The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  As much as any other part of the Central Area, the East Madison neighborhood has rapidly whitened. One night I meet Andrew Taylor in front of his festively red, large Craftsman-style house a few blocks north of Madison Street. Taylor, who is white, moved in with his family in 1983 and has been active in the neighborhood since—first in community groups and now also by maintaining a local blog. For Taylor, a short, trim biochemist who wears chunky glasses and has a head of long, unkempt sandy-gray brown hair, the initial attractions of the area were the lower prices and the fact that he could bike to his workplace at a cancer research center in the nearby Capitol Hill neighborhood. As we walk the blocks toward Madison, Taylor outlines the race and class shifts that have happened over the past twenty-five years.

  When his family first arrived, Taylor says, the neighborhood was predominantly black—he remembers African-American kids coming over to use the swing set in his backyard; others played football on the triangular patch of grass in front of his house. The next-door neighbors ran a daycare out of their house. Though low-income, he says, “there was a feeling that things were going to improve.” Within a few years, though, rock cocaine arrived. Down the street, a home became a crack house, with people coming and going day and night. After a shooting, the police shut it down, but the drug traffic spilled over to the streets as the East Madison area became one of the city’s quick stops for crack. A corner near Taylor’s house was soon occupied with teenage kids who hung around the pay phone. “The bushes next to them were overgrown, they were great for hiding in, doing drug deals, exchanging drugs for sex,” Taylor says.

  In response, the community gathered to discuss what to do. “I went along to the first couple meetings, and if you could have captured that energy, it was just astounding. A cross section of the neighborhood—young, old, black, white—everybody was pissed off at the drug dealers,” Taylor says. After a few meetings, a community group was formed and a strange thing happened: “We got organized, did things the ‘white’ sort of way of having meetings and committees, and the black people went away and we never saw them again.” When I ask Taylor why, he says, “I don’t know to this day. We would reach out to them, we would tell them we were having meetings, we would leave flyers.”

  When I speak with Adrienne Bailey, an African American who grew up in the neighborhood after her parents bought a house there in the 1940s, she tells me the reasons for the lack of black interest were simple. For one, she says, there were cultural differences in communication, and older black people at the meetings felt they were not shown respect. Then there was the fact that though everybody saw the drug dealing as a problem, for the white people—many of them newcomers—it came down to an issue of nuisance and property values. The black residents had conflicting feelings—they knew the kids out on the street as cousins, brothers, and sons. When they heard whites speak about them as if they were “animals,” Bailey says, it hit a nerve. While the solution to the white people in the neighborhood was generally to involve the police, most blacks were unwilling to see the teenagers sent to jail for what they saw as a problem related directly to a lack of jobs, education, and opportunity.

  The community association that did form immediately got to work, eventually getting the pay phone removed and successfully goading the city to trim the trees and bushes. They convinced the Seattle police to park a “mobile control center”—basically a big truck with SEATTLE POLICE DEPARTMENT emblazoned on the side—in the neighborhood. What developed, Taylor tells me, was a zero-sum game with the community association that had started at Twenty-third and Union, the corner six blocks down where JT and Tyrell hung out. “Essentially it was Ping-Pong,” he says. “When we complained, we’d get more police emphasis, and the trade moved down to Twenty-third and Union. They’d get more emphasis, it would move back to us.”

  The changes to the neighborhood accelerated in the mid-1990s as the crack era ended and the tech and property frenzies began. In 1993, Norm Rice, Seattle’s African-American mayor, announced his vision for “urban villages.” The idea was to encourage “managed” growth and density in Seattle by creating a number of zones within which people would live within easy walking distance of daily needs such as grocery stores. The East Madison area was one designated hub within the grand scheme, with the business strip along Madison Street planned to serve the needs of the “village.” As the details were hammered out in community meetings and the city council over the next few years, East Madison was rezoned so that lots with single-family homes could be redeveloped into “denser,” multifamily residences. Commercial buildings along Madison, which had been low-slung at one or two stories, were allowed to go up to sixty-five feet—about six stories.

  The practical outcome was a revolution in architectural style. As the tech economy heated up, the East Madison area—just ten minutes by bus to downtown and an easy drive over to the eastern suburbs where Microsoft is headquartered—became in demand. Developers realized that they could buy the homes on the block—many owned by older African Americans—for about $300,000, knock them down, and replace them with skinny, four-unit town houses. Each apartment in a town house could then be sold for about the price the developer had paid for the property. Taylor and I view the results as we walk down a block on Twenty-first Street just around the corner from his house. Only a few old bungalows and Craftsman-style homes remain, dwarfed by duplexes and two-story, flat-fronted gray and white town houses. I grab a FOR SALE flyer from a box. It advertises a three-bedroom town house unit with red-oak floors, a granite-faced gas fireplace, and a kitchen that will “entice a chef.” The asking price is $470,000.

  We continue down until we hit Madison. Across the street, where the Savoy Ballroom used to stand, a mammoth luxury apartment complex fills the whole block, with a full-size Safeway occupying the ground floor. Kitty-corner to that building sits an empty lot dotted with grass and patches of asphalt. For years it was home to a small grocery store and a nightclub called Deano’s. At night the bar attracted a younger African-American clientele, including JT, who sometimes stopped by to have a drink. The streets outside were often populated with crack dealers and users—generally only the most desperate, as the Seattle police subjected the area to continuous scrutiny. The local community association—with Andrew Taylor as the most vocal proponent—hounded the city to do something about the drug traffic, which they saw as directly tied to the club. After years of stasis, economics took care of the problem—in 2008, right before the Seattle property market crashed, a local developer bought the land from its African-American owner for $7.5 million. The developer plans to build a $60 million apartment and retail complex at the location. The people who will live there are expected to work in places such as the Amazon.com headquarters being built a few miles away, which is in the heart of an old light-industrial neighborhood that Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has redeveloped with a vision of filling it with biotech firms.

  In the midst of all the redevelopment sits a throwback to an earlier time, the beauty shop owned by DeCharlene Williams, a one-story brick building with yellow trim, fronted by a five-foot-high, gated iron fence. Pots filled with plastic flowers are arranged in front of three large windows, which feature framed photos of black women wearing fashions that would have been in style when our team was on the court in 1986. A poster says CONFIDENCE IS ATTITUDE. An old-fashioned striped barber pole hangs from the corner of the building.

  One morning I stop by to speak with Williams, a short, tough, and outspoken woman with a taste for the flamboyant, as evidenced by her blond wig. Born in Texas in the 1940s, Williams moved at age four with her mother to Portland, Oregon, where her mom found a job in a shipyard. Williams started working in the fields picking beans and strawberries at age ten, married at age fifteen—she lied about her age—and moved to Seattle with her new husband. She studied business at a vocational school and soon was working several jobs—serving cocktails to the city’s white elite at the Seattle Tennis Club, assisting in special education class
rooms, and cutting hair. She bought her shop in 1968 and remembers that she got the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed as she was moving in. Staying in business hasn’t been easy—it’s included running off drug dealers, thieves, and corrupt cops looking for kickbacks. “I didn’t let them scare me,” Williams tells me. “I got a .38 and a .22 and a derringer, and kept them with me, and I stayed out there and tried to help others. You’ve got to stand up and let them know.”

  The gentrification of the Central Area presents a different problem. Many Central Area black-owned businesses have shuttered as their customer base has left. Those that have remained have adjusted to serve the more affluent newcomers, or, like Williams’s, have clients who are willing to drive in from the suburbs. The developer who owns the empty lot up the street has approached Williams about buying her out—he tells me he thinks it would be a great place for a restaurant—but she bristles when I ask her if she’s considering it. “This is prime property here,” she says. “I’ll go down with it.” But when I ask how she sees the future of the neighborhood, Williams tells me, “In twenty years, it’s going to be all high-rise places, I would imagine. And whoever can afford to stay. Race is not what it is anymore. It’s called money. And so race is money now. If you got money to stay in a place, you can stay.”

  The implications of gentrification on what was once a geographically cohesive black community can be glimpsed on Sundays. One day, when I attend Mount Zion Church, the large, gravel parking lot is perhaps a quarter full. Inside, a few hundred people sway to the gospel choir. Samuel McKinney, now pastor emeritus, sits in a pew next to his wife. The congregation, almost all black, is well dressed. The average age looks to be about sixty.

  At the same time, twenty miles to the southeast, between the towns of Renton and Kent, the Reverend Leslie Braxton preaches to a younger flock at the New Beginnings Christian Fellowship. In 1999, Braxton, who is African American, had become pastor of Mount Zion after McKinney’s retirement. Six years later, members of the church began a drive to have him removed; when they listed their complaints, they objected to everything from his sermons to his leadership style. Braxton left and founded New Beginnings, taking several hundred of Mount Zion’s members with him. Striking out in a different direction, Braxton has embraced the racial mix of the new suburbs, hiring a white executive pastor—the person who runs the church’s daily operations—and making a special effort to reach out to mixed-race couples as well as the area’s growing Hispanic and Asian populations. The church, as he sees it, has to embrace the new reality—it can no longer afford to be an exclusively black institution in what is becoming an increasingly jumbled culture.

  The two churches straddle a generational fault line: on one side, an older black population that commutes back to the Central Area to maintain its tradition; on the other, a younger one moving on to a future in the suburbs that now surround a wealthier, more exclusive city. Looking at it over the course of decades, the move to Seattle’s southern suburbs is another step in the still-unfinished black migration from the South, with the grandchildren of African Americans who came up in the 1950s and 1960s exiting the city, pushed by economic factors as their elders once were from places such as Louisiana and Mississippi.

  When white people talk about the gentrification of the Central Area, a common refrain is, “It’s not race, it’s economics.” “People wanted to sell and move to the ’burbs,” the developer seeking to buy DeCharlene Williams’s property tells me. If anything, he says, Williams just “hates” that white people are moving in. “A lot of black people think there’s a conspiracy to freeze people out,” he says. “That might have been the case thirty years ago. If anything, it’s the opposite now.”

  Of course, for many black people, thirty years is not that long ago. They remember when the Central Area was left to fester—black homeowners were unable to get loans, their children had to attend substandard schools, and racial discrimination in employment was open and obvious. Those factors created the depressed real estate prices in the Central Area that developers, now that the neighborhood is seen as a desirable place to live, have capitalized on. Given this, it’s easy to see why a woman like DeCharlene Williams, who has fought her whole life to make a place for herself, isn’t going to easily roll over and sell out.

  If there’s a tragedy to it, it’s that African Americans happened to be sitting on an inadvertently created gold mine—the Central Area—that will now only increase in value. In essence, individual African Americans took one-time payouts to sell their property and moved out. The real value went to the people who bought the land, knocked down the old houses, and built town houses and luxury apartments in their stead. If anything, the people who suffered discrimination for so long should have had a way to pool their resources and somehow profit from the redevelopment. When taxes and the other costs of moving to the southern suburbs are figured in, the reality is that, for the people who sold, very little lasting wealth was created.

  Instead, the black community now maintains a mostly emotional connection to the Central Area. When I ask the Reverend Samuel McKinney what the dispersal from the neighborhood means for African-American identity, he responds with a query of his own: “The question is, can we have community without proximity?”

  This comes home to me one day when JT and I head to a Starbucks at Twenty-third and Jackson, the area that was the epicenter of the city’s rowdy jazz and speakeasy scene from the 1920s to the 1950s, a past alluded to by black-and-white photos hung on the walls. JT’s mom grew up nearby in the Yesler Terrace housing projects after her family came up from Louisiana, and JT spent his first few years there as well. The coffee shop, at the southern end of the Central Area, remains a gathering place for African Americans—many drive up from the South End to meet friends there or just to hang out. During the twenty minutes we sit at a table, a number of black people—ranging from teenage to elderly—either wave to JT or come up and say hello. Of course, the African Americans who make it up to Starbucks represent a small percentage of those who either maintain a toehold in the Central Area, or have cars and the time to drive up.

  JT tells me that many more people he knows now live in the suburbs south of Seattle, places such as Renton, Kent, Des Moines, and Federal Way, all the way to Tacoma, thirty miles down Interstate 5, working in service jobs such as clerking at Wal-Mart and loading luggage at the airport, if they have work at all. They are not coming up to the Starbucks. When JT thinks about the loss of the Central Area he grew up in, he says, he hurts. “Your family, friends, everyone used to be right around the corner. Now you don’t see anyone anymore,” he says. “Your roots are gone, you know? It feels like you’ve lost your life.”

  Saved

  Damian Joseph’s church, the Greater Glory Church of God in Christ, is in South Seattle, on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Arriving from the north, you pass a car-repair shop, some Vietnamese and Cambodian restaurants and grocery stores, and a McDonald’s. The recent opening of a light-rail line along MLK has helped to kick-start gentrification—one of the newest additions to the neighborhood is a drive-through Starbucks. The church’s beige steeple rises over a U-Haul lot. A cyclone fence topped with razor wire separates the church’s property from the trucks and trailers next door.

  Sunday services start at eleven thirty. As you enter through the glass doors, a male usher in a black suit hands you a program. Two rows of electric chandeliers cast a bright, almost harsh light. About 150 people are spaced out in fifteen rows of blue-upholstered pews divided by four isles. Most people wear black or navy suits or dresses. A few are in jeans, and one woman has on a black satin jacket with the words GOODWRENCH SERVICE PLUS embroidered on the back. Mothers hold their babies, and kids wander in the aisles. Everyone is black.

  The music starts within a few minutes. Up on the low platform behind the wood-trimmed glass altar, the two men and three women in the choir begin a call and response.

  “Woke up this morning with my mind,” the choir sings
. “STAYED ON JESUS,” responds the congregation.

  “Singin’ and prayin’ with my mind”…“STAYED ON JESUS.”

  “Hallelu … Hallelu … HalleluYAH!” shout the chorus and the congregation together.

  The choir sings into microphones amplified through speakers hung on the walls. A drummer and an organist accompany the singers. In the pews, people clap, stomp their feet, and sing. A woman shakes a tambourine. The noise reverberates and seems to rattle the building at its foundations.

  Damian, a minister in the church, stands on the stage, in front of the choir, in a black suit, white shirt, and red bow tie. He holds his arms above his head, his hands splayed, mouth open in song. Occasionally he fires off a volley of claps that sound like crisp rifle shots and then raises his fists, pumping them in the air.

  Before long, Pastor Sam Townsend enters. A trim man in his late fifties, with high-and-tight hair and a brushy mustache, he wears black vestments with gold trim and has a white towel draped over his left shoulder. Townsend paces the floor in front of the congregation, shooting phrases into the wireless microphone in his right hand.