Pioneer Square -- it really has three sides

Even the seagulls are still sleeping when Smith, in a green CleanScapes uniform, starts blasting cigarette butts, napkins and leaves from Occidental Square with a leaf blower.

Patrick Smith cleans up Pioneer Square in the hours around dawn, and he often finds a lot of unpleasant things.
Phil H. Webber / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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The whir breaks the quiet just as dark skies start fading to a rich blue, a wakeup call to the bundles of blankets on the bricks of the square. He brushes the remnants of last night's party into a dustpan, then throws it into a big yellow trash can on wheels.

Weekends, the yellow can is heavy with broken bottles, discarded condoms and sometimes vomit. But nothing as bad as what he found on Ash Wednesday, some two weeks ago.

"There were rubber bullets, broken bottles, broken glass everywhere," he says.

Fat Tuesday rioters left the broken window glass. Police officers who pushed them from the square provided the rubber bullets.

Former Pioneer Square resident Michael Fajans later stood up at a community meeting at the Yukon Gold Rush National Historical Museum, apologizing as he blinked back tears. He pointed to the owners of the square's nightclubs, taverns and bars. They organized Fat Tuesday, he said, and the riot was their fault.

But his anger ran deeper than the happenings of one night. All the years of noisy nights, vomit and urine on the sidewalks in the mornings, the broken bottles, the litter -- all of it -- exploded into the rage on his face.

Thanks to the nightclubs, he said, "this neighborhood is a neighborhood where people come to behave like this. We have joint cover, which brings the party out to the streets. We are the victims. ...

"The only reason we have Mardi Gras is to sell beer."

Previous coverage
Fat Tuesday photos

The Mardi Gras melee has raised questions about race relations and about youth violence, but it also reignited an old and intensely local debate: how can a community find peace if it is all at once a residential area, a homeless refuge, a high-tech office park and a playpen for hard drinkers?

Hot debate about the soul of the square has come up before -- when, at the neighborhood's insistence, the City Council approved civility laws aimed at keeping the homeless from peeing in public, panhandling aggressively and sitting on the sidewalk, and again with last year's fight over a failed ordinance aimed at muffling noise from the clubs.

It's coming up again, in the wake of Mardi Gras, in the form of a renewed call for a tougher noise ordinance and a ban on joint covers, or the practice of paying $10 to get into all 10 clubs for the night. Some say the practice encourages drunkenness because bartenders can't know how much a bar-hopper has consumed elsewhere.

The demand for a more civil square is likely to grow as the place changes. Since 1998, the number of apartments and condos in the neighborhood has risen from just over 700 to 916, with at least 150 more planned or under construction. Some sell for as much as $2 million.

Not everyone sees the neighborhood as a place that needs to pipe down and dry out.

Some see it as a place for revelry, not only on Fat Tuesdays, but stormy Mondays or any other night.

And still others see it as a place to find a free bowl of soup and a friendly doorway for camping out of the rain.

It's clear that Pioneer Square isn't just one neighborhood. In the 24 hours after Patrick Smith starts work, the face of the square will change almost by the hour.

It's also clear that not even the dedicated cleaner and his powerful machine can clean up the messy, competing visions for the birthplace of Seattle.

Changing of the guard

Patrick Smith brings on the morning. Moments after he and his leaf blower whirred past the iron and glass canopy in Occidental Square, something under an old white blanket stirs. Paint-splattered sneakers slide into view. Cindy, 43, sits up, holding her first Past Blue Ribbon of the day. There's no ready explanation for the old clown doll that lies nearby.

She yawns and groans and apologizes for the paint on her pants. She was on her way to evening prayers the night before, she says, when "these white boys over there threw paint at me from their window," she said, "They think they're better than us. But they wouldn't survive out here."

Yet the homeless and the those who might paint them do have one thing in common, Cindy says: Neither wanted nor welcomed Mardi Gras.

"We just went and lay down in a doorway, but then the police came and said 'get out of here,"' she says. "I said, 'I'm not part of Mardi Gras. I'm homeless and I'm just trying to get some sleep and stay out of the madness.'"

They made her move, anyway.

In the full dawn, early risers among the downtown lawyers and dot-comers filter out of their expensive lofts, some charging ahead; others sleepwalking. Soon people in suits are rushing to meetings as neighborhood activist David Brunner heads to the Triangle Tavern, where he will help clean up earthquake damage.

He points to the Compass Center for the homeless, which now is locked behind barbed wire, closed by the quake. A handmade sign directs the homeless to five other shelters, three of them outside of Pioneer Square.

In a way, this is what the community has always wanted -- other neighborhoods to share the load of the city's homeless. The square may be changing, but it still has a high stock of missions, shelters and food kitchens.

"It's kind of a double-edged sword," says Brunner, who pushed for the civility laws. "The earthquake took out the social service agencies. There's less panhandling right now. I think five clubs are closed and a sixth is teetering. So it's quieter at night."

At lunchtime, Pioneer Square is a 150-year-old office park with weathered charm.

White-collar types have taken over Café Paloma, on Yesler Way just south of First Avenue. It's an intimate place, where young secretaries talk of parties and an earnest man's excitement over a project blur into a lighthearted murmur.

After the lunch rush ebbs, the cafe becomes a hole-in-the-wall where owner Sedat Uysal looks up from cutting peppers to greet customers by name. A photographer who lives a block over sits by the window and smiles and waves at people walking by.

Uysal passes over a box of slides someone has left for the photographer. If you want to leave something for a neighbor in Pioneer Square, Uysal's your man. Everybody, at some point in the day, will stop by.

The photographer, who did not want to read her name in a newspaper, said she sees Pioneer Square in a way the rioters did not -- as a neighborhood.

The homeless do not bother her, she says, calling them "hobos trying to see the world on their own two feet.

"They've always been here," she says. "This is Skid Row."

Now the nightclubs, she says, are another matter. She likes to read Proust, but can't get through it when her windows are rattling from the music. "I don't think the clubs attract a bad crowd," she said. "But I think they create an ambience for a kind of anarchistic behavior."

She's reminded that the square has had bawdy life longer than it has had chic lofts, and that no one forces her to live here -- much less read Proust.

"Look" she says, eyes angry through her bangs. She loves living here. It's a place where photographers can show their work at the local cafe. "This is home for us. We put up with a lot around here."

A lunch crowd at Grand Central Arcade in Pioneer Square. The charming atmosphere changes when the sun goes down and the party set floods in.
Phil H. Webber / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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Late afternoon on First Avenue, where the cast-iron pergola recently came raining down, the bar named for the founder of Pioneer Square is still dark. In a few hours, four women in shiny clothes will be singing hits from the '70s at Doc Maynard's, but manager Steve Lozier looks glum. It's been a rough couple of weeks.

Lozier also runs the Underground Tour that usually starts from the bar, but fear that the Ash Wednesday earthquake may have weakened the walls of subterranean Seattle has forced it to close.

He sees even more trouble ahead. As he slouched in the dark, he looked like a man who's been beaten up for helping to organize the celebration. He knows his neighbors are angry, and that he will be embroiled in fights over noise and the joint cover for months to come.

"I don't mind sacrificing Mardi Gras to keep the peace," he says, but adds that it's unfair to blame the clubs for the riots.

"I feel terrible about what happened. But do I feel like we should be financially responsible? No," he says. "We didn't want these people to come down here."

Like it or not, the club scene -- and even a degree of raucousness -- is as much a part of Pioneer Square as anything else. Before joint cover began 12 years ago, rowdy joints like the J&M Café and the Blue Danube charged no cover at all. Look back a few years and there were brothels and places where an incautious sailor might simply disappear.

"This is the neighborhood's history," he said. "We're part of the neighborhood, too."

Night of skimpy dresses

With nightfall, the office workers take their starched white shirts and board buses for Ballard or North Beach. The square slips into a tight, short skirt.

Soon a pack of young women stroll along, hugging themselves to stay warm rather than tossing a coat over skimpy dresses. A herd of young white men scream through the square, carrying one another on their backs, chased by a cursing homeless woman. A young man in a baseball cap yells at a stranger, "Hey dude, I saw a woman's (you know what he said) right on that bench. Fat Tuesday! Woo Hooo!"

The disco anthem "I Will Survive" pours through the open doors of Doc Maynard's, blending with salsa wafting from Old Timer's. A motorcycle roars, a taxi driver lays on the horn. Matt Bandarra, cigarette tucked behind one ear, wolfs a pushcart hot dog. It's well past midnight, but the night is young and so is he.

"Pioneer Square is kind of notorious for having loud noise and a lot of craziness," the 21-year-old said. "If they don't like it, they should move to Federal Way or Issaquah."

In their two-bedroom apartment overlooking the square, the photographer from Café Paloma is in for the night. The crowd seems smaller; Even so, she'll wear earplugs to bed.

Several blocks away, Cindy also beds down for the night, a shapeless white bundle in a doorway, paint-splattered shoes poking out. Clown doll lying nearby.

Eventually, the man with the cigarette behind his ear and the shivering young women fade away. The bands pack up. Streets empty.

Pioneer Square is left to a few moments of peace.

Then Patrick Smith starts another day with a whir.

P-I reporter Kery Murakami can be reached at 206-448-8029 or kerymurakami@seattle-pi.com