Dave Alvin
Neighborhood focus: ShorelineAurora: The great gray way
Paris has the Champs Elysees. New York has Broadway. Seattle has Aurora.
Named for the Roman goddess of the dawn, divinity may be the last thing to come to a Seattleite’s mind when hearing “Aurora.” Nonetheless, there is a certain endearing quality about Seattle’s defining thoroughfare. Unpretentious, working-class and seemingly unchanging, Aurora serves as a reminder for those of us who sometimes forget that our great city has not always been embodied by doughy, goateed, $4-latte-sipping computer engineers.
Grotesque, fascinating and repellent, like a Mick Jagger video or a bloody automobile accident, Aurora is something we want to look away from, something we want to ignore – but just can’t seem to. Twenty miles of concrete, six lanes wide can’t be closeted so easily.
Luckily for Shoreline students, this gray, oily ribbon of Seattle’s past runs right by our college.
For this neighborhood review, I stopped by a few of the pleasant and several of the dubious establishments between North 150th and 170th streets.
From 160th and Greenwood Avenue North, point your car east, throw it into neutral, and you can coast all the way here.
Come down ... to Aurora.
Old Village Korean Restaurant
15200D Aurora Ave. N.
11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily
You can find this great little restaurant in the same strip mall as Safeway and Wendy’s. The mood is more traditional and comfortable than in most of the other Korean places strewn along Aurora north and south of here.
I stick with what I know, ordering either Bulkogi, barbequed beef, or Bibim bap, cold, marinated bean sprouts, carrots, spinach and other vegetables served in a bowl with beef, which you then mix with rice and cover in sweet chili paste. Both cost $7.95.
For me, the best part about dining in a Korean restaurant is the wide array of appetizers that come with any dish. At the Old Village, they bring you about eight or nine small bowls with everything from potato salad to seaweed to fishcakes to kimchee (fermented cabbage and chili paste).
Aurora Oriental Market
15202 Aurora Ave. N.
Across the parking lot from the Old Village, this market sells oriental noodles, snacks, sliced meat, pots and pans, massive jars of kimchee (less than half the cost of the kimchee at Central Market) and many of the same appetizers they serve at the restaurant. There is a small produce section selling vegetables used in Korean cuisine — bok choy, green onions, bean sprouts — at much cheaper prices than you can find at any of the major grocery stores.
Sears
15711 Aurora Ave. N.
There is something sad about watching the collapse of Sears, the giant, prototypical American retailer. More than 100 years old, Sears sparked an unparalleled expansion of American consumption with the revolutionary idea of mailing goods directly to consumers. Their catalogue also served as makeshift toilet paper to millions of farmers. How’s that for corporate and consumer innovation?
I’m not sure I would recommend buying anything here, but it can be fun to wander the spookily deserted isles of this huge store, pretending that a neutron bomb has detonated over North Seattle, leaving just you and all of those Craftsman tools.
While walking amongst the lawn mowers I overheard a young employee sitting behind a cash register with nothing to do but complain to her co-worker that it had been so long since she had moved, she was afraid that her body was stiffening with rigor mortis.
Stop by soon to soak up the apathy and decay.
Shay’s Lounge
15744 Aurora Ave. N.
This is the place at the corner of 160th with the green sign and the nearly unreadable reader board proclaiming “World’s greatest Omelets.” Having driven past this bar for years, I decided to stop and have a peek inside.
Dark and smoky, with Bud on tap and football on TV, this joint has a miasmic atmosphere you could cut with a knife. (I’d clean my knife afterwards, if I were you.)
Shay’s Lounge is a decrepit, geriatric cave — scary, even without the cardboard Halloween decorations hanging in the murky corners of the bar.
If somberly discussing man’s heart of darkness over a beer is your idea of a good time, no place is darker than Shay’s.
Goldie’s
15030 Aurora Ave. N.
Drift on Inn
16708 Aurora Ave. N.
Club Hollywood
Next to the Drift on Inn
These three casinos have all been remodeled within the last 10 years and contain the same basic elements: meat and potato dinners, recently conceived casino games such as Caribbean Stud and Texas Shoot Out, and television sets of staggering proportions.
The Drift on Inn stands out from the others for one reason: lighting.
All of the other casinos I have been to look like fluorescent bulb-lit grocery stores inside. The basement of the Drift on Inn, however, has a cavernous, labyrinthine feel to it. The gambling tables are spotlighted, which gives a nice contrast between light and darkness, with the spaces between the tables receding into a mysterious obscurity.
If you’ve ever wanted to re-enact the opening scene of “Dr. No,” the Drift on Inn would be a fine place to get dressed up in you most dapper suit and give it a try. (Sorry—there are no baccarat tables available.)
Upstairs is Debby’s Roadhouse Cafe, a ‘50s-theme diner that looks like it’s attempting to reproduce Jack Rabbit Slim’s from “Pulp Fiction.” Breakfast is $5 to $8.