The view from the OK Hotel.

The view from the OK Hotel. Kelly O

Artist Scotty Rickard lives so close to Seattle’s viaduct that sometimes he fantasizes about jumping out of his window and trying to grab on to it, action-movie-style. “It would have to be a pretty far jump,” he says from the third floor of the OK Hotel, guessing the giant concrete monolith is about 12 feet away. “But I bet a person could do it.” (The current world record for the long jump is 29 feet, 4.5 inches…)

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....