Obscure neighborhood on the rebound
Hispanic families drawn to area

By REGINA HACKETT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

In rumpled jeans and T-shirt, South Park's King of Hubcaps is master of all he surveys. He owns the worn, wooden house he grew up in and the rickety office in front of it, covered in hubcaps.

Calling his business King of Hubcaps, John Thomson Jr. is unsure of the size of his stock. "I tell everybody 100,000 but I know there's more," says Thomson, speaking loudly to be heard over his dog's bark. "I've been saying 100,000 for 10 years and getting more hubcaps all the time."

Thomson, 52, employs his living alarm system to good advantage. "Nobody steals from me. Used to be in the old days, nobody needed guard dogs. Nobody locked their doors. No crime."

What is now his hubcap business was once his father's tractor wrecking yard. On the counter of the office is a photo of himself at age 9, riding a horse near the place where his father stored tractor parts. "Lot of farms then. Working people in little houses. My mom used to take us trick or treating. You'd need a big bag."

In a city famous for its neighborhoods, South Park is remarkably obscure, even now, when a Comedy Central cartoon show of that title has become a cult TV hit, featuring fierce and mouthy short people shaped like dumdum bullets.

Walking distance from Boeing headquarters, bordered by the Duwamish River and crisscrossed by freeways, South Park was a farm community earlier in the century, growing produce for sale at the Pike Place Market. In the 1960s and 1970s it turned industrial and is now groping toward its future as a richly multicultural community of roughly 1,500 households learning to live with industrial neighbors.

Roger Valdez, the city's neighborhood development manager for the southwest sector, says South Park is a draw for Hispanic families moving into the area. "Nobody knows how many Hispanics live there now, but their influence is easy to see. I've heard a figure of 15 percent, but I'm sure it's higher."

Sal Hernandez agrees. He owns the Mexi-Mart on South Park's 14th Street, a Mexican fast-food joint, grocery, bakery, music and clothing store. A painted plaster figure of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the window is flanked by four Virgins of Guadalupe On TV facing the cash register, Mexican break dancers entertain a crowd to the strains of a mariachi beat.

Hernandez, 43, is a big man with a baby face and soft, winning smile who never rests on his laurels. Since he opened the Mexi-Mart here eight years ago, he has expanded into Bellevue and Tukwila, calling those stores Mexi-Mart 2 and 3.

He's planning to open a Mexican fish restaurant next door to his South Park Mexi-Mart, to be called La Viagra, after the potency drug. "In Mexico, eating fish gives life energy," says Hernandez. "I have five children now. After I open my restaurant, I'll be ready to have five more."

He also sees in his South Park future the development of a laundromat, a beauty parlor and Latin dance hall. He says he owns five houses in the neighborhood, not counting his own, all rented to Hispanic families. "I work from 8:30 in the morning to 11:30 at night, seven days a week. On slow days I go home to see my kids. There used to be prostitution and drugs along the street but not so much anymore. Anybody acting suspicious, I tell them straight up to move on."

Although Seattle police consider the crime rate in South Park unremarkable, residents seem to think they were once excessively burdened by the criminal element but aren't any more.

"The riffraff moved on," says Mel Markham, shrugging expressively. Raised in South Park, Markham wants to bring his version of high-class dining to his community.

He owns what he calls the "old whore house" (most recently a tavern) on the corner of Eighth and Cloverdale streets and hopes to turn it into a restaurant featuring "good, clean American food" served on Wedgwood china with Waterford crystal glasses and linen napkins. "South Park's ready for mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken and roast beef."

Raymond Pattugalan works nights for a cleaning service with his wife Leonora and lives in a small house he owns on Cloverdale Street with five of their six children. The oldest, 23, is a nurse living on her own and the youngest is 3.

He attributes less crime to "good police, good lighting and our dogs." He says police patrol the area every half hour.

"People used to steal the recycling cans. And the mail. I called the post office. They moved the mailbox from the front of the house and gave me a case number. People speed down the street, turn the corner and don't slow down. A woman nearly hit my daughter, who was cleaning the yard. The woman was drunk and got arrested."

He and his wife exchange satisfied smiles.

Al Mason, 44, an attendant at South Park's spacious and elegant community center which opened in 1989, thinks crime continues to be a problem because of prostitution, and prostitution is a problem because of Boeing.

"The guys looking for prostitutes are wearing suits, ties and Boeing badges," he claims. "If we weren't close to Boeing, we wouldn't have prostitutes."

Not everybody blames Boeing for the community's ills. Russell Lockwood worked at Boeing for several decades and remembers it fondly.

"A guy moved in down the street, the first time I met him, I knew him already," says Lockwood. "He'd worked at Boeing. There are a lot of Boeing people here." Trim and dapper in a red check cap and matching jacket, Lockwood at 80 swims several times a week and is in better shape than his house.

It sags at its edges and rises along its central spine, causing the furniture to tilt. The front yard sports a long row of wild rose bushes whose stems are so heavy with blooms they droop onto the grass.

"I'm not a gardener," he says. "Roses don't interest me."

Married and widowed twice, he met his current 81-year-old girlfriend at South Park's First Baptist Church during a lecture on the work of Joseph Campbell. On his bookshelves are the complete works of C.G. Jung, the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies and a thick guide to Jewish mysticism. "I'm a bit of a mystic myself," says Lockwood.

Nine-year-old Robert Dampier is more of an outdoorsman. He spends the summers at day camp in the community center, playing basketball, shooting pool and going on field trips around the city. "All the people here are nice," he says softly. "Nobody tries to snatch you, like you hear about in other places."