In the summer of 2020 I worked in a dive bar in the most progressive major city in America. Seattle was the first city in the United States to shut down entirely to stop the spread of covid-19.
By late May, small businesses were struggling to stay afloat–particularly restaurants and bars. In a desperate attempt to breathe life into the local economy the city had cautiously rolled out its first phase of reopening. This entailed limited seating with arbitrarily enforced six-foot distance dining rules and masking mandates.
This first phase also allowed for certain Seattle businesses to finally rehire previously furloughed staff. I recall jumping at the opportunity to work at Cha Cha Lounge again. The bar work wasn’t only a chance to get some extra cash on the side and escape an increasingly hostile day job that I had picked up after being denied unemployment by Washington State but it was a way to see my friends again and be reunited with the art and music weirdos that had become my Seattle community.
My social life and working life in Seattle revolved almost entirely around the Capitol Hill neighborhood. I showed art at galleries dotting Broadway Avenue and drank and worked at bars along Pike and Pine streets. While the Fremont neighborhood further north may have the official sign claiming to be the Center of the Universe, for 7 years of my life in Seattle, Capitol Hill was my axis.
The Capitol Hill neighborhood was not only the heart of the music and art scene in Seattle but had a reputation for being the home of the far-left activist community. If you get enough drinks into an old timer at Comet or Sam’s, it is a heads or tails bet on whether you will hear a story about hanging out with Kurt Cobain or breaking windows in the notorious 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests.
In Seattle we have a saying that summer does not officially start until after July 4th when the weather finally turns warmer, and the stereotypical gray skies give way to endless days of relentless sun and brown grass until the rains return in late September. This dry weather inevitably leads to wildfires as the forests around the pacific northwest become kindling.
Fire season felt like it came a month earlier than expected that year as Capitol Hill was on the verge of incinerating. The storefronts along all the major commercial retail strips were boarded up with plywood covered in a mixture of graffiti and half assed street art. The pedestrians who wandered Pike Pine and Broadway dressed like characters from Escape from Los Angeles were mostly addicts hopped up on a mixture of fentanyl and not-your-mother’s methamphetamine.
The city has always had an edge to it with a reputation for boom-and-bust cycles. In the seventies during one of Seattle’s many recessions–dubbed the Boeing Bust, when the company laid off 50,000 local workers in the span of two years, a large billboard appeared by Sea-Tac airport which read “Would the last person in Seattle Please Turn out the Lights.”
The most famous skid row in the country before downtown Los Angeles’ became more notorious was also in Seattle. In the 1850s loggers would “skid” their logs down Yesler Way into Pioneer Square, a neighborhood in South-West Downtown where they would get high at opium dens and visit prostitutes. Yesler Way became the de facto demarcation zone between the wealthier residents of the city and Seattle’s working poor and drug addicted communities–and still is to this day.
While hard drugs have always been a personality trait of the town, Seattle had long traded in its blue-collar roots of logging fishing and airplane manufacturing for the corporate behemoths of Microsoft Amazon and the Biotech industry. What was left of the city’s working poor past was its solidly leftwing political establishment and its ever widening class divide.
Never was the class war more evident than in Capitol Hill during the pandemic. Capitol Hill was the fastest gentrifying neighborhood in the entire city. Music venues and art spaces were quickly being replaced by 5000 a month condominiums and luxury apartments. Songs like “I Hate the Weekend” by Tacocat specifically referenced the impending doom of the techie takeover. The neighborhood was becoming a cliche where Marxist-Lennist bartenders in polycules dutifully packaged DoorDash orders at empty restaurants for neo-liberal tech workers who had waifu pillows waiting at home instead of girlfriends.
Before Capitol Hill became “the gayborhood” it was a primarily poor Black community with a reputation for drugs and violence–just listen to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway” if you’re skeptical. The early 2000s soft gentrification of the neighborhood that pushed out the original Black residents and led to Capitol Hill’s evolution into the city’s arts district, is the historical root of the class and racial guilt that made the 2020 summer of love protests so incendiary.
While the May 29th, 2020, murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis was the national rallying cry that mobilized thousands of Americans to take to the streets to demonstrate against police brutality Seattleites also had their own unique issues with their police department. Seattle PD had a reputation for using unnecessarily violent policing tactics spanning decades. In 2011 SPD was investigated by the federal government for using excessive force and found to be guilty of all charges.
It is foolish to put a time stamp on when exactly the protests turned from mostly peaceful to mostly violent. The threat of physical altercation was in the air from the initial start of the demonstrations. If you went to a protest, which I did, you always had to be prepared for the dynamic to shift. This made going to work treacherous as well, since Cha Cha Lounge was around the corner from the East Precinct, the Seattle police station that would eventually become the headquarters of the autonomous zone.
Given Capitol Hill’s reputation as a music destination for the anarchist crowd it was normal to be bobbing your head to a rap show on an impromptu stage off Pine and 10th while clashes between career protesters decked out in black balaclavas and gas masks happened a block away. There were art shows, food drives, and poetry readings alongside arms sales, drug deals, and urban warlords battling it out for their own territory block by block.
On June 1st, a child was pepper sprayed by SPD. That is when the siege of the East Precinct and Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “2020 Summer of Love” officially began. SPD used blast balls, flashbangs, and pepper spray in a futile attempt to dispel the growing mob of angry protesters who used umbrellas as shields and glass bottles, rocks, and fireworks as counter offensive weapons.
By June 7th large barricades were erected around the East Precinct. I remember seeing the concrete walls on my walk to work and was perplexed that I could no longer use the sidewalk along a busy stretch of 12th and Pine Avenues. The imposing beige barriers were sending a message to the entire neighborhood that the nightly revolutionary block parties were getting too rowdy.
The same night around the same time my shift ended at my job the first shooting at the protests had occurred. I recall watching the video on social media of a friend getting in between a car that was trying to speed through the crowd of one thousand or so people and another demonstrator who had been injured. The person in the vehicle would eventually get out of the car with the gun in hand and walk to the police line where they were arrested without further incident.
By midnight things had gotten darker. While Jenny Durkan had issued a thirty-day ban on the use of tear gas on the 5th of June this was overridden by SPD in the early morning hours of June 8th. I lived a fifteen-minute walk south of East Precinct and could see and hear the clashes from my living room window. Roving gangs of demonstrators led SPD into the Central District and Little Saigon where the protests became guerilla style street battles.
Capitol Hill may have been the center of my social universe, but the Central District was the neighborhood I lived in. It was jarring to watch the blast of fireworks and hear the sharp pops of rubber bullets a block or so away from my apartment complex. By the morning, the evidence of the visit from the rioters was all over my neighborhood. I recall taking a walk up Yesler to grab a coffee from my favorite cafe and passing the broken windows of the Tigrayan corner store blocks away from where I lived.
A bit further south down on Jackson I would find even more destruction. It’s still up for debate if the demonstrators who decided to rampage through the Central District, Little Saigon, and Chinatown spray painting anarchist symbols on every surface and breaking the windows of all small businesses in their path were representative of the average protester who eventually became associated with CHOP; I still say it’s more complicated. There is the camp who insist the people who fought with the police that night were outside agitators of white supremacist plants who purposefully ravaged the traditionally Black Jewish and Asian neighborhoods to the south of Capitol Hill to make the movement look bad; but Seattle has also always had a large contingent of black bloc anarchists who generally come out anytime there is a highly publicized demonstration with the sole purpose of causing the most destruction possible.
In the first days of the protests Black community activists tried to keep the black bloc anarchists at bay. Black demonstrators did try to stop rowdier protesters with distinct anarcho-communist aesthetics from destroying the neighborhood and surrounding areas. The more seasoned Black activists rightly did not want their movement soiled by a bunch of violent mostly white anarchists in facemasks.
Community activists’ efforts to deter the more aggressive fringes of the protests failed. This is how a protest started by grassroots activism surrounding police overreach and thuggery in Seattle’s poor minority communities, devolved, into an amorphous, directionless, culture war emblem. This is how a movement was co-opted by Antifa, an organization so atomized and anti-hierarchical, it’s like it’s led by a school of fish. An interesting twist in a neighborhood that was already gentrified twice over the protests themselves were being colonized by outsiders cosplaying oppression all the while making things more dangerous for residents of the surrounding area.
No one batted an eye regarding the vandalism that had occurred 2 miles south of the hill because the bigger story of the day was the abandonment of the East Precinct. By the afternoon of the 8th SPD had boarded up and vacated the building on 12th Avenue. Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best made a statement about wanting to “de-escalate the situation to rebuild trust.” The hap-hazard decision to leave the precinct was made by Assistant Chief Tom Mahaffey without the consultation or knowledge of Chief Best or Mayor Durkan.
I knew people who had made it inside the police station. Let’s just say the people who initially breached the walls of the East Precinct were not the same people who were later arrested or driven out at the bitter end. Like the history of the Capitol Hill neighborhood, the class and racial dynamic of the protesters at the beginning of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), were vastly different from those at the end of the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP).
And just like that the gigantic experiment with community policing began. Tents were quickly set up and dotting the perimeter of the commune were security checkpoints equipped with the occasional armed guard. The people at the entrances to CHOP could interrogate anyone who wished to visit the encampment. Questions about your feelings on Black lives or the slogan ACAB (all cops are bastards) were doled out to the curious protest tourist or intrepid journalist looking to enter the one block radius around the East Precinct.
Homeless addicts quickly embedded themselves in the autonomous zone. It was rumored that activists graciously used the bodies of the houseless as human shields. However, there are other accounts that claim the police may have been encouraging movement of people from the 3rd and Pine intersection, a notorious drug corner, to infiltrate the tents on Capitol Hill. I can’t verify either of these stories as having any merit outside of things discussed at Seattle bars. However, I can confidently say that the establishment of CHOP did bring increased drug activity violence and more homeless people. I recall later that summer walking through Cal Anderson Park after CHOP had been cleared and finding the remnants of human waste, disposable needles, and rectangle shaped areas of dead grass.
I also remember reassuring myself two months earlier in the middle of the tent city that this was all fine. I was living in Seattle after all the city was known for this kind of stuff and besides the Seattle Police Department did not have that nasty reputation for no reason. But it was also clear that the encampment’s makeshift security team was not doing a fantastic job of securing the perimeter. The new residents were actively making the area uncomfortable for everyone else and enjoying their new status as a revolutionary occupying force a bit too much.
A coffee shop that I frequented around the corner from the precinct was listed in a viral social media post of businesses within the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that should not be supported by the community. The owner was a queer person of color who was harassed by the activist class simply for owning a cafe that happened to be inside the encampment’s borders. The café’s windows were smashed—not once but twice by Capitol Hill’s vigilante arbitrators of justice.
A brick was thrown through a coworker’s back car window as she was trying to leave for work. A man hopped up on methamphetamine and rage shattered my bar’s windows with a two by four while patrons were inside. It took two good Samaritans of comparable height and build to disarm the wood plank wielding tweaker and that was only after he had broken the windows of every business from Cha Cha to Cupcake Royale.
An alleged kidnapping, two murders, four shootings, and several sexual assaults later and CHOP was raided by SPD on July 1st, 2020. The protests lasted the entire summer and so did the vandalism of small businesses.
Later in 2020 Carmen Best would resign as Police Chief. 2020 would also be Jenny Durkan’s final year as mayor. The city council stymied SPD’s budget and voted to reduce the size and scope of the department. A wave of resignations and early retirements at SPD followed the council’s resolution. Neighborhoods on the edges of high crime areas like the one I lived in were patrolled and policed less. I later learned that I was living through what has been dubbed “the Ferguson effect.” Or the impact of less police presence in poor working-class neighborhoods after the 2020 protests contributing to higher violent crime rates in already disenfranchised communities.
Gunshots in my neighborhood became a nightly occurrence. I witnessed two mass shootings from my apartment windows. One was at 4:50 am on a Friday morning when a neighbor had unloaded his semi-automatic rifle into the courtyard of his apartment complex. The SWAT team came and eventually shot to disarm him. The other involved three vehicles (allegedly-the neighborhood talks) with 50-100 rounds of bullets outside of Washington Hall, an old and locally famous music venue around the corner from my building. I recall watching terrified teenagers and young 20-somethings running for their lives screaming “active shooter” while I looked on from my bedroom helpless and afraid.
I had a friend randomly stabbed in the neck on the light rail with his mom after picking her up from the airport at 10 o'clock at night on a Tuesday. Another was jumped and robbed on her way to a local corner store. Two more were held up at gunpoint in the Capitol Hill neighborhood walking home from bars. Random guns were left in our sinks at Cha Cha after busy Saturday night shifts and shootings along the Pike-Pine corridor of the neighborhood also spiked. I developed symptoms that mirrored PTSD (I have never been officially diagnosed) where loud noises caused my nervous system to become dysregulated along with hypervigilance when I walked outside.
The final straw came on a sunny walk to work in August 2022. I was heading to my day job when I spotted a man clearly in distress. It was not until 30 seconds in that I realized the red liquid running down half his face and arms was blood. I stayed with him outside of the homeless encampment he had run out of as he laid on the sidewalk in agony and called 911. The dispatcher informed me that there were reports of a machete attack nearby and I could leave the area if I wanted to. But I did not leave. It did not feel right to leave a person in this much pain, and I waited until a lone police officer showed up 20 minutes later.
It did not initially sink in what had happened to me until a few days afterwards and I never walked down that part of Yesler Way ever again. It was that incident that compelled me to make the hard decision to leave the city I loved but was now scared of.
I have told the story of the machete attack as a cool party trick in part because I cannot get it out of my head and on the flipside because very few people seem to believe me. I have been gaslighted by friends more left of center than me that I am exaggerating my experiences. Usually none of these people have ever visited Seattle or if they have it was a week-long stay near Pike Place Market (although 3rd and Pine across the street from the market sign gets pretty sketchy at night). The same people who lament that crime is just something you have to deal with in every city and my “far right talking points” aren’t welcome also seem to be the same folks who fetishize communist led revolution all the while never actually being in the center of a violent uprising themselves…like…I don’t know…a do-it-yourself occupy movement.
I left Seattle on May 31st, 2023. From 2020 to when I left in 2023 the fire season in the pacific northwest had gotten increasingly worse. Smoke filled skies were appearing earlier and earlier in the summer months with the air taking on the scent and taste of an ashtray. I quelled my sadness about leaving the Emerald City by celebrating never having to endure another smoke season of dark skies and toxic air. As we headed east warnings started popping up on the radio about a large cloud of smoke from forest fires in Quebec Province engulfing the eastern seaboard.
I changed radio stations. Driving out of Seattle tuned in to KEXP Leonard Cohen’s “You Want it Darker” played in the subaru. A fitting song for a sad ending I thought. Driving away from the city of upper middle-class warfare towards dark ominous clouds of toxic fumes and into the unknown.
I live in Philly now and I work at UPenn. When the UPenn encampment sprang up on the college green a month ago the comparisons seemed obvious, and I had to itch the urge to see the tents and protesters for myself. The area of the protest was smaller, and the demonstrators appeared less threatening, but the language felt more violent. Signs like “Defund the Police” were replaced with “Globalize the Intifada” trading the dumb but idealist idea of living in a peaceful utopia without the need for law enforcement with an active call for bloodshed and war.
I saw one PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) flag-a designated terrorist organization with ties to Hamas. And when they finally cleared the UPenn weeks long sleepover party law enforcement did find pamphlets and manuals celebrating violent resistance and “create your own adventure” guides on how to be a terrorist. And so, the baton of liberation has been passed from CHOP to POP or what I am calling the Palestine Occupied Protest.
In between the summer of 2020 and my departure, a lot about Seattle had changed. I had changed. I moved to the city being braver than the version of myself that I carried away with me. However, I also left with a set of experiences that has made me a wiser and stronger person. I no longer wonder where rampant directionless populist protest movements go–it does not end with peaceful outcomes and satisfactory solutions but someplace darker.
You want it darker.
We kill the flame.