Originally published Saturday, May 10, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

To hear Jonny Hahn tell it -- or sing it -- the "kitsch-a-fication" of Fremont will be its downfall.

"Gonna get ugly,
Gettin' real ugly,
Makin' Seattle ugly fast
Pretty city, pretty city,
Turn it around and sell it out
Pretty city, prettiest city,
Gonna turn it inside out

--From "Seattle's Gettin' Ugly"
by Jonny Hahn, 1997

He usually writes and plays his own music ... some 200 songs and still going strong, most with social commentary lyrics. Seven major recordings and at least that many national solo road tours and thousands of miles in a beat-up Murphy's Auction van.

Hahn's played his small piano-on-wheels on major street corners from Boston to Dallas. Great public reception; no hassles, if you discount that one surly cop on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. And no problems with leaving the piano unattended while he parks the old van. Except for that time several years ago, in San Francisco, when someone committed grand theft piano while he went for his van. He's now on his third piano.

Quite something for a guy who was already a devout anti-vehicle, anti-driving sort of environmentalist when he moved here. Even more afield for someone with a political science degree, who wanted more than anything in his young life to be the Chicago Cubs' shortstop after Don Kessinger retired.

Music and baseball were "just always passions with me," he concedes. He and his several siblings took private piano lessons, but the others were forced into it, while Jonny had to ask to play, he said.

There are those around town who feel Hahn's not playing with a full keyboard. And he isn't: that's a three-quarter-size, 64-key piano you see him playing most days, most of the year, at the Pike Place Market, Bumbershoot, the University Street Fair and, of course, the annual Fremont Fair.

When he's playing downtown, with the Tupperware tip bowl atop his piano, he's usually not singing along. Pity, that, because the lyrics can be entertaining and biting.

(For the record: While we -- the two J. Hahns of this piece -- may feel the same way about certain Seattle neighborhoods and much new construction and development in general, and while we may be transplants from the same North Side of Chicago and while we both were graduated from the University of Illinois, and whereas we both vaguely resemble the Fremont Troll, Jonny is a strawberry blond and I am mostly what locals term "Norwegian blond," or gray.)

Jonny, a 44-year-old, pony-tailed street musician, wasn't even plugged into the street-music scene when he first fell in love with Seattle during a visit and dashed home, put all his belongings in a rental truck and returned.

"I fell 1 million percent in love with Seattle. 'How beautiful it is!' I told myself. 'How friendly the people are!'" And how silly, perhaps, not to think it might ever change.

Hahn didn't know from Fremont until he found a job and started to feel like a regular Seattle resident. For someone who earlier had sworn never again to live in a big city, Seattle was a pleasant surprise.

"I was working at an early childhood development center on Queen Anne and living on Capitol Hill, but looking for a place of my own. Everything was either too expensive or already taken, so I began walking the neighborhoods, like Ballard and Greenwood.

"I came to Fremont, walked a few blocks and saw a 'For Rent' sign in the front window of a house on Dayton Avenue North, and that's where I've been for more than 10 years.

"My sense of the community then was an earthy, low-key, friendly kind of place where people had a commitment for political engagement, whether it was a local, citywide or larger issue. My God, do you remember the large crowds that turned out over what color to paint the Fremont Bridge?!?

"All these things were consonant with my move here, to a lifestyle and a neighborhood that seemed like heaven. People were friendly, but very willing to engage whatever issue presented. And best of all, it was a rather mellow community right on the ship canal.

"And it wasn't on anybody's map!"

A lot of water's gone under that funky blue-and-orange Fremont Bridge since then. There was a time when it was simply going to be repainted blue -- until Fremont rose up and objected, and the compromise was orange trim. That was the old in-your-face Fremont way of doing things, Hahn said.

Now comes the new Adobe headquarters building on the canal, just behind the popular "Waiting for the Interurban" sculpture. The former a symbol of money changing the Fremont landscape and the latter part of that Fremont charm Hahn first was drawn to.

"Now Fremont is 'on the map,'" he said subito piano, emoting some of the same too-quiet acceptance of change he decries in other Fremontians. "What used to be quiet streets with single-family homes and small apartments now has been developed into multi-unit buildings with almost no design review or consideration for the character of the neighborhood. I call the big ones 'Roach Hotels.'"

Even worse, said the man who's usually mellowed-out over his keyboard, "Most of these new multi-unit buildings have underground parking. The people drive out in the morning and go back underground and up an internal stairway in the evening. And they never stop to talk to their neighbors; they don't pause on the front steps and visit like people in Fremont used to."

In his song "Leaving the City," Jonny Hahn talks about "driving away, escaping the noise, at least for a day" by going to the ocean. "I laugh at the birds, gawk at the kelp, lean on a log, soak up the heat ... I got a case of bliss on the beach."

That's just what I do when I get tired of driving the interurban; I go to the beach. Must be a Hahn sorta thing.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.