There aren’t enough cozy coffee shops.

I have had it up to here with all these modern Scandinavian-style coffee shop clones. They’re cold, white, and sterile, with all the warmth and ambience of a hospital room. You can usually recognize them by their ubiquitous peg letter menu boards (you know the ones) and uncomfortable metal stools with no back support, seemingly designed to torment anyone even moderately blessed in the cake department. Good luck trying to linger here for more than an hour without your sciatica acting up.

I long for the warm, earthy aesthetic of the ’90s and early 2000s. I want to see squishy, overstuffed armchairs and cushy couches. I want to feel like I just walked onto a Nora Ephron movie set.

A few shops in Seattle still get this cozy, inviting vibe: A Muddy Cup in Wallingford and all locations of Chocolati, which seem frozen in an earlier time (in a good way). C&P Coffee Company in West Seattle, which feels like a living room and bids patrons to “stay awhile.” And Pan de La Selva inside City Hall, whose owner, Mayra Sibrian, decorated it to be colorful and maximalist. Also, RIP to Bedlam Coffee in Belltown—I still miss your comfy reading nooks and cinnamon toast. JULIANNE BELL

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Seattle needs more public bathrooms.

I piss. You piss. We all piss. We also shit. Even women. It’s coming out. Right now, maybe. The question is, “where?”

Seattle’s answer: a shrug. 

Our potty ratio—about 25 public bathrooms per 100,000 residents—is dismal. What if an Etsy Witch hexes Seattle with the dreaded and all-too-common diarrhea curse? What if RFK Jr. replaces the fluoride in our water supply with Giardia? What if we all lose our keys at the same time? The streets would run brown. To an extent, they already do.

This city generally blames homeless people for that. We don’t have reliable poop and pee statistics, but it’s a reasonable assumption that people who don’t have a bathroom of their own are forced to go outside more than people who do have a bathroom.

Building is challenging. Plumbing is hard. It’d all be so expensive to solve. But I think the bigger barrier is the ugly little thought that public bathrooms “enable” homeless people to live outside. And that a door to piss behind is really just a drug den in waiting. A place for someone to hide and hurt the city’s upstanding citizens. The city is full of private bathrooms—in offices and schools and homes. If they want a bathroom, they can just get a fucking job, right??

We can play Twister with human rights talk and the complex, social drivers of homelessness. Or, we can accept the simple math. Fewer bathrooms = more public pooping and peeing. We understand this when there’s a parade, a festival, or a construction site, and line the streets with porta-potties. But when the work and play are over, we slam the door and slap a padlock on it. It’s shameful. 

I don’t want to spend all day up on my porcelain throne, but let’s consider what this really means for us. We’re sacrificing a lot to make people suffer.

I bet you make the calculus without even realizing it. The run or park hang you cut short to get within pissing distance of a toilet. The list of private bathrooms in familiar places stored in the back of your mind. The ambiguous worry you won’t be able to find one when visiting somewhere new. The $4 you know you have to spend on bottled water in exchange for a whizz. Over the course of a year, how much do we spend to use the bathroom? $100? $200? 

Where do you go if you accidentally touch something gross and have to wash your hand? What do you do if your snot-nosed kid needs his diaper changed? Do we think it’s right that some 19-year-old barista is responsible for cleaning up after all the miserable shits that happen within a 10-block radius because the coffee shop they work at is the neighborhood’s only option? Are we really, really better off dispatching a city shit squad to powerwash the alleys in Pioneer Square? Is this the best use of our public resources?

This is beyond antisocial. It’s sociopathic. Bathrooms now! VIVIAN McCALL

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Local filmmakers aren’t making films locally.

As the recent fiasco with Harbor Island Studios made evident (on the chopping block; not on the chopping block), the film industry is not taken seriously by any government body—city, county, or state. We (those who make films) always have to fight tooth and nail for tax incentives, for crumbs to fall from a mighty high budget table. And if that weren’t bad enough, some of our top filmmakers have not made a film in years.

Let’s begin with Zia Mohajerjasbi. He finished shooting Know Your Place in 2019. But despite the attention and awards the film received, Mohajerjasbi has yet to get a new project off the ground. And then there’s S.J. Chiro. She completed her film East of the Mountains, based on a novel by an established writer, David Guterson, in 2020, and counted Tom Skerritt and Mira Sorvino as its stars. And she received positive reviews after its release in 2021. Nevertheless, Chiro is in the same boat as Mohajerjasbi. She has plans, but so far, nothing doing.

Another shocker is Bao Tran, who directed Paper Tigers, a martial arts movie released in 2020. It was Tran’s directorial debut and received rave reviews. Rotten Tomatoes ranks it as one of the Best Action Comedies and Best Asian American Movies. He showed he has the chops to direct bigger and more challenging projects, but he hasn’t released a film in five years. 

These lags between feature films come with a heavy price. They erode what a local or regional film industry must always accumulate: institutional memory. A feature film requires a lot of time to plan (pre-production), a large crew and many weeks to execute (production), and several more months to transform footage into a complete work of art (post-production). The process keeps a lot of people in the industry busy and in the city.  And the more accessible crew and talent are, the more efficient is the production process. But if your leading directors are not working for years at a time, this vital institutional memory is depreciated or completely lost. Seattle is condemned to continually reinvent filmmaking. CHARLES MUDEDE

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We should be able to tap our credit cards or phones to pay for transit. 

Around the world, transit riders are waving their phones or gently tapping their credit cards to enter the glorious universe of a bus, a train, a ferry. In some parts of China, people pay for transit with their palms. Meanwhile, in Seattle, we are stuck in the past. 

Don’t get me wrong, I do not want the palm-payment technology. I would be happy with the simple, elegant alternative of paying my fare the way I pay for everything else: with my card or with my phone. The closest thing we have to the modern era of transit payment is a digital Orca Card that only Google phone owners can use to tap-to-pay. Since I’m a fool who always loses her Orca card or forgets to put money on it, I’ve opted for the digital tickets on the Transit Go App. You cannot scan these tickets. You just tap them and show the bus driver and hope they believe you’ve paid. For a smarter technological alternative to paper tickets, it’s very dumb.

We’ve been signaling ourselves as the city of the future for decades. That’s what that big needle in Lower Queen Anne is all about (see: LQA vs. Uptown complaint). We should be on the cutting edge of this stuff. Plus, in a time when transit agencies around the country are struggling to make ends meet, making it easier for people to pay for transit is probably a good thing. Yes, yes, public transit should be free. But, it’s not. So, it should at least be easy to pay for. 

We’re behind the times. Places like New York City, Chicago, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Portland are ahead of the curve on this. London’s been doing it since 2012. Embarrassing! 

No firm date yet, Sound Transit says. “But expect it in 2026.” NATHALIE GRAHAM

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The Wildrose bathroom is not made for the human body.

Let me set the scene. You’re in the lesbian bar and you have to pee. You hustle past the bar and through the line of drunk women with no spatial awareness. You arrive at a door and open it. Inside, you find a bathroom with no spatial awareness. The hallway of black stalls ends in a cul-de-sac with a small sink. It’s so narrow that two people cannot squeeze past one another without embracing. This is not sexy close. It’s awkward. The stalls are no better. Forget about fingering. There’s no room for your legs, let alone a purse, if you pee at a normal angle. Side-saddle kind of works, but only barely. I’ve tried every stall. They’re all disappointing. I love you, Wildrose, but I cannot fathom how your bathroom ended up this way. VIVIAN McCALL

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Where have all the midnight screenings of ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ gone?

I will never forget the first time I saw Tim Curry as Dr. Frank N. Furter step out of the elevator singing “Sweet Transvestite” in fishnets and a sequin corset. I was 13, at the Admiral Theater’s monthly midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (shadow cast by the Vicarious Theatre Company), and I felt deeply confused and excited by my first crush that existed beyond gender. During the film, I joined the crowd in throwing rice, singing loudly to “Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me,” and yelling things like “Buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch!” For the first time, I was encouraged to be loud, messy, and wild. I loved it. This experience is not unique—most queer people over 30 have had this ah-ha moment at a midnight screening, whether it was while gazing at Curry’s thighs or wanting to kiss the hottie who’s dressed in Columbia cosplay. As the years have passed, I’ve seen these screenings slowly disappear from Seattle. Now it appears that our city has none left (the nearest is at the Blue Mouse Theatre in Tacoma). While adults needn’t walk far to find a queer community (see: Seattle’s many queer bars), queer teenagers shouldn’t have to miss out on this tradition. Like the alluring Frankenstein Place, midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show create a contained queer haven that encourages playful mischief, deviance, and sexual freedom. AUDREY VANN

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Please learn how to drive.

Seattle drivers are psychopathically passive. We all know this. Yes, driving can be scary and is inherently dangerous, but if you’re behind the wheel, you need to be alert to your surroundings and proactive. Please don’t be so deferential and timid that you yourself  become the danger and fuck up everyone’s commute with your insecurities. 

Here’s how it works. When it’s time to turn your car, you must turn your car. Get into an efficiency mindset. Your job is to turn your car, not to fret about whether it is polite to turn your car. You put your blinker on, and then you turn your car at a reasonable pace. 

You don’t slow to a crawl at the green light, just like you don’t randomly slow to a near stop at an uncontrolled intersection with no stop sign, pedestrians, or other cars coming. 

Switching lanes should also be done in a prompt manner. Slowly drifting to wherever you’re going is extremely not the move. Find a gap, turn on your blinker, and change lanes. 

Do not screech to a halt the moment you see a hint of a pedestrian a few feet from the sidewalk. Yes, pedestrians have the right of way. But if they’re not actively crossing the street, you’re just inviting a rear-end collision.

When faced with a four-way stop, review the rules beforehand so you’re confident enough to make it happen when the time comes. In Washington, the first vehicle to arrive has the right-of-way. If two vehicles arrive simultaneously, the one on the left yields to the one on the right. All drivers must also yield to pedestrians and cyclists. This should all happen fairly quickly. If you blank on the rules and someone is waving you forward, go with it, confidently, and then wave back. This is no time to fret, and no time to get overwhelmed. You’ve got this. 

Remember: Fear is the mind-killer. (And public transit is also an option.) THE STRANGER’S DRIVE-BETTER BOARD

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Can we tidy up in here, Seattle businesses? (Nothing crazy, regular cleaning.)

This is a gentle complaint, but babes, some of our beloved Seattle businesses are giving wellness check. If you run a space of any kind, part of the deal is giving the interior a good cleaning every once in a while and refusing to let entropy win. 

I get it. This happens at my apartment, too. We’re in the low-lit season for so much of the year that as soon as a single ray of sun comes through the window, you realize you’ve been living like Miss Havisham (gothic icon!) amongst layers of dust, cobwebs, and whatever that black soot is that just kind of accumulates on our window sills. It’s probably last on your list of things to get to, but we’d collectively get a serotonin boost if our fave restaurants, cafes, shops, and galleries did some zhuzhing. 

Some tough love: Beyond sweeping, dusting, and managing the fingerprint-to-glass ratio on a daily basis, if your walls are fucked up, paint them. How’s the signage doing? Does the bus tub nook have its own ecosystem at this point? Lightbulbs: All of them should work. If your bookshelf or display case is half merch, half random crap, edit it down. How are the chairs doing? Are they wobbly, shedding stuffing, or tattooed with ancient gum? Does the bathroom feel like a dare? If you got really into the plastic-flower-wall trend, there will come a time when you may want to fill some of the holes and de-grime those petals. If you have real plants, keep an eye on them, care for them. If any of them have died, it’s time to replace them, cruel as the cycle of life and death may be. If the Christmas lights are half out, let’s replace those, too. And honestly, maybe we don’t need Christmas lights unless we’re really good at hanging them? EMILY NOKES

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Seattle’s vegan restaurant ecology is flawed.

"Why can’t we find anything like this in Seattle?” I’ve whined to my partner too many times while enjoying meals at vegan eateries in Portland, Detroit, and Los Angeles (note: I’ve not been to LA since 2019). You know, places where you can get superior entrees that combine healthy grains, well-spiced vegetables, interesting dressings and sauces, expertly seasoned tofu, tempeh, and legumes, as well as freshly squeezed juices that make you feel Olympian. Places that innovate using high-quality, local ingredients or put ingenious spins on various ethnic specialties, without over-relying on the fryer or draining your bank account. 

“But, Dave,” you say, “Seattle has plenty of good vegan restaurants, you ungrateful bastard.” Okay, we do have some decent joints. But... there’s (mush)room for improvement! Now, I haven’t eaten at every vegan spot in the city, but it seems that the hive mind has determined that what the city’s meat-and-dairy-avoiders really want is bar/comfort food, prepared sans animal products. Or a menu laden with meat-substitute items, with too-clever names. (News flash: Most vegans are repulsed by food that replicates the taste of things with faces.) Or grub that’s so rich and pretentious the only folks who can afford it are the pretentious rich. Sure, I liked Plum, but it was a once-a-year treat for non-affluent eaters. Same with Cafe Flora and Harvest Beat. Not everyone here’s tech royalty.

Seattle’s flawed vegan restaurant ecology is vexing. We have the demand and bountiful regional ingredients. The city abounds with vegans and people open to chowing that way on a semi-regular basis. But they are underserved in this burg of 800,000 citizens. So, where are all the sensibly priced, flavorful, plant-based eateries in the vein of those that dominate PDX’s scene? 

I’ve had pleasant experiences at Wayward Vegan, Sunlight Cafe, Oak, and Loving Hut, but their meals never rose above “pretty good”—certainly not on the level of Portland benchmarks Harlow, Norah, and Mirisata. El Borracho excels in the Mexican realm, but that’s a narrow niche. Fremont newcomer Vital Creations shows potential to blossom into something special. Araya’s Place offers solid, varied Thai vegan dishes, but my worst case of food poisoning occurred after eating at the U-District branch. Life on Mars’s bar-food-heavy menu takes risks like David Bowie did with music, but it’s not all Hunky Dory. Chu Minh Tofu is a no-frills, affordable champ, but it’s located behind a barbed-wire fence on a beleaguered ID corner. Ba Bar Green in SLU serves tasty Vietnamese street fare, but it’s merely a grab-and-go window adjoined to Ba Bar proper. This arrangement is a metaphor for how many businesses treat vegans.

Seattle needs restaurants that hit the sweet spot of reasonably priced plates of wholesome, boldly flavored vegan victuals that aren’t hell-bent on tricking carnivores and/or bombing your gut. Entrepreneurs, you’re leaving money on the table. DAVE SEGAL

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The escalator etiquette here is bad.

There is a right way to use the escalator. This is important because we have so many escalators. And they are so long. The holes we dug for light rail are so deep. If you are in Seattle, you will find yourself on an escalator. If you do not want to walk up the escalator and would rather be whisked to your destination by the magic of the moving stairs, please stand to the right. This means putting all luggage to the right as well. Then, the people in a hurry, or in pursuit of their daily step goals, can speed by on the left. Standing on the left impedes this. Leaving your bag on the left does, too. We get these thick, clogged bottlenecks. Are we not used to living among other people, Seattle? Over 800,000 people live here now. We must shake our small city-itis. I’m sorry to tell you, but there is hustle and bustle around you now, and it’s not going away. Many of us like that about this growing city. Leave the left lane open. NATHALIE GRAHAM

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And the sidewalk etiquette isn’t any better. 

Gender equality—I love it. People of all genders should be able to do what they want without labels boxing them in or the patriarchy beating them down. And apparently, we’ve decided to apply that philosophy to our sidewalk conduct. The women in my life tell me that men don’t move to the side when they’re walking on the sidewalk. We must have won feminism, because now NOBODY moves on the sidewalk. Men, women, nonbinary people—doesn’t matter! Nobody’s moving out of anyone’s path! And you know what? You SHOULD! It’s RUDE. If you’re walking down the middle of the sidewalk, stop that! If you’re walking with six friends and y’all are taking up the whole sidewalk, CONDENSE! No one should have to duck into doorways or behind those little trees planted in the cement or walk into the literal fucking street to dodge swaths of people who have no concept of spatial awareness or common courtesy. Share the sidewalk! MICAH YIP

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Seattle city pools have terrible and limited lap-swimming hours.

Seattle, city of water, has 10 public city-run pools. Two of these pools are only open during the summer. For the rest, you can buy fairly affordable punchcards ($72 for 10 swims) or monthly passes ($85 for 35 days), good for all city pools. This seems like an easy way to get some exercise, right? Except the lap-swimming hours are crazy. 

I like Medgar Evers Pool next to Garfield High School in the Central District. When I first started swimming for exercise about two years ago (a byproduct of one of my Play Date columns), Medgar Evers had an early morning lap swim program from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. But it quietly disappeared about a month after I started swimming. For most days of the week, lap swimming happened only from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. or for two hours in the evening, starting around 6 or 7 p.m. None of them are easy to get to if you work regular hours, and even on a Tuesday at noon, the pool would be full. Evening hours brought it to a whole different level. At least two times in the past few months, I walked in, saw the churn of the water, and opted to save my precious punches left on my pass for a quieter pool experience. Then the city closed the pool for two months. 

Now, I’m trying to find which city pool I can swim at instead. All of them have the wildest, weirdest hours and windows for lap swimming. The Ballard Pool seems to only have one-hour time slots for lap swimming. Some have two hours. But the bulk of these time slots happen in the midmorning or early afternoon, when people are working. The biggest lap-swimming time slot for a Seattle city pool is at the Meadowbrook Pool in Lake City from noon to 4:00 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. Each day has different hours. 

For a city surrounded by water, where many people— I assume—want to swim for exercise and not freeze their tails off in the lakes during the winter, the lack of publicly available pool time is astounding. Perhaps this is a facilities issue; too many programs are sharing the same resources. Or, it’s a staffing problem; in 2022 and 2023, city beaches and pools closed down because there weren’t enough lifeguards. Either way, it’s not enough to allow me to be a consistent swimmer at Seattle’s pools. I’ll probably have to join the YMCA. Sigh. NATHALIE GRAHAM

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The public artist has gone too far.  

Everywhere you look, they’re there. Shh. You know who I’m talking about. They’re in the alleyways, they’re on the garage doors. Maybe every garage door at this point. Turn your head for just one moment, let your guard down even a little, and whoosh. A mural of a heavily sedated owl wearing a top hat has appeared, and all you felt was the temperature drop, the static on your skin. 

They’ve been here. 

They’ll be back. 

At first, you tell yourself the figures are harmless. A painting of a goofy little guy, some kind of gnome, maybe a vaguely cross-eyed squirrel. It’s kind of cute? But not really your style. That’s okay, not everything is for you. But the more you see them, the more you wish you could also see some other types of art. 

At least it’s just one neighborhood, you think. Or wait. No. You cross the city, there it is again: this time in the form of a heavy-browed sasquatch holding a coffee cup. They’re cropping up faster and faster these days. You hear rumors that there are plans for even more. A thousand new ones, they say. You keep your head down, knowing your peaceful neighborhood walk could, at any moment, be interrupted by an octopus holding a hamburger.

Behind closed doors, your poet friend calls the aesthetic “nautical-java-burner core” (I told you she was a poet). You start to think of it as a whimsy blight. The exterior world smiling back at you with the fixed gaze of a raccoon that’s one bong rip away from pulling out a ukulele at a party, unprompted. “It’s fine, everything’s fine.” 

But it’s not fine. Something is starting to feel unsettling about the ubiquity. This can’t be right. We’re smarter than this. Edgy, even. A city that repeatedly chooses the same frictionless aesthetic is revealing something about its own appetite for risk. It is choosing comfort over experiment, legibility over complexity, and familiarity over the possibility of being altered by an encounter with art. This isn’t who we are. Or is it? You can’t remember. 

    After a while, you stop being surprised. That’s the scariest part. You can’t remember the first one you saw. The murals feel older than the city itself, like they arrived in a batch before you did, an advance party softening the terrain. There is no moment of encounter anymore, only a low-resolution background hum of familiarity. The figures are not on the city, they’ve seeped into it. The soft tyranny of the familiar. 

They must be stopped, you think. We’re just confusing repetition with importance! You subtly ask around. A barista, a server, a first date; you’re met with pleasantly blank replies. “They’re just part of the city. It’s not about liking or disliking. They’ve always been here.” 

Some say that art should make you feel something. That even if you feel anger or disgust, then it’s done its job. But they’re right, it’s not about liking or disliking, you’re anhedonic. And worried. It’s unsettling that you did, in fact, maybe just prefer the side of the hospital better when it was greige, and blank. We need blank spaces, you begin to think. Just a few. We’ll suffocate without them.

You notice how the work never changes. You realize you are not witnessing an artist grow; you are watching a symbol reproduce. These aren’t murals—they’re sigils. They intend to replicate until every surface has been covered.  

Other artists quietly disappear. Who can compete with someone who will cover your building for free? Someone so determined in their spraypaint manifest destiny? The city’s Faustian bargain for getting to boast of being “covered in art.” 

One night, you walk home a different way, thinking you’ve outsmarted them. New block, new alley, a blank stretch of concrete. For a moment, the wall is just a wall.

Then you see it: a fresh outline, the first curve of a too-familiar heavy-lidded eye.

They’re here.

This is their city. 

You were only ever walking through it. EMILY NOKES

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Seattle’s street names make no sense.

Seattle’s streets look like they were named by taking handfuls of Scrabble tiles and some third-grader’s multiplication flashcards, throwing them up in the air, and seeing what tiles and cards landed closest to each other. N 41st St. 33rd Ave NE. NE 196th St. 238th Place SW. Sorry, but that is entirely unreadable. Tell me you look at that and your brain doesn’t just shut down.

And since our original city planners might as well have been 6-year-olds with sidewalk chalk, those streets intersect into five-way stops. I don’t care how sparse public transit is here—I would rather take the light rail and live to see another day. MICAH YIP