Georgetown Trailer Park Mall South Entrance And Jet – 950 Nebraska Street – Georgetown – Seattle, WA
In the Hotel Art posting I touched on the idea that abandoned people, the homeless in that case, often colonize abandoned places. That outcome is not absolute with the Georgetown Trailer Park Mall being a first-rate example of how that can happen.
Georgetown, one of the oldest if not the oldest neighborhood in Seattle, is literary surrounded by planes, trains, and automobiles (aka Boeing Field, BNSF and Union Pacific train yards, and the I-5 Freeway). This is a neighborhood smack in the middle of the industrial district of Seattle and right on the flight path into Boeing Field. What Georgetown lacks in the fancy direction is more than compensated for by a certain kind of toughness; sort of like a dandelion flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk.
Places like this tend to attract people who have more creativity in their souls than dollars in their pockets. These people also tend to fidget a lot and as a result of that energy they often shake things up in ways big and small. In the case of the Georgetown Trailer Park Mall some person or group of people associated a gravel alley, about half a dozen vintage recreational trailers, some collectibles and art with commercial success. That’s a leap.
Not content with victory this group is expanding into outdoor cinema and live music (The F-Holes, which I wrote about in A Random Night In My Life, will be playing there in mid May).
The guts to leap is why entrepreneurs and artists are vital to cities because they take these mutt dog neighborhoods and rescue them and nurture them back to health. Often these people become victims of their own success when other people with more money in than bank than creative insight push them out.
But for now that part of the American character immortalized by Jack Kerouac in On the Road owns the soul of Georgetown.
Copyright 2012 By Katherine Johnson – All Rights Reserved.