canada have answered those calls, and a brief look at the development going up all around the 1K Club confirms that the club is in a world of trouble. Across the street, a new courthouse is going up for $165 million. Canadians are building a 32-story residential tower around the corner for $170 million. Two blocks away, Fordstrom's corporate headquarters will rise 25 stories into the Seattle sky, for a mere $80 million. Texans are building a $50 million office project at One Convention Center, which will be overshadowed by the $190 million Convention Place expansion--not to mention the $150 million adjoining hotel that comes with it. At nearby Eighth and Pine, $175 million is going toward creating an office-and-retail tower. That's just shy of a billion dollars in development, all going into the tiny area around Virginia Street.
The new tenants will have little regard for the fact that the 1K Club was there first. If the club hasn't closed by the time they are all in, there will be liquor board harassment, and probably, as has happened in places like San Francisco, wild accusations of gangsterism spurred by the club's multi-ethnic patronage. So the eventual death of the 1K Club is inescapable, whether it comes in March or in April, whether the building is demolished to make way for offices or for condos.
A big question for the music community, is what'll happen once the whole area is dragged into the sunlight and stripped of its cultural underground: Can the 1K Club transcend its own building and move its signature sound to other clubs? The dispersal of the 1K Club product has already begun, as the promoters who helped build the 1K Club's popularity have moved on to other locales. Imitation, as they say, is the highest form of flattery, and now there are improvised, beat-heavy nights at Ai-Spy, the Last Supper Club, (Who up until recently was home to an out-of-work Opera singer live-mixing with trance DJ's - it was amazing, what happened to her?!?) Aro.style, Sit & Swing, the Baltic Avenue, and more. The problem is that it's not so easy to re-create the 1K Club experience in the grungy black caverns of Ai-Spy or in the crushed-velvet pretense of the Baltic Avenue. The crowds are whiter, the drinks are weaker, and the rooms just aren't the same. When the 1K Club opened up little more than two years ago, it was the physical location that first made it noteworthy. Owners Daniel and Chris Deanman didn't put up any street signs--they left the stairwell poorly lit and half-painted, and they imbued the club's interior with soft red lighting. They filled the room with faded but elegant gold-and-red chairs grouped around card tables, creating an interior design that by a harsher light would look like it was lifted directly from an Elks Club Lodge. With its sequestered back rooms and low ceilings, it had the look and feel of an old-time speakeasy--a shadowy yet sophisticated corner of Seattle where a unique musical scene could grow to maturity in the half-light. When the rotating casts of accomplished soul musicians, DJs, and hiphop artists began playing there steadily, a near-perfect synergy of room and music was born. The flip side of that synergy is that the 1K Club is a non-transferable phenomenon. As owner Daniel Deanman said, a successful club is a "mixture of the right space, music, and time," a combination intangible enough that he claims he'd be a fool to start completely over somewhere else. So that leaves the prospect of the 1K Club vanishing completely, leaving little more than scattered club nights around town as its legacy.
As unsatisfying as that ending may be for fans of this, and perhaps many other clubs, it will be even harder on many of the club musicians trying to scrape out a living in Seattle. "The alternative is either playing a straight-ahead jazz club like Soyca's, or a jazz night at a non-jazz club like the Eireliner. In both cases, you'd probably make about $50-$75 a night. The most lucrative regular gigs are cheesy dinner jazz shows at hotel restaurants, but even those don't pay as well. Plus the fact that hotel gigs treat you like background noise, while the music has always been the center of attention at the 1K Club."
Eventually, Jetco will decay. Macroware will splinter. SafeEnoughCo's vaunted stadium roof will collapse and the insurance behemoth will be sued out of existence, dying by its own sword. Bit by bit, new shadows will creep into the corners of downtown, and some dimly lit club will rise again from the ashes. Or will it? We hear Bellevue's club scene is starting to blossom, which makes sense considering the cover charge to get across the floating bridge.