January 21, 1997: In Search of the Golden Shower of Public-Private Partnerships

Gentrification, triangulation, and public urination, oh my!

Such were the underlying themes of civic life in Seattle during the allegedly halcyon days of the dot-com boom. And such was the backstory on the date in focus here, when roughly 75 local homeless citizens and advocates invaded the downtown Nordstrom store (then in its original Westlake Park location) and the brand-new NikeTown wearing bathrobes and shower caps, bearing rubber duckies and toothbrushes, ostensibly searching for a place to take a shower, but in fact engaging in a protest to draw attention to City Council plans to de-fund a proposed downtown public hygiene center that could be used by the homeless.

The facility, as proposed by its advocates, would have been located in the basement of the Glen Hotel, a vacant remnant of Old Seattle at Third Ave and Spring St. However, certain city mothers and fathers, heavily influenced by the pro-business Downtown Seattle Association, fought both overtly and covertly for "dispersed" bathing and toilet facilities spread over the outskirts of downtown, safely concealed from the city's financial and retail core. Such moneyed maneuvering was in accord with City Hall's attitude toward the homeless in the late '90s, best exemplified by a set of proposed "civility laws" banning economically unproductive loitering and public urination downtown. And such were the ways in which City Hall so gleefully wizzed all over the city's poor folks while rolling out the red carpet for the rich, best exemplified by the $73 million of public money being given away behind closed doors to none other than Nordstrom, for construction of the private parking garage now standing at Sixth and Pine.

Meanwhile, the proposed hygiene center somehow slipped away into oblivion, never to be revived. Today, the former Glen Hotel site houses the Wild Ginger restaurant and similarly stuffy consequences of the dot-com boom, and a richly-stacked incoming City Council stands ready to wage another two years or more of war on the poor in Downtown Seattle. At least none of the Council's newbies have ever been public inebriates--campaigning, urinating, or otherwise. Sources: Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer archives; ETS! archives.