On many routes in any city, there are fewer riders toward the end of a line, so service is truncated, and only every second, or every third bus goes all the way to the route’s terminus. That’s ordinary, in planning bus routes. But Seattle’s #4 route isn’t ordinary. I’ve ridden public transit in four different cities where I’ve lived, and never seen a route do what this route does.
This route never runs from one end of the line to the other, except on weekends. The map shows the #4 running from the very white, very well-off northernmost side of Queen Anne Hill, to the poorest, blackest part of the south-side Atlantic neighborhood, but Monday-Friday there’s never a bus that makes that trip.
Having studied the map and schedule and ridden the route, racism is the only explanation I can come up with. It’s a route designed to keep black and white apart. Tell me I’m mistaken, please.
Coming from the swanky north, the #4 ends two blocks from largely-black Garfield High School. Oh, you wanted to go further south, past the school, onward to the tough turf of Walker Street and Rainier Avenue? Step off the #4 bus, and wait half an hour for the next #4 bus.
From the slummy south, the #4 goes as far north as Belltown, just beyond the city’s central business district. Everybody off, please. Oh, you wanted to go farther north, to Queen Anne, or beyond? Step off the #4 bus, and wait for another #4 bus in fifteen minutes. You don’t mind standing with the bums in Belltown for a while, do you?
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For my southbound trip on the #4, I boarded a southbound bus at 3rd & James Street, downtown, letting two #4s go past without me, since they’d only be going part of the way.
While waiting, an unseen woman around the corner wailed over a loudspeaker, sort of singing a song, but without lyrics or a tune. Basically, she was doing an impression of a theremin, moaning into a microphone. It was unpleasant, but probably ‘art’, and during my twenty-minute wait it never stopped. OMG, is this amplified ‘art/music’ played all day, every day? If so, wouldn’t there be a flurry of suicides in the area?
The bus climbs several blocks up James Street, past the heart of Seattle’s jail-industrial complex — on your left, City Hall, the municipal court, and All-City Bail Bonds; and on your right, the sheriff’s office, county administration, and county jail. Then we roll under the freeway, which is an even bleaker block.
After that, we’re on First Hill, where things get less Orwellian. It’s mostly apartments and the huge Harborview Hospital complex, where a 30-something white woman boarded the bus, talking loudly about her soap opera life for the next two miles — cancer and an abortion figured heavily in her monologue, along with a deadbeat brother-in-law, a broken-down car, and a grandmother fading into dementia. She was talking into a cell phone, but I’m not certain there was any connection, and none of her stories led anywhere except blah, blah, blah. As in, “Grandma can’t remember her dog’s name or where she lives and blah, blah, blah.”
Always there are kooky people on the bus, any bus, which makes it entertainment as much as transportation. At least on this ride nobody was openly smoking fentanyl or acting like a danger to themselves or others.
Isn’t it odd that you can look at a restaurant’s exterior and just sorta know whether you could afford to eat there and whether you’d want to? The bus rolled past Zobel, and I knew the food would be good and the price would be right. Jotted it in my notebook, to come back another day.
Passing 21st Avenue, that’s where I had to step off the bus when I first rode the #4 a few months ago. I hadn’t expected it then, hadn’t studied the schedule enough to notice the black/white demarcation point, and it blew up my whole trip. Now I at least understand the route’s dividing line, and was on the ‘proper’ bus all the way to Walker Street.
Across from the high school is Ezell’s Famous, a local chicken chain. Ate at their West Seattle location once, and it was bad. This is their original restaurant, though. Ought to give them a second chance, and I will, but not today.
Quincy Jones died a few weeks ago. He went to Garfield, class of 1950, played cornet and trumpet in the pep band, and the school’s music hall is named for him. As the bus rolled past Garfield and the Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center, I hummed “Ease on Down the Road” in his honor. I could hardly hear myself humming, though, because the blah, blah, blah lady was still talking and loudly, about her deadbeat brother-in-law, and blah, blah, blah.
Hey, there’s an otherwise boring apartment building, but it’s called Argonaut House. How cool is that, especially if someone named Jason lives there?
The route goes on, passing Sam Smith Park, which intrigued me enough that I jotted the name in my notebook. Back in the 1960s, Smith was the first African-American on Seattle’s City Council, and he was always running for mayor, but never won that job. I was just a kid, but Smith’s grumpy persistence caught my attention from the headlines, and I always liked the guy. Now he’s dead, but he’s a city park — and he’s a city park built on a lidded stretch of Intestate-90. (I couldn’t tell by looking at it as we rolled past, but Google told me later.)
Twisting down some narrow streets, the bus finally comes to Walker Street, the end of the line, and it’s a pit of a neighborhood. The last few passengers deboarded, me among them, and also the blah blah blah lady, still talking on her phone.
“Hey lady!” I called out, but she didn’t stop or look. I gave her the punchline anyway — “Blah, blah, blah!”
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Then I walked a few blocks west to Rainier Ave, to wait for the same #4 bus on its northward run. A homeless encampment blocked the sidewalk for about a third of the way, so I walked on Walker Street, and had an interesting conversation with a 50-something black guy, who’d gotten off the same bus and was making the same walk on the same street.
He said he’d reported the sidewalk encampment to the city, three times, but it’s been months and the city has done nothing.
I said I was the bleedingest bleeding heart liberal you’ve ever seen, but it’s important that sidewalks be available for walking, and sometimes for wheelchairs.
He said the city won’t do anything until someone like us, forced to walk in the street, gets hit by a car and sues.
I said yeah, but I wasn’t volunteering for that.
He laughed at my lame joke, then stepped into Nguyen Pharmacy, and I was alone again, now at Rainier & Walker, waiting for my bus.
Behind the sidewalk was a tall fence, such a normal sight I didn’t even see it. After a few minutes and to my surprise, a man pushed at a tarp that was draped over a segment in the fence, giving him room to pass through a small gap between fence segments. If the tarp-pushing man hadn’t passed right in front of me, I never would’ve noticed the largest shantytown I’ve yet seen in person.
He walked down an earthen pathway that was mostly covered with old cardboard and some plywood, for better footing through the mud. The trail led to a village of tents, a dozen or more of them. From the trail’s descent, my guess is that the tents were in the basement of a large but long-since demolished building.
It was another twenty minutes until my bus came, and in that time several people walked down to the encampment, and a few came up, including a 30-something white woman wearing a gray parka. It had rained that morning, and everything was muddy, but not her. She looked immaculate, like she was on her way to an office job. Probably, she was.
I wondered if they have running water in that shantytown, but I’m not the investigative journalist who might push the tarp aside, and walk down to poke around and ask questions. People deserve their privacy, especially people who don’t have much of it, so I said “Good afternoon, ma’am” to the parka lady, but stowed my curiosity.
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Then the #4 northbound came, and soon enough it took us to the hell that is Seattle’s 3rd Avenue. As we got there, passing where I’d boarded a southbound #4 an hour earlier, I again heard the amplified sound of that unseen woman moaning like a theremin. Does she wail like this all day, every day, into a microphone? Why hasn’t anyone shot her?
3rd Avenue is, of course, block after block of lost souls on the sidewalks, and it’s still pretty bad a mile later as then bus enters Belltown. And that’s the end of the line, if you started on the south side, so everybody got off, to wait for the next #4 that would actually go to the northbound end of the line.
The penalty for being south and wanting to go north is to stand with the tuberculosis tribe, as they wait their turn to enter some fortified public health facility at 3rd & Virginia. A beefy security guard glared at everyone. Signs reminded visitors that no guns are allowed.
After only 18 minutes in the frigid wintry squalor, there came the next #4, which would take us north. It was standing room only, and I stood for the next twenty blocks.
The bus goes under the Monorail, then rolls along 5th Avenue, past where there used to be a McDonald’s I worked at in my 20s. That McD is where I met April, first love of my life. It’s where I met the cop who worked security there, and was later killed “in the line of duty.” Can’t believe I’ve never written about that, but Googling this site tells me I haven’t, so maybe I will.
The McDonald’s is long gone, and instead there’s a big brown box building, of the modern, soulless sort. Even more soulless than a McDonald’s. No idea what the new building is, and also, I don’t care.
On your left is the Museum of Pop Culture, which is an almost frightfully ugly building. On your right, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Faster, driver, please, rush me away from the poseurs and platitudes.
After crossing Mercer Street, the bus turns from 5th onto Valley Street, a twist in the route I hadn’t expected. It brings us about a block from an apartment where I lived 40 years ago. Google Maps told me later that the apartment is still there, but the bus turns north onto Taylor Street, and the old apartment never came into view.
Freakily, despite having lived only a block away, there was nothing, not one building, that was familiar. If not for the street signs, I wouldn’t have known these were streets I’d walked thousands of times.
The rest of the way, it’s all very fancy houses and apartment buildings. Some of the apartments have been nestled into the steep sides of Queen Anne Hill, and are only accessible by long stairways or longer walkways, far from the streets.
As we approach an intersection, a middle-aged woman is walking down the hill toward the bus stop, and the driver points at her, asking in bus-mime language, Are you hoping to catch this bus? She shakes her head no, but smiles and waves at the driver. Obviously, she often rides this line, and they sorta know each other.
Near 3rd & Boston, there’s a small cluster of houses so tiny, so simple, they look like working stiffs could live there — very out of place on the hill.
Then the driver had to suddenly swerve, as some brainless middle-aged white woman opened her SUV’s driver’s door right at the bus’s bumper. I was seated up front, and I’d estimate we missed clipping her door off by about two inches.
At 1st & Boston, there’s a small cluster of small businesses, the first interruption in what’s otherwise been all-housing since the bottom of the hill. Just a few snooty-looking restaurants, but Blue Highway Games looks interesting — it’s a board game shop. “Unplug and reconnect,” says the sign.
Down the street is something called B & Z Family Mexican Restaurant, which looks like a nice enough place.
Both businesses are on Queen Anne Avenue, but this isn’t the busy, commercial Queen Anne everyone in Seattle knows; we’re on the other side of the hill, and this is a quiet, one-lane stretch that’s mostly residential.
The bus turns, and OMG, it’s Five Corners Hardware. I bought a hammer and some screws there, circa 1982, when I lived on top of this big ol’ hill. Founded 1940, says the sign on the building. In the 1950s my dad and mom met and married when they were both attending Seattle Pacific then-College, now-University, a mile down the street, so they probably bought a hammer at Five Corners, too.
That’s the kind of silly random memory that convinced me to move back to Seattle, where I grew up…
Continuing down the steep, north side of Queen Anne Hill, there’s a soccer field at Fulton Street, and I’m 75% certain that’s where I watched a long-ago ladyfriend play an adult-league game. Soccer is kind of boring, unless your girlfriend is playing. She must’ve been some sort of captain of the team, cuz I can still hear her shouting out to the other players what they should be doing next.
Finally we reached the bottom of Queen Anne, on Nickerson Street, at Seattle Pacific U, a block from the Lake Washington Ship Canal.
Two blocks from here was an old friend’s apartment, where we played a lot of chess and ate a lot of hamburgers, and then he died. His building was torn down decades ago.
And so it goes. It’s not just buses that have an end of the line.
11/22/2024
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