Music and Cats

I grew up in a mid-century sunbelt suburb west of Houston, a small neighborhood bounded by an interstate highway, two heavily-trafficked major streets, and a small creek in a deep, wooded ravine. The streets in our neighborhood had no sidewalks. Why build sidewalks when there’s no place to which you can walk? We kids rode our bikes all around the quiet streets of our neighborhood, but our only destinations were each other’s homes and the creek. Trips to the grocery store, to church, even to school required a car. As a child, I thought nothing of our suburban lifestyle; it was all that I knew.

Our suburban enclave was a far cry from the neighborhoods in which my parents were raised. My mother grew up in a small Arkansas town, in a house blocks from the town square. My father’s childhood neighborhood, just north of downtown Houston, had small corner stores to which people walked. These sorts of neighborhoods were once the norm, but today, far more people live in the sort of purely residential suburb in which I was raised than in the small towns and urban neighborhoods of my parents’ childhoods. But I’ve discovered, as I’ve moved around the country, that I much prefer older urban neighborhoods to more modern suburbs.

When Paul and I were contemplating moving to Seattle, we spent a couple of weekends wandering this city’s urban neighborhoods. We were delighted by the small-town feel of neighborhood main streets and corner stores. Perhaps those corner stores were more often upscale coffee houses than you’d find in real small towns, but there were also bakeries and bookstores, grocers and meat markets, barber shops and banks. We eventually found a house on Queen Anne, just a short walk from Queen Anne Avenue, the neighborhood’s main commercial street. Just one block away, down the several flights of steps that connect our street and Queen Anne Avenue, was a small hardware store.

Two framed documents in Queen Anne Hardware’s front window tell of its past. In the late 1930’s, when its King County Land Use Survey photo was taken, the building housed Queen Anne Radio & Electric. By 1947, the date on a framed advertisement, the name had been changed to Queen Anne Hardware & Electric.

Into this century, Queen Anne Hardware has remained an old-fashioned, small-town hardware store. Plumbing and electrical parts, tools and gardening equipment, canning supplies and keys; Queen Anne Hardware has the things you need, and some you didn’t know you wanted until you walked in the door. If you need one or two bolts, you don’t have to buy a package of ten, but can pick a couple out of the bins at the back of the store. The store is charming, anachronistic, a step back in time, and wonderfully convenient.

As we drove down Queen Anne Avenue recently, I noticed large signs in the hardware store windows: Closing Sale! 25 - 50% Off. Later that afternoon, we walked down the steps to the store. The merchandise already looked picked over, the normally full shelves sparsely loaded, empty hooks on the pegboard displays. We wandered up and down the aisles, looking for bargains and just looking, one last time. I found a cooling rack and a pair of ‘youth’ sized gardening gloves. (I have small hands) Paul picked up a roll of reflective tape for some upcoming project. As we paid the clerk the $8.62 total, we told him how sorry we were to see the store closing. He said that, had he the money, he would buy the store from its elderly owner and keep it open.

In a matter of days, we’ll no longer be able to walk down the steps to Queen Anne Hardware. The closest hardware store will be 10 blocks away — almost next door by modern suburban standards, but ten times farther than we’re accustomed to traveling for the odd handful of wood screws or ball of kitchen twine. When we need that bit of hardware, we’ll most likely take the car, or perhaps ride our bikes.

What will become of the old hardware store’s building? I hope that someone who has the money will appreciate its charm, and find an appropriate use for it. I fear, however, that it will go the way of many old commercial buildings in thriving urban neighborhoods around the country, and will be replaced with a bland, historicist structure. If so, both our hardware store and its classic old storefront building will become ghosts of our neighborhood past.

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In 2004, demolition of the building adjacent to Queen Anne Hardware revealed this still-vivid ghost sign. The new, much larger building that’s now adjacent hid the sign from view again.

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