The story behind the steps in the sidewalk


		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Jack Mackie, shown recently with his creation, is the artist behind the bronze dance steps on Broadway in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Not the carefree kind inspired by being young and drunk, or the teetering kind that comes with being old and drunk.

But the tango or foxtrot or rumba that breaks out when people on their way to dinner or to the QFC come across the numbered bronze shoe prints arranged in the sidewalk in the pattern of dance steps.

"1, 2, 3, 1,2,3 -- Quick, quick, slow. Quick, quick, slow," says the panel in the pavement near Noah's Bagels that says, "the RUMBA."

Mackie, 59, over coffee near the Rumba steps, says he considers himself one of the artists of the streets.

He decided 27 years ago that while walking along Broadway, people ought to be able to look down and run into the footsteps and learn how to rumba, tango or "Obeebo."Actually, Mackie says, the Obeebo really isn't a dance step. He just made it up.

"They're the steps of two people walking side-by-side and switching sides. It's the dance that happens on the streets," he says.

As familiar as the "Broadway Dance Steps" have become, Mackie says they were controversial at the time they were created.

The project came about because the city was moving electrical wires underground along Broadway and had to tear up the street. Patricia Fuller, a program manager with the city's arts commission, pushed what was then thought of as a radical idea -- to incorporate art into the project. A new sidewalk was going in, anyway. Why not make it a more interesting sidewalk?

KOMO/4 editorialized against it at the time. People got up at community meetings and yelled, recalled Mackie. "They said it wasn't art. Art was in galleries. Art was statues," Mackie said.

Seattle city engineers thought it would be dangerous because the steps rise a quarter-inch out of the sidewalk. People would trip. The city would sue. Even dancers held a protest on Broadway, believing the money should be spent on dance performances. They marched around with signs. Someone tipped Mackie off, and he showed up in a tuxedo. "I heard it was a formal protest," Mackie said.

Why dance steps, though? He had no idea what he wanted to do on Broadway, so he said he began watching people on the street, and what he noticed was "there was a choreography" -- of people turning and shifting in relation to one another.

He hired dance instructors at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio downtown to slowly do the dances, as he outlined their shoe prints on the floor and took pictures of them to come up with the rumba.

To make "Broadway Dance Steps," he poured concrete around the bronzed shoe print, then scraped the wet concrete from around the edges with an instrument the size of his thumbnail. Each set of dance steps took about a day, he said.

He says he likes the surprise of doing public art.

"I get people on their way to work. I get people on their way shopping, when they don't expect it."

And he likes the interaction.

"It's the people dancing who really complete the piece," he said. One time as the dance steps were going in, he saw a man who appeared to be lying face down on one of the steps. Mackie thought it was a drunk passed out, but it turned out he was blind. "Some had told him to check it out, so he was on the ground feeling the steps. When have you ever seen that in a gallery?" Another time, he said, someone spray-painted more steps on the sidewalk and labeled it "Break Dancing."

If dance steps in the sidewalk aren't whimsical enough, there's the secret buried in the concrete. On the east side of Broadway, at East Republican Street, there used to be a doughnut shop.

"I bought a dozen assorted doughnuts and dropped them in the hole," Mackie said.

P-I reporter Kery Murakami can be reached at 206-448-8131 or kerymurakami@seattlepi.com.

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