The Mid-Week News

Brace yourselves, we have lift-off:

The day has come at last for the City of Seattle to jettison it's odd space-toilets. A mere four months after Seattle Public Utilities recommended their removal, citing uncleanliness and criminality, and only two months after the City Council ordered their contract to be suspended, the five toilets will find new homes.

Bidadoo auction service will auction the toilets separately on Ebay starting at $89,000 each. SPU officers expect the auctions to begin sometime this afternoon and to stay open for 10 days. All five toilets — located on Broadway, near Pike Place Market, and in Hing Hay, Occidental, and Waterfront parks, respectively — will be fenced off starting August 1, and the toilet's new owners will remove them sometime later that month.

An advance copy of Bidadoo's ad describes the toilets as "very good physical and cosmetic condition overall," and weighing about 13,250 pounds each. Anyone who wins a toilet must also secure the correct permits to remove the unit within three weeks of their winning bid.

The Council overruled a mayoral veto to commission the toilets in 2001, predicting them to cost less than $600,000 annually. But the Seattle Public Utilities report calling for their removal predicted a savings of $4.5 million in five years, significantly more.

The German firm that designed the toilets, Hering International, still has a picture of the Pike Place Market toilet displayed on their Automated Public Toilet Web page.


Where there's smoke, there's fire:

If you thought you heard 10 firetrucks worth of screaming sirens last Thursday morning, you may not be far off. The Rabbit Hole, the notoriously grungy hookah bar at Northeast 47th Street and Roosevelt Way Northeast in the University District, caught fire sometime between the night of July 09 and the morning of July 10.

From 7:39 to 7:46a.m, the fire department dispatched six fire engines, four command vehicles, two ladder trucks, two medical aid vehicles, one air truck, and one Deputy 1 Chief, qualifying it as a full response.

All but four vehicles — the air truck, one engine, one command vehicle, and one medic — left the scene by 8a.m, and the last was gone by 9:15a.m.

Fire department records show that an engine responded to a police request for assistance there on the afternoon of July 13, staying for roughly 20 minutes.

Smoke-blackened windows and ripped caution tape mark the scene of the fire. One of the large windows on the south side of the building is covered in plastic sheeting, an apparent make-shift cover after the fire department broke the window in. A peek inside reveals a charred corner of the large room, strewn with bits and pieces of burnt couches.

The hookah bar ran into trouble in 2006 when its owners continued to operate despite the recent smoking ban, and the business changed hands to new owners at the end of 2007 who changed the name on the business license to "Night Owl Lounge." Posts on local hookah-bar Web sites indicate that the business has not been open since sometime in 2007.

Its appearance has remained relatively unchanged since closing months ago — even the beaten-down old couches are the same. But one thing has changed. The large window to the left of the entrance, which was a psychedelic mushroom mural, is now painted with a bird's eye view of a U-District intersection.