The Dearborn Street Bridge (seen here in 1917) was renamed Jose Rizal Bridge in the 1970s, after the 19th-century Filipino revolutionary. Credit: CITY OF SEATTLE, MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES

The Dearborn Street Bridge (seen here in 1917) was renamed Jose Rizal Bridge in the 1970s, after the 19th-century Filipino revolutionary.

The Dearborn Street Bridge (seen here in 1917) was renamed Jose Rizal Bridge in the 1970s, after the 19th-century Filipino revolutionary. CITY OF SEATTLE, MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES

Let’s begin our walk here, at Promenade 23 Shopping Center. Its north side has a Starbucks that opened in 1997 as part of a Earvin “Magic” Johnson inner-city revitalization project. (If you do not know who Magic Johnson is, I can do nothing for you, man.)

The theme of this Starbucks’s interior and exterior design was plainly inspired by South Jackson Street’s once-popping jazz scene. The scene took off in the 1930s, flourished in the 1950s, and declined in the period (the late-1960s) that experienced white flight and urban disinvestment. In the late 1970s, the city destroyed the old buildings that housed the jazz clubs and attempted to renew the area with small and large businesses. When Starbucks opened in 1997, the Seattle Times painfully described it as “urban re-brew-al.”

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...