underdog city

According to local lore, Sauro’s Cleanerama was once the dry cleaner of choice among world-famous T-Dome performers whose glittery body suits needed a good laundering. Even now, a handful of years since the business and the building were obliterated, the Cleanerama is still number one. At least, that is, according to the Washington Department of Ecology.

Six months ago this toxic pit, situated at Pacific Ave and S. 14th, was added to Ecology’s Hazardous Sites List, with a ranking of 1 on a 1-5 scale. So not only does the state have its eye on this mostly vacant plot of exemplary urban grit, but it also wants it cleaned up, pronto.

According to the Hazardous Sites List, a 1 ranking represents the highest level of risk. That doesn’t necessarily mean a site is contaminated with the most hazardous chemicals known to man (though it may be), but that there is a high risk of human exposure, and so cleanup needs to happen ASAP. In the most recent Hazardous Sites List, published yesterday, the Cleanerama site is listed as “awaiting remedial action,” which means that nothing beyond the state’s hazardous assessment has occurred yet.

The waste drums on the perimeter of the property are supposedly a result of the assessment. Prominently and reassuringly labeled “non-hazardous waste” — and surrounded by pretty purple wildflowers, to boot — these drums, according to the Trib, contain soil from the site. That means they probably contain dry-cleaning chemicals, too, and quite possibly some of Prince’s or Janet Jackson’s DNA.

While there is undoubtedly more hype surrounding this property now that it’s a fenced-off brownfield, it’s hard to imagine it could be any more hazardous now than it was during the nearly 40 years Sauro’s was in business. One particularly notable dry-cleaning chemical, perchloroethylene (commonly called perc), is a nerve toxin and probable human carcinogen. Studies have shown that dry-cleaning workers, as well as tenants of buildings situated near dry-cleaning facilities, are exposed to unholy amounts of the stuff. Sure, the Cleanerama site now hosts 39 years’ worth of dumped waste, but at least levels of airborne perc should now be minimal to nonexistent.

In any case, once cleaned up, the Cleanerama pit will undoubtedly be a coveted piece of real estate. Unfortunately for the name of progress, development, downtown revitalization, and coveted pieces of real estate, however, it’s probably much cheaper for the owner to keep paying the property tax and doing nothing than it is to get in there and decontaminate the land.

On the bright side, if we eliminated all such patches of urban blight, Tacoma might very well be stripped of its ultra-cool Grit City moniker. What, after all, could be grittier than having a toxic waste dump right in our very own downtown?

*****

To see which other Tacoma locations made the Hazardous Sites List, click here and head for page 25.

If you visit the web address displayed on the Can It butt receptacle, you will learn why cigarette litter is bad news. For instance, I learned that heavy metals of the least righteous kind leach from abandoned tobacco sticks into our groundwater, the Thea Foss Waterway, and Commencement Bay. My guess is that the flora and fauna living in those bodies of water don’t appreciate it, mostly because I can’t think of any living organisms that do appreciate being killed.

If you visit the web address displayed on the Can It butt receptacle, however, there’s a strong chance you’re not necessarily the target demographic of the Can It campaign. Actually, if you’re the type of nerd who photographs an ashcan for the sole purpose of capturing a web address so you can find out what more the city has to say about keeping your butt out of the bay, it doesn’t seem likely you’re the kind of person who throws cigarette butts on the ground in the first place.

Toward the end of 2007, the City of Tacoma distributed these bottom-heavy beauties to various places around downtown as part of the “Can It: Keep Your Butts Out of the Bay” pilot program, the purpose of which was to find effective ways of keeping butts off the ground and their toxins out of our ecosystem. The results of that study aren’t in yet, but in the meantime, let’s consider a question: In light of the recent nonstop vilification of smokers in this country, is it reasonable to expect them to care about the ramifications of their little cigarette butts?

Some smokers do, of course. Some smokers voluntarily isolate themselves in dark alleys with organically grown, hand-rolled tobacco sticks whose butts they then stow in their hemp-sweatshirt pockets — and do it with overflowing peace and tranquility. But what about smokers who feel cast out by society, banished to 25 feet away from every business entrance, cordoned off in makeshift outdoor smokers’ areas, scowled at, and unfairly taxed to high heaven? Some of them might get a certain amount of delight out of murdering plankton and flounders, even if only as a last angry act of nicotine rebellion.

Therefore, if we want litter-prevention efforts to work, what we really need is a way to appeal to the latter crowd. I believe that way is to make cigarette disposal fun for even the most disaffected, disenfranchised, anti-establishment, pessimistic, solipsistic, sociopathic smoker.

If, at the point at which the seriousness of Commencement Bay’s health meets the smallness of Tacoma’s ashcan budget, all we can afford are the receptacles pictured above, we’ve got to dress them up a little. The one in the photograph, which I found at Pacific Ave. and S. 14th, has the right idea with the Mardi Gras beads. The one sitting at the top of Frost Park, however, is completely unadorned, and you know what? Frost Park’s lovely water-down-the-steps display is also littered with bloated, waterlogged cigarette butts. Correlation? Perhaps.

If we’re working with a robust endowment, however, I’d like to recommend a new pilot study. This one will have local sculptors design eye-catching, gawk-worthy ashcans, prototypes of which the city will then purchase and distribute in Tacoma’s major business areas. Then let’s see if perhaps the allure of stuffing a cigarette butt into the end of a little girl’s die-cast ponytail, the hungry mouth of a frolicking granite sea otter, or the bronze eyeball of The Man himself is tempting enough to get even the least environmentally concerned smoker on the bandwagon. If the very act of disposing of a cigarette can become a way to fight the power, so much the better, I say. So much the better.

There are more cigarette litter details for nerds and diehard city-info fans here.

Spotted just north of the 6th Avenue Business District: a perpetual tea party for one.

There is a time and place for an acronym. This is a stretch on both counts. As Dictionary.com has just informed me, a scad is a kind of fish. Just what sort of event is this?

Aside from the SCAD issue, the chief question this poster raises is, What the heck is Senior Citizen Awareness Day? Who is supposed to show up? People who want to learn more about senior citizens, or senior citizens themselves? It’s unclear from this poster whether the event is meant to raise awareness about old folks or raise awareness within the community of old folks.

A good acronym could help at a time like this. But SCAD, SCAD does not help.

According to the City of Tacoma website, SCAD has nothing to do with fish. It is in fact supposed to be a fun event for seniors and their families, with the dual purpose of connecting elder Tacomans to services available to them in our community. A worthy cause. A very unworthy acronym. Just heap SCAD on top of the large pile of indignities the elderly already have to suffer. But the 12:45 game of bingo should just about make up for it.

Standing in Tollefson Plaza for the very first time yesterday at Showcase Tacoma, waiting for Helio Sequence to take the stage, I found my head ringing with echoes of T.P. critiques I have read on other T-Town blogs. Then, of course, I found myself enthusiastically marching along in the critique parade.

To my untrained eye, T.P. seems in want of more grass, some trees, maybe a centerpiece garden, a smooth grassy patch for lawn bowling, or at least a merry-go-round. But I am uneducated about such matters. I don’t know what will draw people to the Plaza. I don’t even know if there are enough people generally milling about in the whole of downtown to fill the Plaza.

Rather than speculate endlessly, I will add a critique I have yet to hear voiced, which happens to be based on quite solid empirical evidence. It goes something like this: The city no doubt wants people to use the Plaza. The city no doubt knows a few people, and so should know that people don’t generally trek to attraction-free destinations if they won’t be able to sit down when they get there. Therefore, the city must expect people, when they arrive at destination Tollefson Plaza, to sit on those big, chalky pink, amphitheater-like steps. But perhaps the city has never known people who like their pants or have a reputation to maintain or hold a job they must get back to, because it seems the city thinks people must enjoy traipsing around town with chalky pink dust ground into their britches. The chalky pink ass of my blue jeans counts as empirical evidence, right?

For two recent Tacoma bloggers’ treatments of T.P.’s problems click here and here.

It is right out of a Frank Herbert novel, this garden. Frank Herbert was himself an avid gardener, and, I just found out, a Tacoma native. Before I knew that piece of trivia, Herbert was on my mind for another reason altogether: the stillsuit.

As I shoveled one and a half cubic yards of “Class A biosolids” out of a friend’s truck and into my yard, suppressing the fear that I might unearth a log or two that had somehow escaped processing, Herbert’s fictional body-waste reclaiming getup was at the forefront of my mind.

I imagine the stillsuit might look a bit like a wetsuit, an all-encompassing version, except thinner and far more high-tech. Developed to make life on an inhospitable desert planet possible, these fictional bodysuits recycle their fictional wearers’ sweat, urine, and feces, thus minimizing moisture loss and making the reclaimed moisture quickly available for re-consumption.

When I read Dune a decade or so ago, the idea of consuming one’s bodily wastes, no matter how carefully processed, struck me as disgusting. It nearly made me gag. Those few moments I put the book down to attend to my collegiate responsibilities, I couldn’t stop wondering if I could hack it on Arrakis. Would I be able to overcome my revulsion and suit up with the rest of my clan? Or would my upturned nose and I quickly wither on that unlivable planet, my squeamishness dooming me to become nothing more than a pile of hot Arrakis dust?

That was then. A month ago when my need for soil arose, I hardly batted an eye before saying yes to a garden full of human feces. Your feces, Tacoma. In my front yard.

Aside from the convenience of tripping down to the TAGRO plant and having a scoop and a half dumped in the back of a pickup for $45, I also was acting on an embarrassingly recent revelation that the earth is sort of a closed system, like a body in a stillsuit would be. When we eat, we eat nutrients that come from the soil, and when we crap, we crap totally valuable, totally reusable nutrients that can be returned to the soil, that should be returned to the soil. To indulge in a little anthropomorphism, it’s what the earth would expect.

We don’t flinch at putting horse poop on our vegetable crops; even the non-gardeners among us understand the value of bodily wastes in that light. But we are unaccustomed to thinking of human feces as a soil amendment. When human waste was phased out of American agriculture at the advent of cheap, petroleum-based fertilizers, the farming that followed was based on the idea that the earth’s natural resources were not only bountiful but bottomless. In that case, we decided, let’s just flush our filthy fecal matter, and send it where we send the rest of our trash: away. Well, it turns out “away” doesn’t really exist, so why not make use of all that sludge?

Since the whole of America is waking up to formerly fringe concepts like local food, composting, and recycling, it would seem possible that humanure’s time has come. So for me, TAGRO it is, and TAGRO it shall be. It’s local, safe, sustainable, and easy to come by. Assuming my green thumb doesn’t fail me in the front-yard garden, I will soon be eating what you have eaten, fellow Tacomans. I think Frank Herbert would approve.

Seriously, the checking is FREE?

I hear they’re fashioning a drive-through ATM out of cinder blocks around back.

A place like Tacoma, home to a good many creative types, is bound to have at least one decent spot for a haircut. In fact, I’ve seen a couple promising locales, like Supernova and Embellish, which only makes this story that much more embarrassing.

Two Thursdays ago I found myself suddenly in bad need of a haircut. Looking at 10 months of untamed growth and a friend’s wedding in 48 hours, I knew it would only be right to finally get a trim. A simple enough desire, really, but for the problem of my longstanding fear of salons and the folks with the scissors inside them. What has happened in some of those swivel chairs…the horror! So I weighed my options longer than any normal person would have to, and finally decided to make the leap and give Supernova a call. When I was told they would be closing in 15 minutes, I did what any superstitious person would do and chalked it up to fate. It probably would have been a disaster, I told myself.

Thirty minutes later I had a new plan in action, and I slid, still nervous, into a generic salon chair in a generic salon in the generic Tacoma Mall. See, I was cultivating a theory that I would be better off avoiding anyone with any “fancy ideas” about hairstyles, so, I reasoned, a less highfalutin place would ultimately lead to a better, more foolproof hairdo. In that spirit, I chose Regis — about as lowfalutin as they come, but still one notch classier than anything with “hair” or “masters” in the name, and one notch cheaper than anything with two names, like Gene Juarez or Paul Mitchell.

Though I thought I had a solid working theory, it had yet to be tested, and as it turned out, I was wrong. Very. My hair met its match in the little barberista I like to call the Demon Stylist of Steele Street. This somewhat gruff, skinny pixie stylist listened closely to my desires, shampooed and conditioned me, and started cutting. She seemed competent enough with the scissors, but there was a certain finesse that seemed to be lacking. After that relaxing shampoo, however, I was loath to think negative thoughts, so, short of stabbing me in the neck or slicing off my ears, any which way she brandished the scissors was all right by me.

I imagine somewhere there is a textbook of haircutting, and if so you can find my new haircut in either the Rookie Mistakes or the Vengeance is Mine chapter. My barberista didn’t exactly butcher me, but she didn’t do me any favors either. She artlessly chopped thick swaths of hair seemingly without concern for how that might play out in my thick, humidity-absorbing mop, ultimately creating the illusion that I am a comic book character with a head of enormous proportions. It is big, I admit, but not that big. And though she did unburden me of a good two inches of growth, the finished product is a head of hair that looks like it desperately needs to be cut, ASAP.

I’ve been through hair disasters before, and this one is nothing patience and a sturdy hair band can’t handle, but today, feeling the full weight of one too many scissor-related disappointments, that $35 plus 20-percent tip I parted with has now become the precise $42 I will miss dearly the next time I am broke. Next time I decide I have to push back the cellphone bill, the TV bill, the utility bill, the need for a new bar of soap or something aside from scraps of junk mail to wipe my ass with, it will be that very $42 I long for, that $42 whose loss most upsets me.

Though she has driven me to a perpetual ponytail, I will say one thing in the Demon Stylist’s defense: she has a way with shampoo.

If you do not visit a haircutter often enough to inure you to the charms of having an intriguingly brusque nymph massage your head for five minutes and then twirl your hair around her long, long fingers for another twenty-five, then how will you survive the goosebumps and the endorphins magically released when a stylist goes at your scalp? You will not, is how.

You will melt into quiet bliss before you’ve even seen the glint of the scissors in the salon light. If you remember the list of haircutting specifications that will reduce the grandiosity of your slightly large head, you will have no inclination to speak up when you see things begin to go awry. Helpless after my time at the Demon’s sink, all I could do was bask silently in the twirling, the combing, the airy sound of the snip snip snipping.

When you are as good as melted in that swivel chair and the Demon Stylist hands you a mirror saying, How does it look, you will say it is perfect, and then float to the cash register where you will eagerly pay and over-tip her. When the Demon Stylist says, “See you next time,” you almost think, for a moment, she will.

But she won’t. Next time it’s going to be one of those cool-looking, slightly intimidating places I’m just sure the creative types frequent, or it will be nothing, nothing at all.

Seeds sown just five days ago. Meet not just the beets, but also their medium of growth: That’s TAGRO, folks.