We went to Playland. It was at 130th Street, I now find; west side of Aurora Avenue North, large 1920s amusement park with roller coaster, haunted house, smaller rides. To a 6-year-old in the 1950s (we lived nearby on 141st) it is permanently etched into the memory. The memory of Aurora over my life.
The long blighted stretch from Greenlake to Shoreline at 145th Street has always been industrial ugly: car lots, aging buildings, old motels, telephone poles and wires. But with a bit of odd funk thrown in here and there: Twin Teepees, Chubby and Tubby variety store, the cement elephant (still there), Playland.
Growing up in North Seattle, it was hard not to cross or traverse Aurora on a regular basis, at first from the back seat of Mom and Dad’s car, later from behind the wheel. The Burgermaster was there fairly early (still there) but with Dick’s, and Herfy’s (at Northgate), we seldom stopped to wait for a carhop. Also, I will always remember the cement building at 80th, now a paint store, that on a night in 1968 had long lines of Beatles fans buying the released-that-day “White Album,” stacks and stacks of white rising from the floor of the then-record store.
What I do not recall from past Aurora, but am now told was there, is crime, specifically sex trafficking. I can guarantee that women and girls were not standing or walking on the sidewalks of Aurora throughout the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and into the early 2000s, when I bought my house on North 102nd Street, and drove up and down Aurora night and day.
It was in the mid 2010s, after the federal government shut down a national prostitution solicitation website, that I first began to notice women who seemed oddly out of place on the worn-out, industrial sidewalks of Aurora. And even then it did not quite register as they wore very Seattle-and-Northwest down coats and bluejeans.
Then, in the late 2010s came … I’m really not sure what? A city government mindset that police, laws, government in general (rules?) were unwanted. Restrictive of freedom? Backward? Stifling to the spirit of humanity? Connected to Trump?
Then, each year there were more — and more, and more and more. Now congregating heavily at the end of my street, now dressed in high heels and see-through lingerie, like they had just come from a Hollywood movie set. I encountered one of the most bizarre sights I had ever seen while waiting for the light at 105th, at rush hour, as a crowd of fully dressed pedestrians crossed with the walk sign joined by an already-tall woman in high heels and the smallest-possible thong.
I have photographs of up to seven of these women standing together in broad daylight at the end of my street. Others of pimp cars parked by them with license plates from California, Texas, Nevada, and … even Washington.
Now there are large cement barriers at the end of my street, looking like Gaza, meant to protect us from gun violence. Playland is gone. And in many ways, so is my city.
