The state of political journalism in Seattle has been a top story here during the last two weeks. While Mayor McGinn continues to operate with the smug incompetence that is his trademark, his top adviser Chris Bushnell has been reaping the consequences of being a felon and fraud on top of any competence or incompetence. However, you wouldn’t know this from reading the mainstream Seattle Times, at least not until Bushnell was ultimately forced to resign and the Times was forced to report it. The story and the outrage unfolded entirely doe to the reporting of Publicola, a shoestring political blog.

There are ironies in this. Publicola is run by long-time McGinn supporters. Like The Stranger, Publicola vocally supported McGinn’s mayoral bid. The Times, meanwhile, opposed McGinn in the mayoral race, though only tepidly endorsing his opponent. And now the Seattle Weekly (which got scooped and admits it) has run a story trashing the Times for sitting on the story and trying to ignore Publicola’s complete ownership of it. (Not a peep from the adult daycare environs of The Stranger, whose staff would have to hurl itself en masse into Mt. St. Helens to purge the taint of last fall’s McGinn cheerleading.)

Why the Seattle Times hushed up the emerging city hall scandal remains to be seen — perhaps as a matter of policy (and to maintain “access”) they kiss any establishment ass that offers itself. What’s clear is that Publicola has the only able and willing political reporting team in town. It helps that they are not hamstrung by a sense of institutional self-importance, and that they are more interested in a good story than in their own political leanings.

This is Bushnell, courtesy of his Facebook page. Good bye!

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Not bad — industrial scenery, smooth surface mostly, lit at night, no puddles.

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And so it begins. The utopian tunnel opponent who waffled, or pretended to, to get elected takes the first step in confusing and ultimately destroying the tunnel project to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn said this morning he wants to ask voters in May to approve a $241 million bond measure to fund replacement of the city’s sea wall.
…
The sea wall has been deteriorating for several years, creating the risk that soil could someday become unstable beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct and other waterfront structures. State plans currently call for the sea wall to be replaced in 2016.

That is, replaced in 2016 as part of the waterfront tunnel project. McGinn is hoping to uncouple the sea wall replacement from the tunnel project and lay the, uh, groundwork for his inevitable effort to, er, derail the tunnel in Olympia amid a flurry of mixed metaphors.

I am no Republican tax-hater, but I would have to oppose this measure in May. If, that is, the city council is dumb enough to approve it. Ah, but the tunnel has nothing to do with McGinn’s proposal: “During the news conference, McGinn wouldn’t answer questions about the viaduct…. ‘This is not about the viaduct except as it relates to safety,’ McGinn said.”

See also the more interesting article and comments at http://publicola.net/?p=22735.

Oh, and here come the vultures, led by Frank Chopp, D-Viaduct: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/414211_viadcut14.html.

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http://www.yelp.com/biz/richmond-city-of-richmond-4

To summarize…

The good: “If you want to be in a place where everyone drives the same cars, has the same house or looks the same then Richmond isn’t for you. But if you want to really feel like where you live has a pulse then this is the area to be.”

The bad: “One thing I have to say about growing up in Richmond is that I can definitely tell the difference between backfire and gunshot.”

The ugly: “It’s still a struggle to get so much as a pizza delivered to me.”

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The old commercial center of Richmond, California, is (to my considerable surprise) called the “Iron Triangle.” The name derives from the railroad tracks that demarcate and enclose the neighborhood. I borrow the “deadly” of the title from the breathless reporting on KRON-TV about a series of drug- and gang-related killings in 2006. The commercial center of the city died in the late sixties or early seventies, replaced by Hilltop Mall on Richmond’s northern outskirts. A rough working-class neighborhood became a blighted slum. Today idle black or Hispanic men stand around surveying vacant lots and abandoned houses. Better-appointed properties are protected with high iron fences. My earliest memories are of 231 3rd Street, between McDonald and Bissell.

Parcel Details (courtesy of http://ccmap.us/gis/, accessed today):

APN	538190012
Site Address Number	231
Site Street Name	3RD
Site Street Suffix	STREET
Site City	RICHMOND
Site Zip Code	94801
Site Zip Code Extension	3454
Supervisor District	1
Site Description	CITY OF RICHMOND LOT 18 BLK 7
Existing Land Use	other than single family land
Existing Land Use Category	Single Family
Assessed Land Value	31,985
Assessed Improvement Value	17,515
Personal Property	0
Property Statement Improvements	0
Lot Size	3,000
Underground Utility	N
Deed Reference	9057 102
Transfer Date	3/18/2009
Public Sale Price	45,000
Total Assessed Value	49,500

Built 1907.

I attended kindergarten four blocks away at Lincoln Elementary School, still in operation. At five years old, I walked to school and back every day, and I can remember being helped to memorize the 2-3-1 address in case I got lost. My grandparents rented their house from a black family named Claiborne. They moved away from there in 1964, ascending to the social and geographic height of Ralston Avenue in the east Richmond hills, where they bought a house. That wasn’t the friendliest neighborhood, either, but it was nominally middle-class. I recall hearing that before living on 3rd Street, they had rented houses on Chanslor Avenue (also in the Iron Triangle), and on Monterey Street in the Richmond Annex, near El Cerrito. “Monterey Street” came back to me as I was writing, and the map confirms it is where it should be.

I never heard the name “Iron Triangle” while growing up. It has a certain zing to it, though.

I remember the McDonald Avenue commercial corridor looking like this:

Source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/25406926. Date: 1956.

Or this:

Source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/25406875. Date: 1960.

My grandmother would take me with her as she shopped at Macy’s, J.C. Penney, Woolworth, Kress, and local stores such as the Fourth Street Market (still operating in the same building, unlike the others).

Richmond is well-documented on Wikipedia as the city that built the greatest number of World War II “Victory Ships,” and there is even an article on the Iron Triangle.

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