Here is a view of where the Red Door used to be, just a block east at the northwest corner of Fremont Avenue North and North 34th Street, now occupied by the Epicenter Apartment Building.

Peet’s Coffee & Tea occupies the street corner while the PCC Natural Market and other retail spaces fill out the ground level. Five floors of apartments rise above, adorned by an array of welded and polished steel sculptures, Mon Sruang (Thai for “Jewelry of Heaven”), by Fremont artist Mark Stevens. The Fremont Bridge is to the left and the new location of the Red Door Ale House is down North 34th Street.

After a brief hiatus, I am continuing my series of views of the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. At the northwest corner of Evanston Avenue North and North 34th Street sits the Red Door Ale House atop a concrete parking garage. How did it get here?

The original structure was erected on the Fremont tide flats in 1900, before the Lake Washington Ship Canal was constructed. Three years later, it was moved to the northeast corner of Fremont Avenue North and North 34th Street. In 1917, the structure was raised up on stilts so that it would be level with the newly raised streets surrounding it, where it became a familiar sight as one drove across the Fremont Bridge. Originally a drugstore, it was transformed into a tavern in 1938. It is said that the original uneven floor was a sort of sobriety test for those who might have imbibed a little too much ale.

In 2001, to make room for a new mixed use development, the Red Door was relocated to its current location, which you can see in the view above. To the right is the local PCC Natural Market and in the background beyond you can see the Fremont Rocket.

Housed in an old boiler works factory in the Sodo district of Seattle, the Emerald City Trapeze Arts is a school for aspiring flying trapeze and aerial artists. The people at ECTA were nice enough to welcome the Seattle UrbanSketchers group yesterday to observe one of their classes and sketch the proceedings.

If you think drawing people is difficult, it is even more challenging trying to capture them in motion as they swing and twirl through the air thirty or forty feet above the floor. There are ample safety belts and netting for the students, but these elements made sketching the scene that much more challenging. So my approach was to begin with the structure of the old timber frame building and then merely suggest the movement of the students. You might be able to see the light strokes I used to try to capture that movement. My good friend, Frank B., helps to establish the foreground, where I was, overlooking the tall space.

The Seattle Urban Sketchers met yesterday on a cool, rainy Sunday morning at the Experience Music Project, designed by Frank Gehry. While I may not be a fan of the design as a whole, I do appreciate the amazing spatial compositions and vignettes created by the curved steel framework and the metal and plywood sheathing.

On the one hand, spaces such as this lobby of the EMP are relatively easy to draw because there are few straight lines and one need not pay too much attention to the pesky subject of perspective. On the other hand, what is often difficult is ensuring that the curvilinear surfaces do not overpower the sense of space as they hover overhead.

In this case, I started with the one measurable item I could see, the vertical column, and then worked my way from the contours of one curved surface to the next…and the next…and the next, all the time trying to maintain the spatial relationships of the major forms.  The view is obviously beyond one’s normal cone of vision but it does replicate the feeling of being enveloped by the space. The only thing missing are the bright colors of the metal sheathed walls.