M otel odor is different from hotel odor. This is what
separates the two. A hotel smells, if you smell it at all, like effort:
the effort to cleanse or to cover over everything that smells.
The particular magic of a hotel is that, through a certain overall
system of strenuousness, it subtracts residue with every guest rather
than adds it. (Full disclosure: I used to be a hotel maid.) When the
residue begins to build up in a hotel, that’s when it becomes a motel.
A motel is like a body. Lying down in it, you’re lying down with someone. Who is it? You could spend all of your time in a motel just
lying there and thinking about this question if it weren’t so
unsettling. Touching things feels too personal. “I sho did wear flip
flops in the shower,” someone who identified himself as David M. wrote
in a review posted to the internet of the Eighth Avenue Inn, the motel
located in the no-man’s-land between South Lake Union and the retail
core downtown. David M. tried describing the deathy smells: The AC was
a “urinal,” the heater was “burnt human hair,” and somewhere was
“ferret carcass.”
David M.’s fetid room may be the same room where, now, an
angel-faced, delicate teenage boy in purple pants sits nervously on his
first day away from home. “I always wanted to leave Texas—”
His mother interrupts him: “He announced it when he was 4.”
They smile at each other. The boy’s father, stepmother, and older
sister are also in the room, and the boy, named John Pyburn, is the
family oddball—the sister has a finance degree and all three
parents work at oil companies, while he’s at art
school—but in what seems like a peaceable way. “We’re afraid
to tell people on the West Coast what we do,” the mother says, and they
all laugh. Laughter is in the air all up and down the smelly corridors
of the motel, as parents like John’s drop off their babies at what was
until very recently a dingy motel, surrounded by other fetid “inns,”
car-rental lots, a liquor store, a Midas, and a 24-hour greasy spoon
painted forest green and camel/vomit called the Hurricane Cafe. It’s an
unsightly little valley—an anti-neighborhood—with an almost
sarcastically good view of the Space Needle. This valley is the cradle
of the first dorms that Cornish College of the Arts, in its 95 years of
existence, has ever had.
The historic move-in day was last Sunday, kicking off even before
the 9:00 a.m. start time because there were already families lining up
around the block of Cornish’s main building. All day, 200 students and
their parents carted in boxes and suitcases and refrigerators and
guitars and amps and cameras and printers and lamps and posters. What
used to be the Eighth Avenue Inn gradually transformed into the Eighth
Avenue Residence Hall. Across the street, what used to be the Days Inn
became the Seventh Avenue Residence Hall. (They need better names,
obviously.)
The block changed overnight. It’s like two ant farms were plopped
down in a deserted alley. Until now, the students at Cornish—a
private art school with departments in theater and performance
production, art and design, dance, and music—had to find their
own
housing. Most of them still will, since the college is only
requiring first-year students to live in the dorms. But the dorms are a
step toward a long-term plan for a unified Cornish, rather than its
current split model (half the campus is on Capitol Hill). They also
make Cornish more attractive in the endless bid to keep enrollment
up.
In the last two months of scrambling renovation, the carpets have
been changed, but certain things are still the same. The former motel
signs haven’t been removed—only emptied of logos and words. Where
once there was a giant sun rising over the words “Days Inn” along
Seventh Avenue at Blanchard Street, now there’s just a giant white
sunrise shape that glows like a pointless false moon at night. To avoid
freaking out the students, only RAs live in the rooms that look out on
the radiant alien. It may be freaky, but it’s also the best thing about
the entire block.
Inside on moving day, cuteness and
enthusiasm rule. In hotel-motel terms, Cornish is a Four Seasons:
Tuition is about $30,000 a year, and the room-and-board plans add
something like $9,000. But nobody is complaining about the lingering
motelness of the buildings and their location. Every door is decorated
with signs of the students’ names according to the floor’s set theme
(old-school video games, bug-virus creatures, literary figures like
Yeats and Beckett, trees). Cornish staff and RAs wear unbelievably
bright blue T-shirts to distinguish themselves. There seems to be an
undue amount of clapping. New roommates are making a second level of
assumptions about each other, most having met on Facebook already.
There’s no overarching style: In one room, Erika from Covington is in
all black (black Mohawk, black trench coat in closet, black sheets on
bed); her roommate, Miranda from Sun Valley, is in a short white dress
and has white sheets. (It’s weird.) They were matched based on a short
application form. (“Neither one has body-odor issues,” Miranda’s mom
says. “They discussed that.”) In another room, two ready-for-TV-pretty
best friends from Colorado have replaced their motel odor with
“essential oils,” set up an herbal-tea station, and stashed their
organic lollipops. Susanna Daly, a musical-theater hopeful, leads her
mother, Betsy, into her room (it’s a theater family: Betsy was on
Broadway “a hundred years ago” and her husband, Joe, is an acting
teacher), and they agree it’s a palace compared to the dorm rooms in
New York. It’s big. It has its own bathroom—a universal perk of
the motel-dorm. The Dalys wanted Susanna to go to Cornish, but worried
she’d have to get her own apartment. When Cornish announced it would
have dorms, the deal was done.
After-hours, parents (and everyone else) are banished. There’s a
mandatory 9:00 p.m. meeting in each hall. From the door of the
Hurricane across the street, an entirely new scene is visible in the
dorm windows. The man lodged between the legs of a lady at the diner’s
entrance does not notice this yet, nor does the lady. They remain there
for a while, then disappear into the bar side of the restaurant.
By 10:00 p.m., a handful of students are eating burgers in the
sticky red booths beneath framed photographs of the destruction caused
by Hurricane Andrew. An espresso machine on a cart near the door hasn’t
worked for more than a year because nobody liked it enough to clean it.
Two regulars (holding positions 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 on the high-score
list of the video game Time Crisis inside the door) are not
thrilled that the place is about to become an art-school hangout, but
they don’t elaborate, they just shrug. Outside, under the great
pointless false moon, two art students light cigarettes as they cross
the street to the Hurricane. On the sidewalk behind them, a homeless
man with a pit bull pretends to hit another homeless man in the head
with a pint carton of milk. Welcome to art school. 
Full disclosure: Jen Graves teaches contemporary art history on an adjunct basis at Cornish.
This story has been updated since its original publication.
Hmmm, speaking of effort, this article’s tone reeks of the effortless. That is to say, it has all the tone and snark of a capitol hill cafe table, with none of the depth or real poignancy of real journalism. Welcome to the Jade City.
It seems to me that providing students a community where they can live and learn together, in the heart of downtown Seattle, has a lot more good sides than bad. If the students are happy, you should be too, because at the end of the day, its not about you and your musings on an old hotel turned residence hall. Its about the vibrant and enthusiastic students who are happy to be members of the the Cornish community and will undoubtedly bring new life into Denny Triangle. Good work Cornish and Welcome New Students! Make this space your own!
Hey, wait a sec! I think these motel-dorms are kind of fascinating, not *bad*. ??
I’m not really sure what the point of this article was.
To point out the fact that Cornish’s new residence halls are in converted motels? But any decent piece of journalism would have also researched the other issues, both pro and con, surrounding having a campus located so close to downtown. And what were the other options? To construct a brand new building? Where would the funds come from for that?
Was the point that the RAs wore bright shirts so people in need of help could find them easily? Or that everyone was a tad over-enthusiastic? Probably not.
Maybe this article was written to bring about the revelation that there are homeless people in Seattle? What a grand epiphany.
And don’t even diss on the Hurricane, the food is amazing and the people who work there rock.
If you’re going to write a pointless article, at least get your facts right, move-in was Sunday, not Saturday.
Isnt it ironic that a cornish faculty member wrote this article?
This is a great article. As somebody who started college at the age of 25, I can only dream about how that freshman experience could be. This sounds like an awesome way for young people to make connections.
Douchus – I agree with part of your statement.
Oh, Jen, the RAs don’t have the rooms with the signs “to avoid freaking out the students.” They have the rooms with the signs so they’ll know when the signs get, as we used to put it, _improved_.
These are _so much better_ than my art school dorms were, motel stank and all – I’d be all over these. MAKE IT AWESOME, GUYS! ^_^
I would recommend getting some febreze and a new contemporary art history teacher…
maybe the cornish students who responded negatively to this article failed jen’s class… hahahahahahhaaahha
maybe the cornish students that responded negatively to this article failed jen’s class… hahahhahaahhaha
I think some readers may be missing the point. The story, to me, is a real, rich and multi-dimensional look at these dorms and the people who have been there before and are there now. It’s not about – or as simple – as whether they’re “good” or “bad,” but rather the piece explores the merging of the present and future with the physical history of these buildings. Rather than malign that, Jen is paying tribute. After all, who are we but the sum of our experiences and our hope for the future? True for buildings too, I think.
Don’t hate on the Hurricane cafe! I lived at Fountain Court up the street only a few blocks, while it was terribly overpriced, I didn’t hate passing this area all the time. I think this is not a bad thing for this neighborhood!
1. Shitty motel in downtown seattle
or
2. A huge building full of 12′ by 19′ rooms.
Dude, I would take the motel any day. Clean it up, make it all cornish college artsy and call it home. Judging by the pictures the rooms aren’t too bad in size either and damn, look at that window.
*Side-Note*
The Starry Night painter’s taped to the wall is hilarious.
How long before we drive by and see beer bottles stacked in the windows like any other college dorm? Honestly I bet there will be some great art installations.
Hey what about all the displaced teen prostitutes that are now out of a stomping ground? Daddy didnt send them to college.
Jen:
Perhaps your readers are assuming you’re looking at the motel dorms as “bad” because your tone is vicious and mean-spirited. How else would you expect your readers to take it when you call an entire neighborhood “an unsightly little valley” and a “deserted alley” and refer to the neighboring businesses as “fetid?”
If you can’t see how your readers could have that reaction, I gather you also can’t see the irony of your puritanical rant existing in a “newspaper” that supports itself financially by promoting the objectification of women with one-inch sex ads.
I’m the General Manager of the “green and camel/puke” painted Hurricane Café, and it should be noted that The Stranger used to always have nice things to say about us. The magazine once even regaled us as the “teenage poet-laureate friendly Hurricane Café.”
But then we stopped advertising in The Stranger, and since then we’ve noticed The Stranger tossing more and more little barbs like those in your story our way while continuing to use our location as a spawning-point for its political perspectives dressed up as news.
We may exist in an unsightly valley by your elitist standards, but at least we’re not fucking hypocrites: we don’t pretend to be a liberal magazine while using the thug-like tactic of bashing on businesses that don’t support us financially with advertising dollars.
– Richard Nelson
Richard: The area IS unsightly — and who says that’s a terrible thing? This is the farthest thing from a puritanical rant; it’s a simple mood piece about an area of the city nobody ever pays any attention to. The Hurricane, I really liked. The server was particularly awesome; he described the death of the espresso machine, which made us both laugh. Not everything is about paint color and advertising.
Jen
Cornish is 30,000 a year now? Damn… That’s a 400% increase in tuition from my first year there, in ’89-90.
I’m just curious: Do the dorms/hotels have a kitchen, mess hall, or whatnot? Or are the kids on their own when it comes to meals?
Jen:
I’m glad you liked The Hurricane, but I’m displeased with the (not so) careful choice of words you used to tell the world how much you liked it.
As a journalist, you should know that your choice of language dictates the ways in which you readers interact with your published mood pieces. By placing your focus where you did ignored many facts of the matter.
Our espresso cart didn’t die because no one loved it enough to clean it. We don’t clean it as often as we should because it doesn’t work after the $300 motor blew out. We haven’t fixed it because before it broke, we only sold about $350/year in espresso products. In fact, we’d love to sell it.
Our seats are vinyl. You might stick to vinyl, but calling them “sticky” implies a dirtiness and lack of effort to achieve cleanliness and frankly, that’s not us. It may have been at one time, but those employees who lived up to that low perception your article perpetuates have long been replaced with a higher caliber crew.
It’s like me saying about The Stranger, “It’s great if you’re looking for a magazine with a fantastic sex advice column surrounded by one-sided social and political views and art/film/music reviews that are little more than individual opinions with a touch of snark to them.”
I believe there’s truth to that statement, but stopping there wouldn’t tell the whole truth, would it? That would ignore the clear passion The Stranger staff has toward improving Seattle’s art, nightlife, and music scene. It would ignore the wit and charm that is often brought to bare about the issues many of your readers care about. In short, it would ignore the hard work the employees at The Stranger put into publishing a damn good underground paper.
By focusing your attentions on our paint color and a broken espresso machine, you gloss over the hard work we at The Hurricane put in to keeping a 100+ year old building as nice as possible given the fiscal, legal, and social restraints we must work around.
By doing so, you gloss over the hard work we do to keep our standards of service and quality up while avoiding a corporate “cookie cutter” diner environment that most of the few remaining 24-hour diners have.
By doing so, you gloss over the outreach we’ve done in welcoming the Cornish art students to our neighborhood.
You’re a wordsmith. Use care with how you craft your words, or don’t be surprised when people assume they mean things you didn’t intend.
– Richard
By definition, unsightly means “unpleasant to the sight.” Unpleasant means “not pleasant.” So you can see, Jen, how your readers may have inferred that your opinion of the area “nobody ever pays attention to” was a negative one. Furthermore, using the word “vomit” to describe the color of a building doesn’t exactly make the place sound like a place you’d want to dine. Don’t imply that Richard misunderstood the tone of your article. Unless the definition of these words have new meaning that you’re privy to, I can totally understand why he might feel as if you were attacking the Hurricane and its surroundings.
The Hurricane is an awesome place with a staff that keeps people coming back.
And Richard is a genius–trust me. You do not want to get into a literary battle with him.
You may know art history, but that man knows words.
I, for one, think it’s great to create affordable, accessible housing for students, particularly in a city that is overrun with pricey luxury condos. And what a smart re-use of existing buildings that, let’s face it, weren’t exactly thriving as motels anymore. Congratulations, Cornish, on a smart move!
Damn. I wish people would read the text of ballot measures as meticulously as they read this article. Lost in all the parsing is this simple, clear statement by the author: The new dorms “make Cornish more attractive in the endless bid to keep enrollment up.”
From my own safe distance of having no affiliation with Cornish or the Hurricane or the neighborhood, this supposedly snarky article left me wistful. How truly great to be John Pyburn, the “angel-faced, delicate teenage boy in purple pants” making a new home for himself in this ex-motel and taking the first steps toward a dream he first voiced at four years old.
Bottom line: The average kid dreaming of going away to art school would read this story and want to move straight into one of these dorm rooms. Stank or no stank.
The people who’d be scared off from Cornish because of this article are the same sort of people who’d go see Rent and need to Purell themselves after each toast in “La Vie Boheme.”
Lay down your pitchforks and your Febreze bottles, folks. We live in a big world where some truly awful things happen. Save your venom for that stuff. The world and Cornish and the Hurricane and the neighborhood are going to survive this article.
Holy crap, their own bathrooms?! Universities’ in washington don’t even have the smarts to do that. Go Cornish.
Personally as someone who both worked with the public on the level of this neighoburhood and is now going to uni, all I can say is this is a pretty good move, or at least life learning experience for these freshmen. Especially being away from home for the first time, etc.
I can’t even say that about the universities here in washington, I’ve visited both and feel like the ‘community’ around it reeks of plastic facade, to put it bluntly.
Bitch you WORK for Cornish!
This was fascinating, utterly fascinating! I love the give and take, the barbs; thinly disguised or not. I agree that people will take what you say at face value, and if you want to make friends or have others feel you are sympathetic to them; you had better watch what comes out of your mouth (or is written in a well read paper, etc.). I agree with Richard in that the “terms” in which Jen describes the Hurricane would upset and anger the employees of said business. The neighborhood in general won’t, of course, get up in arms, as it is an inanimate object! Maybe the people who live there will though, as they probably already are aware they live in an “unsightly little valley” and don’t want to be reminded! I know she was going for cutesy, but mostly came off as pretentious.
Now, all that being said, I am glad that Cornish has solved the lack of living space for their students. I have a third year Cornish student and it was a big worry over where he would live his first year. Sending your child off to the big city and into unknown neighborhoods is extremely unsettling!
What people should actually be focusing on now, that is considerably more important than this article, is Cornish’s recent changes as to firing all their dependable security personnel who had been with them for long periods (up to 25 years), and hiring a cheap, 24 hour a day security company. I would be more concerned as a parent about that change, than the color of the Hurricane! I have personally seen some shady people who were hired at cheap security companies that weren’t completely background checked, etc., and did some terrible things. You guys may want to check into that and question it! Especially since young students are living alone for the first time!
Richard,
You have every right to be pissed about the negative comments about the Hurricane. Your place is dope, so try not to let her words bother you.
Being negatively critical and casually mean-spirited is the hipster way; it is all they know. In other words, player-hating is key to the hipster sub-culture.
Rightly or wrongly, the hipsters at the Stranger wield a great deal of power over the people who read their works. Strangely enough, (or “ironically”, in hipster lingo), associating your establishment with “puke” might actually be considered a compliment in the strange(r), bizarro world of anti-matter “hip”.