A Micro-Geography of the 1960S and 1970S

Madrona: A Micro-Geography of the 1960s and 1970s Through memory, detailed mappings, and archival research, the author explores the topographical and social fabric of the racially bifurcated neighborhood of Madrona, Seattle in the 1960s and 1970s. By Brett Bodemer 2021 For everyone who was there. Madrona: A Micro-Geography of the 1960s and 1970s Part I Introduction 3 The House at 425 35th Avenue 5 The House as Interpersonal Space 10 Topography is Fate: 35th Avenue and Parts East 12 Topography is Fate: 34th Avenue and Parts West 24 My Personal Neighborhood Expands: Madrona School 33 The Neighborhood as Crumpled Handkerchief 66 My Personal Neighborhood Contracts 87 Epilog 105 Epilog’s Epilog and Disclaimer 108 Part II Methodology, AKA How I Wrote This 109 Bibliography 127 View full licensing and publication information by clicking here. Introduction | 3 Part I Introduction Neighborhood is a seemingly simple word. We all use it without a second thought and usually believe ourselves to be understood. Yet its easiness deceives us as to how com- plicated and slippery it really is. Is it a set of streets? How big then, or how small? A group of people? Which people? Is it simply an administrative area bounded on a map by a municipality? And what about change over time? The complexity and slipperiness of the term neighborhood remain conveniently out of view unless something prods us to step back and try to pin it down. So in my case, what has prodded me to step back and think about the word? It was a troubling email recalling children and events in a school and a neighborhood decades ago. Don’t get me wrong — I was delighted to receive the email, which was a total surprise, from one of my best friends in the earliest years of grade school and who now lived on the opposite side of the country. I was pleased that Garrett remembered me and that he did so for the same reasons that I remembered him: we had boundlessly great times at recesses and lunch, running fast, swinging on bars, digging tunnels in sand, even rambunctiously climbing the trees just outside the playground’s chain-link fence. I remember clearly how after our first-grade trip to the zoo we had vowed to sneak back in one night and live on Monkey Island forever. He was the one friend who walked home with me some Tuesdays for lunch, and in his email he could even list what we ate on those days: split pea soup, tuna fish sandwiches, and a small salad consisting of cottage cheese nested on shredded lettuce and topped with peach halves. But in the email, I was also taken aback to learn that playing with me in those days was the highlight of his life — we always had so much fun, and I was such fun to be around — but that in high school, he had started hanging out with the wrong people and even wound up in jail. Although, he had since gotten all straightened out and raised a family and now had grandchildren. Most troubling in his email was something that I had totally forgotten about: the perpetual public rivalry to be the smartest kid in the class. He wrote of how he had always tried to keep up with me and the equally vocal girl who aspired to be the smartest kid in class, but that he always came up short, unable to compete. This brought back to my mind the time I visited his house on 23rd Avenue, and I was so puzzled to see only one small book- case in the corner of the living room, with just a handful of books. The other two contenders for the smartest kid in class were both the children of professors, and his house looked nothing like ours; in fact, it seemed from the email that the shape of his life had really looked nothing like ours. Introduction | 4 His email spawned a gnawing cognitive dissonance. The same neighborhood, the same school, why such disparate outcomes? As the dissonance kept coming back like recurring but indeterminate tooth pain, I could tell that it was more than just the divergence of his path and my path that was clamoring for my attention. I found myself revisiting the places and events of my childhood. The more I concentrated on details of where I grew up and how, who I played with and when, where I felt safe and where I didn’t, the more I realized that addressing the dissonance lay in finding as many ways to portray my experience in my neighborhood as I could: not just through the rehearsal of familiar recollections, but through creating maps and spreadsheets that plotted friends by attributes such as race, gender and year, plotting violence by type, year and space, tracing preferred routes of transit, on foot, bike and bus, drawing affective maps with different colors for different emotions, even visualizing the topography of the neighborhood stripped of all housing, trees and bushes. And taking more steps to enrich and further prod my experience of the neighborhood through external descriptions, ranging from Census Bureau data to city and church reports, personal accounts, community newsletters, and even PTA memorabilia. So what neighborhood am I talking about, specifically? Madrona, in Seattle, a neighborhood that lies somewhat south of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, somewhat north of the first floating bridge across Lake Washington, about three miles from downtown Seattle and Elliot Bay, with its eastern edge determined by Lake Washington, and its western edge lying somewhere near 23rd Avenue. That is a really loose definition, but as we will see, there can easily be a host of definitions. Not all will see the same things. These days, for instance, when I tell people that I grew up in Madrona, they often smile admiringly, nod in approval, and sometimes even add a softly spoken, “Nice!” They are thinking about a neighborhood with historic ambience exuded by flourishing trees, impeccable land- scaping, and large, hundred-year-old houses in perfect order, each of which sells for at least seven figures. I refrain from telling them in the midst of their reveries that the Madrona they are picturing is not at all the Madrona I grew up in during the 1960s and 1970s. So, let me now say what the Madrona I grew up in was like. The House at 425 35th Avenue | 5 ⋙⌂⋘ The House at 425 35th Avenue In 1961, my family moved from Wedgewood in the north end of Seattle and bought a larger, two-story house. It lay on 35th Avenue on a stub of a block between James Street and the bluff where 35th reached a dead end. I was a few months shy of two years old at the time. Following a nested model for describing my experience, I will start with my room as the smallest meaningful spa- tial unit. And when I say small, I mean small. I lived in this room for the better part of fifteen years and friends and family often joked about the room’s size. Elegant molding trimmed the ceiling, the two narrow windows, and both the entry and closet door. A broader, less intricate molding coursed just above the fir floor, which, though Author’s “lived” Madrona Neighborhood. faded and even worn in spots, still harbored a gentle red-brown hue from its original coats of stain. The room’s smallness was due in part to other features that assured its privacy within the house. A small entry hall from the door paralleled the closet, both serving as a buffer and shrinking the room to an eight-by-eight-foot square. A large gap to accommodate an interior chimney muffled all sound from the bedroom next to mine. And my room lay on the second floor the farthest removed from my parents’ room. Such arrangements make more sense once The House at 425 35th Avenue | 6 you know (and as I only recently learned) that my oh so small room was in fact the maid’s room.1 Maid’s room or not, it was set at the very back of the house, and its two narrow windows faced west to 34th and north to James. For much of the year, I could see the thick canopy of maple leaves and sparser foliage of fruit trees, as well as glimpses of neighbors’ houses and mundane backyard trappings such as clotheslines and old stacked lumber. In winter, though, when the maples and fruit trees were mere skeletons, from the north window I could see the corner of 34th and James, while from the west window, through a small lot dotted with gnarled fruit trees, I could see all the way through to the houses th Personal Photo of 425 35 Avenue, October 1972. on the other side of 34th. The west window was set directly above the peaked roof covering the garage walkway, and when I was older and more intrepid, I sometimes left the house by climbing out the window, treading carefully on the walkway roof, then transitioning to the peaked garage roof, and finally letting myself down to the ground via two fences of different heights. At an even later age, I sometimes skipped the fences and simply jumped off the garage. But this last, not too often. I still bear a whitish scar — which oddly never bled — where my two front teeth imprinted the flesh just beneath my lower lip when my chin had struck my knee with the full force of gravity.

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