Two turn-of-the-century commercial buildings on historic Hewitt Avenue in downtown Everett were razed on March 23, before neighborhood activists could obtain an injunction to stop the two-block demolition project. City powers-that-be had condemned the worn-yet-fixable structures to make way for a minor-league hockey arena. The activist group Citizens for a Better Arena obtained 4,000 signatures in a drive to put the project to a public vote. The city council threw out the petition after city officials pleaded that they needed to get the arena started during the current fiscal year in order to qualify for state matching funds. The matter is now tied up in the courts, while demolition plans continue unchecked as of now. Among the buildings still slated to be knocked down is the one now used as Everett's first and only art-house movie theater.
The Beatty Book Store, one of Seattle's grandes dames of used and antiquarian bookselling, closed on March 20. The biggest share of the store's inventory was shipped off to Powell's City of Books in Portland and Bowie and Co. in Seattle; the Friends of the Seattle Public Library and local charities got the rest. Beatty first opened in 1968 (at a former location of Shorey's, Seattle's oldest antiquarian bookseller); since 1980 it was owned by Barbara Beatty McGovern (the founders' daughter) and her husband Tom. They maintained it as a comfy, spacious, yet gloriously cluttered pair of rooms, in which one could find anything from literary first editions to turn-of-the-century magazines to glossy picture books about lighthouses. Audiences and performers from the nearby Moore Theatre often showed up; McGovern remembers the day when Teller (of Penn and...) "spent a lot of time talking to us." But not only had the Beatty suffered from the same recent retail slump affecting other small shops, but its storefront at 1925 Third Avenue was effectively obscured from public view for the past year when its building was scaffolded after the Ash Wednesday earthquake (the scaffolds are still up, the repairs are still not done). Barbara McGovern adds, "Much of our business came from tourists and out-of-towners. When the flying stopped after September 11, that really curtailed things for us." For now, McGovern says she and her husband will retire from bookselling. "We're going to read, and we're going to explore all the wonderful parts of Seattle we couldn't when we were working six days a week."
