Artistic expressions at your feet

Look down, and you may discover a dreamy sidewalk canvas, where even the dullest 500-foot skyscraper takes on pleasing abstract forms, smeared in a rainy reflection.


	Hoof prints embedded in the pavement lead the way to Rachel the Pig in the Pike Place Market. Dan DeLong/P-I

Seattle's a city that likes to be walked all over. It's designed for it.

Look down at the Pike Place Market, and you'll find your feet awash in a sea of names, inscribed in tile. Ronald and Nancy Reagan are down there. So are Dick and Jane.

A Seussed-up prankster even dedicated a tile to Green Eggs and Ham.

Some of the city's most playful, thinky art is cast in concrete and planted below -- down there where gum and guano make Jackson Pollock designs across the pavement and pigeons feed on soggy lunch detritus.

Look carefully along the eastside of First Avenue, north of Virginia Street, and you'll find Northwest artist Buster Simpson's "A Poem To Be Worn" down below. It's a five-word composition recessed in an innocuous gray slab.


: A woman walks over the decorative surface of Westlake Center, patterned after a Salish basket weave. Dan DeLong/P-I

His poem has, indeed been worn -- by tens of thousands of feet rushing by.

"It acknowledges wear," says Simpson. "It acknowledges that wear can be a monument."

A little farther north, near Bell Street, the artist provocateur has carved a welcome mat in the sidewalk. It fronts a set of steps that lead to ... nothing. It's a profound nothing, suggesting older times, when neighborly folks sat on stoops shooting the breeze and sipping suds.

More food for the sole lies along the busy intersections of Eastlake Avenue East. There, Pennsylvania enviro artist Stacey Levy has created a series of cornerstones with vividly colored cast glass and sandblasted drawings of microorganisms native to nearby Lake Union and its shores -- algae, crustaceans, protozoa, diatoms and other mysterious, magnified specimens that look as if they came from Way Out There.

It's a curious, lively place, this world underfoot.


	Former President Ronald Reagan's name is engraved in a tile at the Market. Dan DeLong/P-I

Slow down, eyes to the ground, and take a good look.

Making tracks

I love the goofy little duck feet, bronzed, implanted in pavement outside McCormick & Schmick's (First Avenue and Spring Street). They're the inspiration of Paul Schell, previous mayor and former president of Cornerstone Columbia Development. "It's the little details that delight and surprise, that make a city rich," says Schell.

He put in the feet, without permission, while developing the building site, raising a quack with the Board of Public Works. "They got all uptight over that, but it was too late. They were already in," says the permit scofflaw.

Equally endearing are the wee tulip-petal hoofprints at the Pike Place Market, scattered beneath the signature clock. Follow the pig-print trails and you'll find yourself at the polished flanks of big mama Rachel, the 550-pound bronze piggy-bank with the Bob Hope ski-slope nose, designed by artist Georgia Gerber.

Weave of history

Most Seattleites know the interlocking red, white and gray granite paving stones that front Westlake Center mall were one of the city's most hotly debated public projects in the '80s. But many don't know what the stones represent.

I didn't when I set out on a walking tour with my history-steeped guide, Duse McLean, co-author with Joan Burton, of "Urban Walks: 23 Walks Through Seattle's Parks and Neighborhoods" (Thistle Press, 207 pages, $16.95).


	A pigeon walks past "The Mambo" dance steps along Broadway on Capitol Hill. The invitation to dance, with inlaid bronze shoeprints providing step-by-step instruction, was created by artist Jack Mackie in the early 1980s. DAN DELONG/P-I PHOTOS

McLean explained that the pleasing sweep of multicolored stones -- the work of artist Robert Maki -- are patterned after a Salish basket-weave motif. "This was originally a great gathering spot of Indian tribes, one of the few natural clearings in the old landscape," McLean said. "The basket-weave is a reminder that there were people here long before our pioneers arrived."

Think about that as your Nine West platforms pound the pavement en route to the Goldiva chocolatier.

In the park across from the center, don't miss the imbedded metal plaques underfoot, drawn by Seattle kids as tribute to their city. Each is a riddle with a drawing.

My favorite: "How big is the Kingdome?" Answer: 250 feet high, 660 feet wide.

Here's another question: What's a Kingdome?

Steps to the past

Sidewalks hold a hundred stories in Pioneer Square. They slump to the shape of underlying landfill -- sawdust and dirt, animal carcasses and whatever else Seattle's settlers felt like dumping 150 years ago. They edge away from buildings, buckled and broken -- a result of 2001's Nisqually Earthquake.


	Small skylights embedded in the sidewalks in Pioneer Square provide illumination for the first floor of an earlier Seattle, built over after the Great Fire of 1889.

Walk down the district's historic core and you'll see what look like large purple polka dots embedded in the sidewalks. These are old glass skylights, windows on a shady underground world beneath the sidewalks. Down there lies the first floor of an earlier Seattle, rebuilt after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Can-do pioneers decided to cover over this first level, and raise the city a full story to get it up off the mucky, sewage-strewn tideflats (early visitors swore you could smell Seattle a mile away).

The spooky underworld left behind became home to opium addicts, shysters, hustlers and hooch dealers who maneuvered in spotty light filtering down through the skylights.

Those skylights have purpled with age. Some are almost indigo. Some are a pastel lavender, and as opaque as cataracts. Some of the oldest were shaped into three-way prisms that draw extra light into the eerie dank underworld of spider webs and green mold.

Take an Underground Tour, breathe deep the musty air, look up, and you'll see the blurred shadows of the modern world passing overhead, downside-up.

On Broadway

Broadway Avenue on Capitol Hill richly rewards its ground-level explorers. On the sidewalks between East Pine and Roy streets, you'll find an invitation to dance, with inlaid bronze shoeprints providing step-to-step directions. Grab a stranger for a partner, shake off those rainy-day blues, and get moving to the tango, Seattle. "Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow."

In the two decades since they were installed, the shoeprints have been buffed to a gold luster by happy sidewalk dancers. But the dance patterns raised a public ruckus when first presented by artist Jack Mackie in the early '80s.

Dances come in eight varieties: the tango, the waltz, the lindy, the foxtrot weave, the rhumba and mambo. There are also two nifty dances created by Mackie: the bus stop and obeebo, a crossover-spin ditty that turns you around backward.

Don't be surprised if a shopkeeper jumps out to show you how it's done. "That's MY dance!" one told an awkward reporter who was bungling the moves. On flaunt-it Broadway, it's always showtime. Artist Mackie swore "Dancers' Series: Steps" wouldn't have worked anywhere else in the city.

Going deep


	A man heads down the stairs with "traveling stories" that lead to the International District Metro tunnel.

The art-filled 1.3-mile Metro tunnel is a feast for downcast eyes. As you ascend staircases, check the color of the granite underfoot. If it's white, you're headed north. South is black, east is green and west is red.

Look on the stairway risers for "traveling stories," quotations from Seattle somebodies such as guitar god Jimi Hendrix and Seattle activist Gordon Hirabayashi, stretched out step-by-step. In the International District station, the risers quote Chinese entrepreneur Chin Gee Hee, describing plans to build a railroad: "Please read/ the/ printed/ matter/ and/ try/ to/devise/some/ means/ whereby / we / may/ go/ on/ with/ the / big/ venture."

Quotations are written in typefaces from each speaker's era. Garamond type is for early 1800s quotes; Bookman for late 1800s and early 1900s, Futura for 1942-1962, and Univers for quotes from 1963 to present.

Look topside at the I.D. station (Fifth Avenue South and South Jackson Street) and you'll find a wonderful oversize Chinese calendar underfoot, with blocky rats and monkeys and rabbits and snakes created out of cut and colored bricks -- the work of artists Alice Adams and Sonya Ishli.

It's downright uplifting.

Art in iron

I look at manhole covers warily. They're the heavy-metal stopper between me and a creepy, wet, rat-and-roach infested underworld, the kind of place where alligators run free and human scum prey on the good-hearted Jean Val-Jeans of the universe.

Strange, then, that their raised designs, originally intended to provide traction for horse hoofs, are so predominantly ... pedestrian. Waffles and honeycombs and weaves, oh my!

How wise it was of Seattle city leaders, acclaimed pioneers in hatchcover rethink, to turn manhole covers into art.


	Lost? This decorative manhole cover at First Avenue and Spring Street is a relief map of downtown.

Dozens of these cast-iron beauties are scattered around town. One design is by artist Garth Edwards, who ringed his 350-pound manhole covers with a gallery of odd Picasso-like characters that seem to stare up vacantly at passers-by. Another is by Alaska native Nathan Jackson. His stylized Tlingit whales curl around the hatchcover, swimming in a perpetual circle.

If you're lost, look for the hatchcover relief maps of downtown by Anne Knight, with a profile of Chief Seattle bobbing in a bay of metal bubbles. Each map has a "you are here" steel button, and 13 major landmarks keyed around the rim. They show a city of mismatched streets that crash in a trainwreck of lines in Pioneer Square. This curious platting can be blamed on our willful founders, who couldn't agree whether to orient streets to the compass or to the contours of the waterfront. They ended up doing both.

One of my favorite manhole covers in Pioneer Square honors the late pundit and promoter Bill Speidel, author of "Sons of the Profits." It quotes the colorful historian saying: "Seattle is made up of doers, don'ters, doubters and deadheads."

(Speidel's manhole cover was temporarily removed from Pioneer Place Park when an 18-wheeler crashed into the nearby wrought-iron pergola last year. It is scheduled to be reinstalled in June, when the new pergola goes up.)

Park place

There's a remarkable little foot-level gallery at the Betty Bowen Viewpoint on Queen Anne Hill, featuring the works of some of the Northwest's most celebrated artists -- among them Richard Gilkey, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Margaret Tomkins.

Innovative Seattle architect Victor Steinbrueck asked 10 artists to submit drawings and paintings, then transferred them into concrete panels at the site (West Highland Drive and Seventh Avenue West). The panels pay tribute to Bowen, a fireball activist and arts patron who died in 1977.

It's fascinating to see how Steinbrueck used the subtleties of texture (gravel, sand, inset stone) and color (varied tones of concrete) to translate the artists' visions into sophisticated concrete abstractions.

Last shot

Want to see the site of a 1901 shootout in Pioneer Square? Inside Song's Market, corner of Second Avenue and Yesler Way, are yellow and tan floor tiles that spell out "GO Guy." That's the name of the original pharmacy where William Meredith, an ousted Seattle chief of police accused of corruption, tried to off his nemesis, entertainment entrepreneur John Considine.

According to historian Murray Morgan, who describes the scene vividly in his book "Skid Road," Meredith blamed Considine for his downfall, and went out gunning for him, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, a .32 colt, a .38 caliber bulldog revolver and a dagger. Considine, who had gone to the pharmacy seeking a sore throat remedy, instead got the 12-gauge stuck in his face. Meredith shot at a range of about two feet -- and missed.

In the battle that ensued, Considine unloaded two shots from a .38 revolver into Meredith, one through the liver, the other smashing the heart. The last word Meredith uttered was "Oh."

UNDER YOUR FEET

Do you have a favorite underfoot discovery -- a piece of art or wit or bit of history embedded in our city's sidewalks? Send a brief description, with location, to: m.l.lyke@seattlepi.com, or call 206-448-8344.

P-I reporter M.L. Lyke can be reached at 206-448-8344 or m.l.lyke@seattlepi.com

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