East of the waterfront, up on South Jackson Street, past the International District and at the base of a steep hill in the Central area, looms a giant red Wonder Bread sign.
A lonely piece of Americana, the neon sign is perched atop a shuttered bakery. Beyond the broader neighborhood implications of the factory's imminent demolition and replacement with housing and shops is the prickly question of what happens to the sign.
The San Diego company that is developing the 0.65-hectare property said the sign would be donated to the nearby Pratt Institute of Fine Arts. But that has some neighborhood residents worried that Pratt will auction it off to wealthy collectors.
PHOTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Old neon industrial signs are in the midst of a renaissance, especially across the Northwest and in Los Angeles. Seattle is on the cutting edge of this scene, mostly because the city, already a national leader in historic preservation, did not take down or restore many of the original signs at bustling establishments like the Pike Place Market, founded in 1907, and the Elephant Car Wash, started up in 1951.
Still, some, like the Wonder Bread sign and the neon R for the Rainier Brewing Co, which is now in a neon museum, are no longer hovering above thriving businesses.
Pratt officials did not return telephone calls seeking comment about their plans for the sign. But the executive director, Earl Sedlik, told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer last year, when the sign question first emerged, "Our artists are eager to inherit the sign -- whether or not it ends up here, I don't know."
Bill Bradburd, an artist who moved here from San Francisco, said the Wonder Bread sign was really a symbol of a "bait and switch" on the part of city officials. Bradburd, who lives near the bakery and is a co-chairman of the Jackson Place Community Council, said development was moving at such a fast pace that city officials who had promised to protect the character of Seattle's neighborhoods were instead seizing on the dollars flowing in.
Bradburd and others on the council want the sign displayed publicly near the site of the bakery.
But is the tension over these 11 red letters, each 1.8m tall, really about the sign?
"These battles over saving something old are proxy battles," said David Brewster, the founder of Town Hall, Seattle's cultural center, who is writing a history of the city since the 1962 World's Fair here. "They are really battles against traffic, although of course gentrification weighs in."
Seattle, founded in the 1850s, is still relatively young, Brewster said. "Where you don't have a lot of history," he said, "you do want to hang onto the little you do have. And where you have a high degree of change, you fear change."
The city, still recovering from the dot-com bust, is in a young yet remarkable real estate boom. Projections for 2006 construction, said Alan Justad, a spokesman for the city's planning department, outpace last year, when the city accepted a record US$2 billion in residential and commercial building permit applications, with US$1.7 billion approved. Much of the development is concentrated downtown under a planning strategy known as "urban density," which is intended to prevent sprawl.
But development is also coming soon to neighborhoods like the Central area. Seattle, with a population of 572,000, according to city figures, and an additional three million people living elsewhere in the metropolitan area, is projecting a population increase within the city limits of at least 100,000 people by 2024.
About half of those would live downtown, Justad said, with the rest in new housing planned for some of Seattle's 38 neighborhoods, or "urban villages," in planning parlance.
"The bottom line is green; you can't hold back progress," said Terry Johnson, 62, who grew up in the Central area with Jimi Hendrix and for a time worked at the bakery. "Devel-opment, it's inevitable, and the worst thing you can do is not develop there and just leave them all to grow old poor."
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the
Moritz Mieg, 22, lay face down in the rubble, the ground shaking violently beneath him. Boulders crashed down around him, some stones hitting his back. “I just hoped that it would be one big hit and over, because I did not want to be hit nearly to death and then have to slowly die,” the student from Germany tells Taipei Times. MORNING WALK Early on April 3, Mieg set out on a scenic hike through Taroko Gorge in Hualien County (花蓮). It was a fine day for it. Little did he know that the complex intersection of tectonic plates Taiwan sits
When picturing Tainan, what typically comes to mind is charming alleyways, Japanese architecture and world-class cuisine. But look beyond the fray, through stained glass windows and sliding bookcases, and there exists a thriving speakeasy subculture, where innovative mixologists ply their trade, serving exquisite concoctions and unique flavor profiles to rival any city in Taiwan. Speakeasies hail from the prohibition era of 1920s America. When alcohol was outlawed, people took their business to hidden establishments; requiring patrons to use hushed tones — speak easy — to conceal their illegal activities. Nowadays legal, speakeasy bars are simply hidden bars, often found behind bookcases