When Seattle Was Gritty

A lot has changed in the Evergreen City, but not everything.

Image courtesy “Streetwise”, directed by Martin Bell (1984)

In the summer of 1988, my family moved from Los Angeles to the Seattle area to start a new business. As a twelve year old kid I knew very little about the city except that it was home to the Sonics, Seahawks and Mariners (sports trading cards were a big deal back then.)

We settled in comfortably and when I wasn’t figuring out how to adjust to life as an adolescent about to start the eighth grade in a new community, I started to explore my surroundings. The first thing I noticed, coming from the dry geography of Southern California, was the abundance of nature — forests, creeks, a lake. And green — and everything was so green. The contrast between the colors of the trees and the clear blue sky on a warm summer day that we Seattleites love so much affected me as much then as it does now.

Meanwhile, across the lake to the west (we rented a house on a little island in between Seattle and Bellevue), things were happening that I wouldn’t learn about for years to come. Around that time, a rock band that had formed a few months earlier was starting to make some pretty serious waves. Springing from the ashes of another popular band that had split in late 1987, Mother Love Bone, fronted by the charismatic singer Andrew Wood and featuring members of what would…