The #7 bus is Metro Transit’s busiest line, if you don’t count the RapidRides that are sorta-semi express lines. It’s popular, and often crowded, because poor folks take the bus more than rich folks, and the #7 runs along Rainier Avenue, through the heart of Seattle’s poorest neighborhood.
Seattle’s not Chicago, though — this city has no genuine slums, and even the poorest, bleakest, blackest areas of what’s called Rainier Valley are only lower middle class. Most white people would lock their doors driving through and stop only for stop lights, but that’s more a comment on white people than on the Valley.
As we get started, be forewarned: I grew up in a suburb just south of Seattle, discovered public transit in my early teens, and the #7 was my backbone route, my regular ride to hang out in Hillman City, or to the downtown movie theaters. Later I lived in Rainier Valley, easy walking distance from a #7 bus stop, so as much as this will be a review of the route in 2024, it’ll also be a memento of what was along the #7 route in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.
Downtown, the #7 starts its southbound run at 6th @ Virginia Street, making stops all along Third Avenue, where the sidewalks are home to the homeless, by the thousands. Then it turns onto Jackson Street, for a jaunt through the International District (Chinatown, Japantown, Little Saigon, etc).
The downtown homeless stretch is depressing and outrageous to ride, and I ride it often, so today I boarded in Chinatown, after walking a few blocks to Cake House, where a couple of excellent egg tarts would hold me over until lunch.
Eating my tarts and waiting for the next #7, a lady bum asked for spare change. “Mister, can you help me can get something to drink? A beer would be nice.” It was about 10:30 AM, and I gave her my standard five bucks, and hope the beer brightened her morning.
The next #7 went up Jackson, past Dim Sum King, which looks like a great place for a cheap carry-out lunch, and Asia Bar-B-Que, which I can vouch is a great place for a cheap carry-out dinner.
We rolled under Interstate 5, the freeway that decimated the International District when it was built 60 years ago. Blocks of thriving businesses were obliterated and replaced with cold cement, dark freeway shadows, and acres of asphalt nothingness which still uglify the area, until we reached Little Saigon, on the other side of the freeway.
Around the intersection of 12th @ Jackson, there’s a flock of cheap Asian restaurants in all directions, but I’ve never been to any of them, and probably never will. I’m easy-going and understanding about the homeless, the addicts, the drunks and deselects and bums, but there are always so many of them crowded at every corner of that intersection, eating there would feel like dining on death row.
The bus turns right onto Rainier Avenue, which it’ll traverse the rest of the way. This is the newer, soulless part of Rainier, with ugly, overpriced apartment buildings and nothing much of interest.
At 1146 Rainier Ave, on the east side of the road, there’s a huge, kinda classy brick building that’s now abandoned and fenced off. Pretty sure it was open for business when I was a kid, but I don’t remember what the business was, and Google offers no answers. Now the building is only a sad, beautiful old place gone to ruins.
Then we passed under the gloom of another freeway’s shadow, Interstate-90 this time, but there’s hope in the darkness — the Judkins Park light rail station‘s been built here, waiting behind more fencing, to be opened when a new Link extension opens alongside the freeway. Who knows when that’ll be, though — Sound Transit laid several miles of track on the wrong kind of concrete, and had to rip it out and start over again.
Onward we rolled, past the Northwest African-American Museum, because yup, we’d come into the black part of town. The ride became more interesting, with more older buildings and fewer newer, more mom & pop businesses and interesting things out the window.
Stewart Lumber & Hardware is still there, since 1926 says the sign. I bought my first screwdriver set there, circa 1975.
Dixon’s Used Furniture looks like it’s been there since the natives got nudged out in 1851, but it’s more recent. I don’t remember Dixon’s from my younger years. Sure looks like the place to buy a dresser drawer or a couch or whatever, though.
There’s a sign for Baskin-Robbins, but the store and its building are gone. There’s only an empty, paved lot behind cyclone fencing, with a now-lying sign that says 31 flavors. Usually in the city, a fenced-off lot is bad news, but when it means a chain store has been demolished, it smells like victory.
Speaking of chain dumps, there’s McDonald’s. During my teenage first stint with McDonald’s in the mid- to late-1970s, I worked at the Renton branch, but employees are sometimes farmed out to other locations as needed, and several times they sent me to this one. Any McD, of course, is much like any other McD. The only differences were that the shake machine was in the west corner instead of east, the walk-in fridge opened to the left not the right, and the customers and co-workers were mostly black.
As the bus passed what was once Sick’s Stadium, I would’ve removed my hat if I’d been wearing one. Named for a local businessman by the unlikely name of Emil Sick, it was the long-time home of minor league baseball, and one-year home of the Major Leagues’ Seattle Pilots, in 1969. It’s where I first saw and came to love baseball, but eventually the idiots let the other idiots tear the stadium down, to build the city’s largest Lowe’s. Sweet jeebers, what sacrilege.
At the intersection of Rainier and Martin Luther King, there’s The Original Philly’s, a cheesesteak place that always looks interesting as the bus goes by, but for me anyway, it’s never looked interesting enough to ding the bell, step off, and try it. Haven’t been there since the same building was an H Salt Esquire Fish’n’Chips shack in the 1980s.
We rolled past Franklin High School, where I was never a student but saw a few basketball games.
And I recognized what was once Courtesy Chevrolet, and is now a used car lot. My mom & dad, looking for a car in the mid-1970s, spent an hour at Courtesy Chevy, and dragged me with them, but they didn’t buy their next car there. Afterward, my dad complained that they weren’t all that courteous, so from Pop, I inherited my grumpiness.
At Charlestown Street there’s Emerald City Fish’n’Chips, where I did ring the bell, and had a fine lunch I’ll review soon. You’re on the edge of your seat for that, eh?
A few blocks later an old black man wheeling an oxygen tank got onto the bus, and sat in front of me in a sideways seat, leaving an empty seat between himself and an elderly black woman with a cane. Gotta respect the old man’s game, as he low-key flirted with her for the next twenty blocks, but sadly, no, they didn’t get off together.
All along Rainier, there’s a mostly pleasant mix of old houses, older and occasionally newer apartments, and small businesses — endless nail shops, chiropractic, auto shops, shady tax prep places, and unique restaurants, along with, of course, all the ordinary chains you’d find anywhere, everywhere.
There are some bleak stretches, but most of Rainier Ave is alive and well, and a thousand times more interesting than the whitebread neighborhood where I’m living.
(If anyone reading this has an empty room along the #7 route, and you’d take a renter with no credit history, drop me a line, please. Never been evicted, and never been late with the rent.)
On the east side of Rainier, there’s the old Darigold dairy. It was built when this stretch of Rainier Avenue was open countryside, but anachronistically it remained all through my childhood and even after I moved away in 1993, a working dairy and headquarters for the entire co-op for many years after the city ate all the farm land. You’d always see milk trucks coming and going, and Darigold is still a leading local brand, but they’re not in that building any more. Something is — numerous trucks were parked in the lot — but there’s no Darigold sign, no Darigold trucks.
There’s the Beacon Cinema, a great, tiny, one-screen art- and old-movie house of recent vintage, run by folks who love old movies. It’s one of three theaters in town where I sometimes buy a ticket.
Next there’s the Columbia Funeral Home, which looks exactly as it did a hundred years ago, but now it’s owned by some chain of funeral homes so fuck ’em. Then comes the grand old Columbia Library, still a great place for quiet reading, if the teenagers ever shut up.
Everything’s Columbia this and Columbia that because this is the Columbia City neighborhood. Soon, though, it melts into an area known as Hillman City, and I’m not sure where’s the dividing point between Columbia and Hillman.
30+ years ago, when I was living in San Francisco, I had recurring dreams set in exactly this part of Seattle. Nothing much happened in the dreams; I simply drove along this stretch of Rainier Avenue, same as I’d driven it frequently when I lived half a mile from here in my 20s. What’s weird is, I remember those dreams very vividly, even today, maybe more vividly than I remember actually living in Rainier Valley.
There’s a branch of Bank of America, with its stone facade out front. It’s where our church had its bank account, when I was a boy. My dad was an “elder” of the church, and made deposits there, through the drop-box outside. Sometimes he’d let me — and only me, none of my many brothers and sisters — accompany him, and we’d stop for doughnuts at a nearby Winchell’s that isn’t there any more. But 60 years later the bank is still there, and completely unchanged.
Next, something called Jazz Night School, which intrigued me. Is it for music classes, or is it a nightclub, maybe both? Googling it later, it’s entirely a school, but maybe they put on shows occasionally? And indeed they do. The next one is on November 2. Tickets: $150, so I’ll never be there.
Then the bus rolled past the church. Oy, the church — 18 years of Sunday School, boring sermons, and mid-week youth club. I began drifting away in my late teens and was gone by my early 20s.
Everyone else in my family — literally, each and all of my brothers and sisters, and my parents — switched to different churches during my years away from Seattle, 1993-2022. “It’s such a long drive,” and, “There’s a nice church close to our new suburban home.” Translation: The neighborhood around the church is so black, so scary.
But the church is still there, and instead of 99% white it’s multicultural, and thriving, with sermons in three languages every Sunday.
A few blocks to the west is the house where Bruno, my best childhood friend, lived. Our families went to the same church, and many, many times I went home with Bruno after Sunday morning services, or he went home with me, to spend the afternoon together until we returned for Sunday evening services.
Here’s Lucky One Food, which was a 7-Eleven 50 years ago, and seems unchanged except for different colors of exterior paint. It’s the only place I’ve ever had a Slurpee™, because even as a kid, Slurpees seemed weird and too sticky-sweet. Bruno loved ’em, though. When I was afternooning or overnighting at his place, we often got Slurpees, and if someone else is buying, sure, I’ll inhale a sloppy Slurpee.
Royal Detail Shop & Cafe looks marvelous, out the window. You drive up, let them clean the interior of your car, and they’re also a Somali cafe where you can get lunch while they work.
At Othello Street, the #50 bus crosses Rainier Ave. That’s good to know, because the #50 goes (relatively) straight between Rainier Ave and West Seattle, where I live. If I want to come back and eat at Royal Detail & Cafe, and maybe I do, the #50 would be a much quicker ride than going downtown and then taking the #7.
Next nostalgia, the bus rolled past a particular apartment building I shan’t name, which like a lot of this ride seems utterly unchanged from the 1970s. My older sister Katrina lived at that building, and when I was a teenager, the very concept wowed me. She’d moved out! She had her own place! She’d bought her own plates and TV and a couch! She was all grown up — and in only a few more years I could move out, too!
Further south was an apartment building where Lilly lived. My dad sometimes gave her a ride home with our family, after church. Ah, Lilly… a cute, nice, smart girl who I long had a crush on, but never had the courage to confess it or ask her out. The smallish apartment building where she and her family lived is gone, replaced by a biggish apartment building. And what, I wonder, became of Lilly?
Rainier Avenue @ Cloverdale Street: the corner where restaurants die. All through my wonder years, as my dad drove us down this stretch of Rainier Ave to church twice every Sunday and on Wednesday nights, we’d pass this intersection and there’d be a new restaurant. A few months later it would be out of business, and a few months after that it would be a different restaurant in the same building. Must’ve seen a dozen restaurants go out of business in that building, at that intersection. Now it’s behind another cyclone fence. Coming soon: a new restaurant.
Past Henderson Street, there’s the ex-Herfy’s where I often hung out with a few friends during my high school years. Herfy’s was a local fast-food chain, long gone, but the building is still there. From the sign you can see that most recently it was a Vietnamese restaurant, but now it’s — guess what? — closed and padlocked, cloaked in cyclone fencing.
In a vanished strip mall behind the Herfy’s, there was once a steak house, where Dad sometimes took the family after church. Gone. Where Rainier Ave twists to the west, was the insurance agent who sold Dad coverage for home and auto and life. Also gone. But look, there’s another shitty McDonald’s.
My #7 bus was marked ‘Prentice Street’, so we veered off Rainier at 57th Avenue, climbed up a hill and meandered into what looks like suburbia, but is actually still part of the city. Average incomes and real estate values are stratospheric, though, and along a few of the smaller streets there’s a brief but breathtaking view of Lake Washington. The route reaches its apex at Prentice Street, but it doesn’t lay over, it simply goes back onto 57th Avenue, and then Rainier Avenue, now headed northbound.
Which is where the route gets confusing. My #7 had started as a southbound #7 from downtown, but became a northbound #7, on the same section of Rainier Ave where it had been going south five minutes earlier. It goes north as far as Henderson Street, which is the official but nonsensical end of the line. If you’ve caught a northbound #7 on its ‘Prentice Street’ run, you’ll have to get off at Henderson Street and transfer to a different #7 northbound.
And it gets even weirder. After idling for 10 or 15 minutes at Henderson Street, the northbound #7 bus starts its route by going about five blocks west on Henderson, five blocks south on Seward Park Blvd, and then ten blocks north on Rainier Avenue again, until the bus is back at Henderson Street, where it started. Instead of turning east onto Henderson, this time it continues north on Rainier, unless it’s the ‘Prentice Street’ run, which does turn onto Henderson, the end of its line.
Confused? Exactly. Now imagine living on the eastern edge of Henderson Street, or along Seward Park Blvd, or any of Rainier Ave’s northbound stops south of Henderson Street — you’ll have to wait through a layover on Henderson to get home. And you can’t wait in your seat on the bus, because it’s the driver’s break time, so all passengers must leave the bus, stand and wait on the sidewalk.
It’s gotta be a frustration for anyone unlucky enough to live along Seward Park Blvd, or that ten-block stretch of Rainier Ave. Why not have the buses lay over at the intersection of Seward Park and Rainier? That’s the southern tip of the non-Prentice line.
The #7 is electric, drawing power from overhead wires strung all along the route, which means it’s ‘green’, but trolley technology sucks, and makes for a herky-jerky ride.
The route runs often — every ten minutes or so weekdays, and even more frequently during rush hour — but not often enough. There are frequently no seats, and I stood part of the way both coming and going.
There are transit-only lanes for some parts of Rainier Ave, for other parts there are not. Rainier is a very busy arterial, and you could find yourself on a bus that’s moving slower than people walking on the sidewalk. That’s what happened on my return ride, where it took us about twenty minutes to travel a particular three-block stretch where there ought to be a transit lane, but isn’t.
Summing up, it’s a stupid route at the end, but for its scenery and usefulness in taking you where you might want to go, the #7 is a smashing success. If you’re visiting the city and getting around on a day pass, there are dozens of interesting spots to step off and see the real Seattle. And if you grew up on the city’s south side, the #7 is a time machine on ten wheels.
10/25/2024
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