[ Applause ]
-Well, we have a great program tonight,
focusing on the Street Trees of Seattle,
documenting our changing history,
which is Taha Ebrahimi's brand new book, which is so exciting.
If you haven't seen it,
you're going to hear all about it this evening,
but you also can buy it and take home your own copy, right, Taha?
And I think they're for sale in the back, so be sure to do that.
And we are joined by several special guests.
So let me go into the official introductions.
Taha Ebrahimi, who we're going to hear from this evening,
is the director of Tableau Public,
which is a free platform to explore, create,
and share online data visualizations about life
in our communities.
She is a native Seattleite and lived on the East Coast
until a few years ago when she came back.
And her writing,
she's a writer as well as the author of this book.
She's -- her writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction,
Crosscut, The Seattle Times, and a whole bunch of other places.
And she serves as a member of the Historic Seattle Council,
which does such great work in our community,
and is also a board member for the Cal Anderson Park Alliance.
So, thank you, Taha, for all you're doing.
And Taha is going to be joined by two other people
who will be up here just momentarily,
two of the best people for recording Seattle history.
Susanna Ryan.
Susanna is a Seattle-based illustrator,
and she's the author of the "Seattle Walks Report",
which, again, if you have not seen it, it's in the back.
You have to see it. It's so much fun.
It's an illustrated walking tour
through 23 Seattle neighborhoods.
She also wrote "Secret Seattle:
An Illustrated Guide to the City's Offbeat
and Overlooked History".
And finally, and this one, Susanna,
you'll have to fill me in on more details.
I don't think I've read this one.
"Dog Days: Your Fur Baby Memory Book".
So those are all wonderful books you have to look at.
And in 2021,
Susanna was named one of Seattle Magazine's
Most Influential People in Washington State.
So we are very lucky to have her.
And finally, I want to let you know
that we're being joined this evening
by the amazing Cynthia Brothers, whose media empire,
"Vanishing Seattle",
is an absolute must-see for anyone
who cares about our city past and present and future.
It celebrates the spaces and communities
that give us our character and our soul.
Cynthia was named one of Seattle's most influential
in Seattle Magazine as well.
Two years, 2018 and 2023. That's probably a record.
And she's also very involved
with the Chinatown International District Coalition
and previously has presented at Seattle -- at MOHAI rather,
and so you probably are familiar with her from that.
So please welcome Taha, Susanna, and Cynthia.
-I am so honored
and excited to be here today with these two ladies.
And we'll each share a little bit about our projects,
and then we'll take questions from the audience.
And one of the first things
when we first got together
and talked about the commonalities of our projects
is that I think that we are all documenting in different ways
a city that we love very much that is changing very fast.
So we've all done it in different ways,
and we'll talk a little bit about that each.
And I get to start off.
So, "Street Trees of Seattle" is in -- oh nice,
that's even better, thank you.
"Street Trees of Seattle" is an illustrated walking guide,
and it's based on publicly available data
that the city publishes every year and it goes back to 1950.
And I show you where the widest diameter
and first recorded street trees across 50 genus are located
in about 30 different neighborhoods in Seattle.
And what I learned in the process of this project
is that trees are very much interconnected
with our cultural histories,
and especially public trees that are shared with the community
and that live in collective memory.
If you show me a city's trees,
I could probably tell you the story of that city.
So, this is a picture of Seattle taken in 1882.
And you're looking from the Beacon Hill Bridge,
if you can believe it, towards Pioneer Square.
And here, just to give you some context,
that's the Smith Tower.
And that peninsula that it's on is essentially downtown Seattle.
And all the water south of that was filled in
and turned into today's Soto.
So three years before this picture was taken,
in 1879,
the last original tree in the downtown area had been logged,
which we forget about.
We're the Emerald City and the Evergreen State;
it was all clear-cut.
So the area we are standing on right now,
the traditional land of the Duwamish people,
had been previously covered in thick forest, mostly evergreen.
And here's what it looks like today, that exact view.
Once again, there's the Smith Tower for context,
and there they are side-by-side.
So today, believe it or not, based on the city's data,
only about 5% of Seattle's right-of-way trees
are originally native to this region.
Everything else, most of what you see today,
was brought here from somewhere else
and planted relatively not that long ago.
So people often planted what was familiar to them,
and they leave clues about what came before.
Trees are a kind of witness and connection to what came before.
In 2020, this is when it began.
You may remember these signs in parks everywhere.
It was during the pandemic lockdown,
and many of the streets were closed off to cars.
There were no airplanes in the sky.
The public parks stopped mowing their lawns.
It felt like time had stopped.
And that's honestly
when I started taking these epic walks in my neighborhood
and when I started noticing the street trees.
And I was born and raised in Seattle
and I had taken these trees for granted that entire time.
I got a book called "Sibley's Guide to Trees",
and you see that right here. It was mostly illustrations.
And remember, I was all alone during that time,
so I couldn't know for certain
if I was identifying the trees correctly
just by looking at a picture.
I needed something else.
And that's when I discovered this legendary book,
if you don't know about it yet, called "Trees of Seattle".
It's from the 1980s by Arthur Lee Jacobson.
And this book had actual addresses
of specific tree species
so I could visit and see them in person.
The only problem here was that it was all text.
So, I actually needed both of these books
in order to learn about trees.
And you can imagine how ridiculous I looked.
I really was carrying both of these books,
and I was often pulling out my phone
and looking at the address.
So in the beginning,
it was literally out of sheer necessity
that I started drawing tree maps.
And that got all the information on one piece of paper
so I could just walk around with that.
Well, I ended up making a lot of those tree maps.
There was something very calming about it for me.
And eventually I found that publicly available dataset
that I mentioned that the city releases.
And since I work at a data visualization company,
I got predictably obsessed with that dataset.
So on my walk, something happened to me.
And it was that act of traveling with my own feet
at a walking pace,
deciphering these handwritten maps,
and looking for these physical identifying features of trees,
it forced me to be present.
And there was something really oddly satisfying
about identifying, and finding, and confirming these trees.
And during that time,
I was spending a lot of time inside in my head,
not really present, looking at two-dimensional screens.
As I mentioned before, I was born and raised in Seattle,
but when I went on these walks,
it was like I was seeing these neighborhoods
in a whole different way.
I had never seen them like this before.
It was like a portal had opened
and I had walked into a second dimension.
And I wanted to share that experience.
So in my book, "Street Trees of Seattle",
I've created about 30 hand-drawn neighborhood maps
like this one on the screen. And on those maps,
I have noted the notable street trees for you to find.
And when Cynthia, Susanna, and I first got together,
we talked about the threads in common with our projects.
And we realized pretty quickly, as I mentioned before,
that we're all basically documenting a city
that we love that is rapidly changing.
And we thought it would be fun for each one of us
to show how we use different mediums and styles
to capture and document the same neighborhood in different ways.
And I'll start out with this.
We chose the neighborhood you see here,
which is the Central District,
a specific area called Cherry Hill.
And as it turns out, Cherry Hill is, coincidentally or not,
where the city's widest cherry street tree exists.
I thought that was interesting.
There were cherry street trees all about
the same age on this street.
Here is a picture of that widest cherry street tree.
It's actually a Japanese Hill Cherry,
and the city had mislabeled it as a Sergeant Cherry
and the city also claimed
that it had no Japanese Hill Cherries as street trees.
For me, finding and identifying street trees
is about making contact with a place.
So this cherry street tree got me to do some digging
so I could find out exactly when it was planted,
and I'll share that story.
So one of the ways I find out
when a particular street tree is planted
is I look through old archival photos.
And so I searched around for archival photos
that had Cherry Hill in the description.
And this was one of those photos that I found.
And this photo actually ended up being the key.
And it was taken in 1959, after World War II.
And you see a woman in the middle smiling,
and some official looking guys around her
in this pile of trash.
Many people after World War II had moved to Seattle
for defense-related jobs at places like Boeing.
And I was actually able to close up on this picture,
kind of a little CSI,
and find out that the numbers above that door said 313.
And also take note of that circle,
that design of the window shade there.
That is important later on.
I used the house address,
and I essentially went through every street in Cherry Hill.
I popped it into Google Maps to see
if I could see any similarities.
And guess what I found out?
That exact photo happened to be on the exact same street
where the widest cherry street tree in Seattle was located.
And here's that same porch.
You remember I circled that,
and you can see it in the other picture as well.
And remember that window.
So, most importantly what you see is that
that cherry tree is not there yet.
And judging by the size of the trees today,
I'm guessing they may have been planted not very long actually
after that photo was taken.
So that photo got me really curious.
What clues did it hold? The caption underneath
mentioned it was the cleanup crew
for the Cherry Hill Urban Renewal Project.
So I started looking into that.
I had not heard of that before.
It turns out that the Cherry Hill Urban Renewal Project was
a project to improve so-called blight in areas from about 1959,
when this photo was taken, apparently as a publicity shot,
and the program went on for about 17 years, ending in 1976.
And maybe the street trees had even been symbolically planted
as the kickoff to the campaign, which wouldn't be untold.
And it would make a lot of sense,
considering it was called Cherry Hill.
One year after that photo was taken, in 1960,
the first part of that project started.
And the first part was
when the building department began the first phase
of the project, enforcing new housing codes on a spot basis.
The idea was that after the building department pointed out
what the homes needed,
they would then help folks secure loans
and financial assistance to renovate their homes.
But sadly, that's not actually what happened.
As I did my research,
I found out that those loans never materialized.
And instead,
people who weren't able to meet the new minimum housing code
had their homes forcibly condemned.
This is another photo from that same series.
In 1959, there were about three pictures.
And remember,
this photo was taken before anyone knew
that the project wasn't going to work out
or that they might lose their homes.
So under state law,
for those who get displaced by imminent domain,
people get relocation expenses,
but the families that were displaced by code enforcement
did not qualify for that. By 1968,
over 1,000 structures in Cherry Hill had been razed
or condemned due to code enforcement,.
And later in 1981 a report was created
that determined that the Cherry Hill Urban Renewal Project was
directly responsible for displacing, quotation mark,
more people than any other activity at that time
in Seattle history.
And it was also considered a major contributing factor
to the shortage of housing,
since many of those homes that were razed
and demolished ended up being vacant lots for many,
many, many years.
But thanks to the widest Cherry Street tree in the entire city,
I was able to make contact with that story.
As I mentioned, they are witness to things
that have happened in the past.
I took a picture and printed it out,
and actually that telephone pole
that you see there in the photo is the exact same telephone pole
that's in the photo that I'm holding.
The knots match exactly.
Seattle's widest diameter Cherry Street tree is just one
of the trees mapped in my book.
Of the 600 or so trees that I validated,
about 22% had been incorrectly recorded by the city.
So I've corrected all of those.
And before I pass this on to Cynthia and Susanna
to tell their stories,
I'm going to read three short paragraphs from the book,
"Street Trees of Seattle", and it's about the data that I used.
"So as I walk the neighborhoods of Seattle
to validate the trees behind the data points in person,
I regularly noticed other trees
that were destination worthy for various reasons.
Trees hunched in strange shapes, trees in beautiful locations,
trees that evoked memories and witnessed history.
In Leschi, I saw an English maple with an abnormal growth,
sheathing its trunk, making it appear cinched at its waist.
A man walking his dog at the time stopped to comment about
how unusual the tree was,
and how everyone in the neighborhood
used it as a landmark.
It would be ridiculous not to include this tree
in a list of noteworthy street trees.
Yet, it had not turned up in any of my analyses
because it did not rank high in any of the categories
of information that had been collected in the city's data.
The growth was too far up the trunk
to be counted as part of the measurement
of its trunk diameter. And, in fact,
the tree didn't rank highly no matter how I sorted the fields.
If I had not taken a physical walk in the neighborhood
and seen the entire tree in person,
and if I had only been at my desk
limiting my analysis to just the data,
as much analysis is often done,
I would have missed this landmark tree.
And this is a reminder
that data is flawed from the very moment it is collected.
And that's because it consists of only what can be measured,
which is by nature only the superficial.
The nature of data is a dual trap.
In the specific case of this book,
not only are there overlooked trees,
but the trees that are included
take on incommensurate importance.
The information collected takes highest priority simply
because it exists.
It reminded me the data analysts and researchers
are similarly expected to use data as their starting point.
But such analysis inevitably underestimates the bias
that is implicit in collecting and processing data,
discounting the intangibles of lived experience.
So, data is many things, but most of all,
data is dangerous because it lends a false sense
of objectivity and truth,
as if it illuminates the totality of a picture.
Deeper analysis, of course,
requires a level of intimate understanding
that must take place beyond the numbers.
And my hope is that this book will take you there,
helping you make contact with the urban forest,
and to know the stories that came before us
and to connect with a sense of place
that data by itself can never capture."
Thank you.
-Hello, thank you so much for being here this evening.
My name is Susanna Ryan, and I am the author of the books
"Seattle Walk Report: An Illustrated Walking Tour
Through 23 Seattle Neighborhoods",
and "Secret Seattle:
An Illustrated Guide to the City's Offbeat
and Overlooked History",
both based on an Instagram comic series called
"Seattle Walk Report" that I started in 2017.
In 2017, I, a passionate, lifelong, indoor enthusiast,
did the unthinkable.
I left my Capitol Hill apartment and decided to take a walk.
It sounds kind of wild to say
that I had never just gone outside for no reason before,
but I am pretty sure I had never gone outside
for no reason before. Why would I?
There's trash, there's hills, there's people
with clipboards wanting me to save the whales or something.
No thank you.
Walking had always played a small role in my life
prior to this day
because I never learned how to drive and have never had a car.
But that kind of walking was a means to an end,
trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible
so I could return to my one true love,
sitting on my couch with all the lights off.
Growing up,
you were much more likely to find me doodling
in the margins of my notebooks
or making extremely elaborate birthday cards for my grandma.
I have just never really been the athletic type,
walking included.
While I've never had any formal art training,
drawing is just something I've always liked to do.
But in 2017, headphones put away, open heart, open mind,
with a stingle -- single step out the front door,
it just all clicked.
Almost instantly, Seattle began revealing itself to me
in ways that I had never taken the time to notice before,
and everything I saw seemed remarkable.
Streets I thought I knew well turned into opportunities
for delightful new discoveries. In a little park
that I had lived blocks away from for seven years
but never even knew existed, I found a Tamagotchi,
one of those little keychain toys
that was popular in the mid-'90s,
hanging on a tree branch.
It was magic.
An abandoned pile of goldfish crackers
on the sidewalk was no longer just random litter.
It was a tasty little sidewalk mystery waiting to be unraveled.
I wondered endlessly about the people
that I passed on the street,
about the things I saw, about these tiny,
nearly invisible stories playing out thousands of times a day
on hundreds of sidewalks across the city,
that would be so easy to miss if you weren't paying attention.
Just by being present and having an open mind,
I had tapped into a secret world
that had been right under my nose this entire time.
After that day,
my passion for walking and tolerance
for blisters only grew.
What began as walks around Capitol Hill
expanded outwards to other neighborhoods,
covering ground
that would have seemed like an absolute nightmare to me
only months before.
I walked from Lake City to Capitol Hill,
from Queen Anne to Beacon Hill,
from wherever I was to wherever I found myself hours later,
and then on my next day off from work I would do it again.
But as the miles and sites racked up,
all my walks started blending together
and I feared that I was starting to forget something
that had become an unexpectedly huge part of my life.
So, one day on a walk somewhere in Inner Bay,
I got the idea to create what I envisioned
as an illustrated travel journal for my own city,
figuring that I would record the route, the mileage,
and whatever happened to catch my eye that day.
Starting an illustrated walking journal seemed like a great way
to combine my newfound love of walking with my lifelong,
yet kind of dormant, love of drawing.
The stakes couldn't be lower.
I didn't plan on sharing this walking art project.
I thought I would buy a cute new notebook
and keep it to myself
or more accurately I thought I would buy a cute new notebook
and then put it on my shelf
because I didn't want to start writing in it.
But after taking my first walk with this idea,
a five-mile walk from Capitol Hill to the U-district,
and creating the first entry, I felt something gnawing at me.
Something was telling me to put this out there
for other people to find, even if nobody ever did.
Maybe there were other people just like me,
seeing the things I see,
or wanting to see the things I see,
or just wanting to connect with Seattle in a different way.
Or maybe not.
But walking had completely changed my perspective
of the city, and of myself, honestly.
News about Seattle,
which, prior to walking I was consuming more
than I was actually out experiencing Seattle
for myself - indoor person - seemed to occupy this --
either this extreme non-stop dumpster fire-type sentiment
or this overly sanitized thing that I didn't feel
like I could relate to at all.
But with every abandoned David Hasselhoff memoir
on the sidewalk, or cute cat spotted,
or Washington Mutual Deposit bag in a bush,
it seemed like there was a tiny story
about Seattle going untold.
So I thought, Why not try to tell it?
On a whim, I signed up for Instagram
and shared the first installment.
This is the very first "Seattle Walk Report",
documenting a five-mile walk to the U-district.
I lost the original drawing so it's a little bit hard to see
so I'll just share a little highlight.
I saw 21 dogs, which means I saw 3.1 dogs per mile.
Fun.
From there, I just kept plodding along at two miles an hour,
walking and making "Seattle Walk Report",
yet suddenly it felt like I was living life in the fast lane.
Somehow, some way, well, through word-of-mouth and algorithms,
people did discover the comic.
Maybe a month or two in, I was on the light rail,
and two people were having a conversation in front of me
about "Seattle Walk Report",
where one was explaining to the other what it was,
and as a sneaky little creep, I was like, This is incredible.
I felt like Harriet the Spy or something.
I wanted to, like, correct them or whatever,
but I was just like, No, I'm just going to listen.
And then about nine months after I started the comic in May 2018,
an editor from Seattle-based publisher Sasquatch Books
slid into my DMs one day and asked
if I'd be willing to make a book together.
It was not something I was expecting,
but I was like, Sure I got this, like, I can make a book,
how hard can it be?
And I did.
And nearly seven years, several books, hundreds of comics,
and thousands and thousands and thousands
of walking miles later, here I am.
It's pretty magical,
and all because I randomly decided to leave my
Capitol Hill apartment without any expectations
or time restraints,
and all without really understanding how to draw hands.
My walking interests have evolved a little bit with time.
While I was initially attracted to the more ephemeral sites
on a long walk, with my book "Secret Seattle",
I shifted my focus to unearth the local history
behind some of the more overlooked parts
of our streetscape,
like sidewalks, utility covers, and fire hydrants.
For example,
since Taha shared some utility pole sleuthing,
I thought I would share a way
that you too can become a little utility pole detective
in your neighborhood.
This is a comic I made a few years ago.
It says, "This fall, date a utility pole."
And then it says,
"I recently learned that you can tell
how old some Seattle utility poles are
just by looking at them.
Utility poles are given date nails when they are installed
that reflect the year that they went up.
For example,"
and then I have drawings of date nails that I've seen from 1994,
1973, and 1944,
which I spotted on East Thomas Street
between Harvard Avenue East and Broadway East on Capitol Hill.
It continues,
"Sometimes the date nail is missing because it fell out
or was removed by a date nail enthusiast.
I highly recommend doing some date nail spotting
in your neighborhood."
There's usually a little flat kind of notch thing
cut into the pole,
so that's the thing I look for first
and if a date nail is present, that's where you would find it.
Since making this comic,
I actually found an even older one, this one from 1939,
near South Dearborn Street and 19th Avenue South.
It's my favorite combination of fun and concerning.
Seattle's population has nearly doubled
since this utility pole was installed,
and it's just been quietly sitting there,
watching the whole thing.
This is the kind of thing that I love to discover on walks,
these mundane parts of the streetscape that have a story
to tell, a bit of historical intrigue,
these common threads that tie us to the past
but are firmly rooted in the present.
So, that's me basically, I'll hand it over to Cynthia.
Thanks for listening.
-Hi everyone, great to see you, thank you for coming out.
My name's Cynthia, and I founded "Vanishing Seattle" in 2016.
And it started out as social media
and also grew to include documentary film, exhibits,
and other projects. But before 2016,
the idea for "Vanishing Seattle" had been knocking around
in my brain for a while,
as I saw the places that I cared about in the city
disappearing at this seemed to be really rapid rate.
And I wanted to share with you all the place
that I consider to be the catalyst
that actually pushed me to start the account.
And that was a spot called Inay's,
which was a Filipino restaurant in North Beacon Hill.
It was opened in 2007 and was owned by Uncle Ernie Rios
and he named Inay's after his mother.
And Inay's was known for being a really warm and welcoming space,
for its delicious home-cooked Filipino food.
And I had a friend who worked there as a server
and also became Inay's resident drag queen.
Her name is Natasha Manila,
and she started a drag show every Friday
that was just epic and amazing.
And what happened with Inay's
is that North Beacon Hill was gentrifying,
and so the rent got raised on the building
and Uncle Ernie decided he was going to have to close.
So I went to Inay's for its closing night,
happened to be a Friday,
so Natasha was going to be performing there
for the very last time. And so I'll share with you
a short clip from Inay's closing night.
So that is the glorious Natasha Manila.
Yes, and as you can see, the place was just packed
out with friends and family and fans.
And if you didn't catch the song that Natasha was doing,
it was Effie's song from "Dreamgirls",
"And I'm Telling You, I'm Not Going".
And I just found it to be a really powerful, defiant moment.
I was really affected by it,
and I went home that night
and grabbed the "Vanishing Seattle" account
on Instagram and Facebook
and Uploaded a video for performing that song,
and that turned out to be my very first post on
"Vanishing Seattle".
But I think I just felt compelled to share this
out with the world, to demonstrate,
like, this is such a special and magical
and to me very uniquely Seattle space
where you have this cross section
of the Beacon Hill community,
the Asian-American and Filipino community,
the queer community all together in one space,
which I feel is not easy to replicate.
And this is what,
you know, we stand to lose as a city and as a community
when we lose and push out places like Inay's.
So, huge shout out to Natasha and Inay's for kind of,
yeah, I guess, causing me to pull the trigger
and create "Vanishing Seattle".
And I'd also like to share with you
all a few places in the Central District,
since that's the neighborhood we're covering today,
that I posted about on "Vanishing Seattle" in the past.
And the first spot is a place called
R&L Home of Good Barbecue,
and this is located on Yesler between 18th and 19th.
It was opened in 1952
and served up Louisiana-style barbecue
over three generations of the family that ran it.
It was opened by Louise Collins and her husband,
Reverend Robert Collins,
and then was run by their daughter, Mary Davis,
and then her daughters, Barbara and Cheryl.
And Miss Mary never turned down anyone who was hungry,
and Home of Goods hot links and ribs
and secret sauce was known all over
and drew people from all corners of the country.
To name a few, James Earl Jones, Sammy Davis Jr.,
Public Enemy, all came to Home of Good.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
during his only visit to Seattle in 1961,
came to Home of Good when it was closing
and then ended up staying and eating
and talking until the early morning.
And Mary Davis and her daughters ran Home of Good
until November of 2018,
when it closed after 66 years. And then in 2020,
appropriately, it became home to The Barbecue Pit,
which was owned by Edward Whitfield, also known as Pookie.
And this is actually the third location for Barbecue Pit.
Its prior space at 23rd and Plum, they were displaced from.
It was torn down for a podment redevelopment.
Before that, it was located at 25th and Cherry.
And Pookie brought back into the space
his signature posters and pictures
of Black and Seattle and Central District legends and artists.
And The Barbecue Pit closed around 2022.
Pookie had to take care of some family
but still ran a catering business on the side.
The next place I'll share is the -- oh,
before I go on to that,
so one of my favorite things about
"Vanishing Seattle" is the stories and the memories
that people will share about places,
which I'll encourage people to leave on the post.
So, a couple memories that folks shared about Home of Good.
"Went here since I was a kid.
They used to have arcade machines by the door
when I was little.
Me and the other neighborhood kids would play after ordering."
"That's the corner where my parents met.
My mom was leaving Home of Good BBQ
eating a chipped beef sandwich,
and my dad had just gotten a haircut at the barber shop
on the other corner."
So the next place is actually right across the street
from Home of Good, and that's the original Bryant Manor.
And I posted about this in November of 2022,
because November 3rd had just been proclaimed by the mayor
as Sir Mix-a-Lot Day because of the artistic
and cultural contributions he's made to the city,
as well as his championing of live music venues
and artists during the pandemic
through his involvement with the Keep Music Live campaign.
And also because Sir Mix-a-Lot was raised
in the Bryant Manor projects.
So, Bryant Manor was constructed in 1972.
It was owned by First AME Housing,
which was a part
of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church.
And it was developed as low-income
and affordable housing for Black and immigrant and POC
seniors and families.
And the building did get torn down,
but luckily it's still under the ownership of First AME.
And so they replaced the aging buildings with two new buildings
and even more low-income and affordable housing,
as well as the Ashe Prep Early Learning Center.
And here's a memory someone shared about Bryant Manor.
"My family lived there in the late '70s to early '80s
when I was in elementary school.
Mix was my neighbor and I fondly remember banging on the walls
when he played his stereo loud."
And then the last place I'll share with you all
is a not vanishing spot,
because I like to share not vanishing sometimes,
just to balance out all the bummer content.
And also, you know, just let folks know about places
that are still around that, you know, we can all still support.
So this spot is one of my favorites.
It's Flowers Just for You, on the corner of 23rd and Cherry.
It was opened in 1984 by Mary Wesley,
and was one of the only Black-owned
flower shops in the region.
Mary moved to Seattle from DC in 1956
and worked for Boeing into the '90s.
Before that, she went back to school for flower design
and then opened her original flower district shop
that was on 23rd and Jackson.
So Miss Mary has been serving the Central District community
for 40 years,
and her flowers have been a part of generations of weddings,
funerals, celebrations. And she's also seen
and weathered a lot of changes and challenges
in the Central District over the past four decades.
For example,
there was a years-long construction project
on 23rd Avenue that affected her business.
Then her building was torn down for a development.
Then she moved to her current location,
and the lack of parking and foot
traffic really affected her business.
And then she got an eviction notice.
So when the community learned
that Miss Mary might close her shop,
they really rallied around her
and Africatown started a GoFundMe campaign.
And they were able to raise enough money to keep her going.
So with the support of community, Miss Mary
and her shop have been able to persevere and to flourish.
She knew my grandmother when she was alive.
I'd buy my grandmother roses from Just for You,
and the note would always be handwritten in cursive.
You don't get that anymore.
"She's the best."
"This makes me incredibly happy to hear.
I used to visit her shop in the old location over a decade ago.
I pet her dog, Ginger, and listened to her tales of life
in Seattle and DC over the years.
Miss Mary was such a blessing to me back then.
Now, to see her little store still going, warms my soul.
She's such an iconic, kind human.
Please, Miss Mary, keep going."
And I think that's a good note to end on,
to, you know, support shops like Just For You
and the spaces in your neighborhoods and communities
so they don't vanish.
And even for the ones that, you know, aren't around anymore,
just continue to share the memories and stories
because, yeah,
I think they're a part of what kind of make up
the collective memory of us as a city.
And maybe the kind of city that we all want to live in.
So, thanks so much.
-Hello, my name is Kathy.
Thank you so much for your presentations.
I'm a rare Washington native, born and raised in Tacoma.
Lived in other parts of the country for a bit,
went to school elsewhere, and just had to come back.
And I really enjoyed your presentations.
My question is,
We've seen profound population growth in this area.
And what you're describing is sense
of place and place attachment.
How do you think we might help newcomers
to understand the value of these places,
as you mentioned, to frequent some of the shops,
some of the vendors,
but how do you introduce this deeper sense of place
to people who have not perhaps grown up with it
or been here for decades?
-So, you want to go first?
-Yeah, that's a great question.
Thank you.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've grappled with this myself.
And, I mean, I think wherever you come from,
there's going to be memories you have of places
that are important to you.
And I feel like, you know, people are social animals,
you want to have connection.
And I'm always interested in the interplay
between people and space and how they influence each other.
So, I don't know, maybe it's like tapping into this, just,
universal need for connection and places they care about.
And I have had people who are new to the city say to me,
like, Oh, this place was gone before I got here,
but it reminds me of, like, a bookshop I used to go to, like,
back in my hometown,
and I wish that that place was still here so I could enjoy it,
or so my kids could enjoy it.
But yeah, I think the key is really people,
you know, do need to get out of their house
and go out in the community, connect with spaces,
connect with each other. Yeah.
-Yeah, I think talking about it,
just being vocal about the things
that you like about your city
or that catch your eye about the city.
I wasn't getting a lot of that
before I started "Seattle Walk Report",
like, on an individual level.
And so when I decided to share kind of individual --
individually to me what was catching my eye,
the amount of people who suddenly went, Yes, me too,
I never thought that somebody would draw the roundabout
on my street, or these tiny little details.
And kind of highlighting these things
in a different sort of way and being enthusiastic about it.
It seems like it makes a little bit of a difference.
-For me, I had left Seattle for about 15 years,
and when I came back, the city was unrecognizable.
Like, literally, there were neighborhoods
I'd be driving through and it just looked --
I didn't know what place I was in.
And the trees were really anchors for me.
My earliest memories are of the cherry trees
that line the quad at the University of Washington.
And I've had the privilege of being able to see
them grow older and bigger over time.
And there's something powerful
about seeing that same tree growing over time
in the same place and,
for lack of a better way of saying it,
it made me feel rooted.
And I think that that is one of the keys helping
new people to Seattle experience.
A lot of people come to the city
and they spend a lot of time indoors.
I've heard the average percentage of time
we spend indoors across America is about 93% of our time.
So we're not really in our places that much.
And the trees were a way for me to, well,
selfishly for me first,
to make contact with a place by identifying certain features
and recognizing and acknowledging
and knowing the name of a tree
that I had passed by so many years and never noticed before.
So I think helping people get out,
helping them see their local areas sounds
like an obvious thing, but it's really not these days.
You know, we evolved in a three-dimensional world
and we spend most of our time
now looking at these two-dimensional screens.
And there's a lot of research
that says being outdoors
and looking at the organic geometry of nature
is just what we need.
And without that, we tend to not be able to focus on things.
We get stressed out,
we get depressed, and we can't put our finger on why,
and it's the most obvious thing, I think.
-Thank you so much.
My question was actually going to be about
how you guys foster breaking the Seattle freeze,
which you kind of just did.
So, I'm a new writer for the Capitol Hill blog,
and I was wondering --
-Yay. -Thank you.
Two articles out, neither of them very good,
but we're trying.
I was wondering if there's things
that you guys do every day to foster a sense of curiosity
and just love for Seattle. I love Seattle,
and I try to break the Seattle freeze every day,
kind of the way
that you're doing it by showing appreciation
for the little things.
But I was just wondering
if you guys could share any daily things
or just things that have given you inspiration
for endless creativity
and, yeah, breaking the Seattle freeze.
-I would like to start on that one.
So, creating this book, I've had lots of people reach out to me,
and I've been surprised by
how many people are people new to Seattle.
I didn't know it would be interesting
to people new to Seattle.
I -- when I made this book, much like Susanna,
I thought this was going to be something for myself
that I would throw on the shelf.
Maybe a couple of eccentrics might like it.
So, I was taken aback by the response people had to this.
And I think part of that
is people wanting to have communities
and not knowing where to find them anymore.
Even just these readings and events
have been such fun excuses to see people
from kind of all different times of my life
and other people's lives coming together
around this common interest.
One daily thing is social media.
I know that's technology,
but when I post things
I try to think about not just the street tree
that people should visit,
but maybe some local businesses nearby.
I try where I can to say, Hey, go check out this cafe,
things like that.
But yeah, I don't know if you guys --
-Yeah, I can't remember the exact quote right now,
but conservationist Rachel Carlson has a quote
that something like,
"A key to looking at your environment
with curiosity is to ask yourself,
What if I had never seen this before?
Or what if I had never seen -- what if I never see this again?
So kind of approaching even, like,
a crushed-up chip bag on the sidewalk.
It's like,
Maybe I've seen a crushed up chip bag on the sidewalk before,
but I haven't seen one on this unique day,
in this unique situation, never to be repeated again.
So truly, like,
tuning into these little parts of my environment
just sort of changed everything for me.
And I think it is a way
that new Seattleites can kind of start looking
and asking questions,
and just saying why, instead of just being like,
I'm just trying to get to where I'm going.
-Yeah, I mean, I think that's what I really love
about both of y'all's work is, like,
finding beauty in the maybe overlooked or everyday things.
Yeah, and I think for me,
it's like maybe finding beauty in an old dive bar,
or maybe a business I've been to a million times,
but maybe there's a new question I have about it,
or there's a another person hanging out there
that I can talk to and hear about why they like that place.
Yeah, I mean, running "Vanishing Seattle" can be kind of heavy
and depressing sometimes because,
you know, it's covering a lot of things that are going away
that people are sad about and grieving.
But the thing that really does keep me going
is being able to get out and to talk to people,
to small business owners,
to other people in the community,
and just, you know,
hearing what is it about these places
that are meaningful to people, that matter,
that might not be in, like,
I don't know, like a shiny, you know,
guide for tourists about Seattle, but.
-I love that you included the comments from your account
on there,
because I find particularly your
"Vanishing Seattle" account to be a community
in the comments section.
Like, it's this place
where people can share their memories
that they have of the same place.
And it goes back to that idea of the collective memory, places
that everyone kind of remembers
that are in the background of lots of people's experiences.
And I think we see less and less of that over time.
But projects like this
are trying to create that celebration
of those collective moments. -First of all,
thank you for all your efforts in protecting
and making a better community
and doing what you're doing for the environment.
It's what I care about.
So we see the tree beds in New York are open for anyone,
who can adopt the tree bed,
and plants and take the garbage out and make it better.
Do you happen to know,
because I kind of feel like it's --
we even take on a little our own tree beds in our front.
I moved to Belltown.
I've already done my tree beds on my block.
But just planting flowers or whatever it is to contribute,
and showing the respect.
And sometimes I --
that's your opportunity to meet people
and to bond over the mutual love
for what we have in our own backyards or front yards.
So do you know about the --
if that can be done in the Seattle -- if that's allowable?
Someone actually pointed out to me that it's not,
and I questioned that but I hadn't researched it yet.
-Well, most people don't know
that they're eligible to receive
up to three free trees apparently from
the City of Seattle,
six max, and I think that's an awesome thing.
So you are allowed to kind of plant whatever you want,
and Seattle is unique. I think that --
that we take for granted that on a single block
you're going to see a palm tree, a Douglas fir, a maple,
and then this random eucalyptus.
That doesn't happen in every city.
We have one of the most diverse street tree programs
in the entire United States.
So, double the diversity of trees on the East Coast
and triple the Midwest.
And Seattle's street tree program,
as far as planting the same kind of tree on a street,
that happened relatively late.
So for a good portion of Seattle's history,
people just planted whatever they wanted out
in front of their house.
So you get this modge-podge of people's different styles
and different ways they want to express themselves.
I know that there are some laws now, to your point,
whether it's allowed or not.
For example, the bigleaf maple.
It is a native tree here in King County.
It also happens to grow enormously.
And it used to be the most abundant kind of street tree
we had in Seattle,
until people figured out that it busted up sidewalks.
Now it is illegal to plant one of those in your planting strip.
And I believe it is also illegal to plant fruit trees
in your planting strip,
because they create an attraction for vermin, I guess.
So, there are these weird little rules here and there,
but for the most part,
no one's really enforcing if you plant something.
I've seen so many rogue trees, I cannot even describe.
There's this awesome apple tree
that ended up in the city's data set,
even though I'm sure it was not deliberately planted.
It wasn't even in the planting strip.
It was on the other side growing between two garbage cans,
and I figured what probably happened is
an apple core fell out of the garbage
and that's how that tree ended up there.
But what I love is that the city picked it up
and put it into the data set anyway.
-I just wanted to comment on the street tree policy
that the Seattle Department of Transportation has.
There's an online street tree map.
-Yes, there is.
-That is a fantastic resource that lists every tree by number.
And if you know the address of a tree,
if you want to find out about your tree,
you can go look at that address and you can see a dot there
and a database will explain the qualities of the tree.
Unfortunately, there's all kinds of trees
that aren't between the sidewalk and the curb
that there is no map for and they are not numbered,
and there is kind of a wild west open season on trees.
So, we need to recognize
that these trees take 80 years to grow.
You can't plant a tree and have a replacement.
And unfortunately, in our city code,
it gives you that impression,
that you can plant a tree that's as big as about chest high or so
and have that be a quote-unquote replacement.
And I guess my last comment is there is a kind of
a hidden maintenance responsibility for street trees.
If you were to ask people who is in charge of your tree,
you would probably get an inconclusive answer.
So we really do need to take care of our street trees.
So thank you so much for publicizing this resource
and this fantastic book.
-I'm so glad you brought that up,
because it is a really important point to remember that a mature,
large tree, on average,
provides ten times the physical
and mental health benefits as a small tree.
So even though our ordinance allows people to plant,
I believe, like 10 trees to make up for the one tree
that they cut down,
that is not a replacement, exactly like you mentioned.
So there are certain birds
that will only return to the same nesting area.
Kathy mentioned this to me earlier.
When you get rid of a tree,
you're also getting rid of a community of birds
that might be there, or insects, or things like that.
And one more thing I wanted to mention
is that the ordinance is a little bit tricky right now.
It's a crazy thing,
but there's actually a different set of rules for developers
than there are for homeowners,
as I understand it.
So, for homeowners,
it's under a certain amount --
a certain diameter that you are allowed to cut down your trees.
But for developers, they are given a kind of guarantee
where they can develop to I believe
it's like 85% of the plot,
and no tree is protected except for a kind of tree
called a heritage tree.
There are only about 253 heritage trees
in the entire city, and that program is closed.
No one can nominate trees for that program anymore.
So, these two sets of rules are a little bit at odds.
One is called a tree protection rule,
but it's more like a developer guarantee.
And if these trees were valued for the infrastructure
that they actually are,
the mental health benefits they provide,
the physical climate resilience they provide,
they would be protected more, I think.
-Are any of you familiar with the Panama Hotel
that was the feature in Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet?
It's there and it's lovely,
and I encourage everyone to go there.
-And it has some amazing honey locust street
trees in front of it.
They're gorgeous, they really are.
They just look humanoid.
They're, like, craggy and just gorgeous.
-Yeah, it might have the only --
be the only preserved Japanese-American bathhouse
in the country as well.
So yeah, ditto on the importance of paying it a visit.
-And actually, the caretaker of that building
has done a great job I think, maintaining that history.
If you go to the back of the cafe in the main floor,
they've put a little glass area
where you can look down into the basement.
And they haven't touched anything in the basement,
but it's basically the suitcases of the Japanese community
that was incarcerated.
They had nowhere to put their things,
so they all came to the Panama Hotel,
put it in the basement, nobody touched anything.
Only one-third of the community returned after World War II.
And that is something you can go see at the back of that cafe.
-Thank you again.
Please join me in a final thanks to our presenters.
Thank you.