'Signs of Vanishing Seattle' Preserves an Important Element of This City's Legacy

by Jas Keimig

We've all encountered a Vanishing Seattle post on Instagram about a beloved Seattle spot — the old Rainier Burger King, Vieng Thong, or Drunky Two Shoes — in danger of closing. The comments become a place for patrons to share memories or beg for the powers that be to change the business's fate.

Started by Cynthia Brothers back in 2016, Vanishing Seattle preserves the stories of legendary mom-and-pop shops, music venues, and restaurants that are no longer in business through pictures, photos, and written memories of people who loved them most. Taken as a whole, the project captures a shifting Seattle where creatives, restaurateurs, and other small-business owners are beset with high rents, corporate landlords, and changing tastes. Since its start eight years ago, it has blossomed into talks, short documentary films, and IRL exhibitions.

A year ago, Brothers took over an entire floor of the RailSpur building in Pioneer Square with a Vanishing Seattle exhibition featuring signs from iconic Seattle businesses that no longer exist. The show doubled as both an ode to the Emerald City's legacy of place and to the community of people who saved and remembered bits and pieces of bars, restaurants, venues, and other gathering spaces over the decades.

Now, Brothers has teamed up with book designer and Tome Press founder Thomas Eykemans to create a book form of the 2023 exhibition titled Signs of Vanishing Seattle. It collates pictures of signs from the show and separates them out into distinct categories: groceries and community, Asian American and Chinatown-International District businesses, restaurants and bars, music and venues, and more. Each sign has a brief biography including the dates and location of the business as well as the people who loaned it to the exhibition. Sprinkled throughout are sticky notes featuring visitors' memories of the space that Brothers collected over the show's run.

Ahead of Signs of Vanishing Seattle's official book release at Common Area Maintenance on July 28, I called up Brothers for a quick chat about Vanishing Seattle, the show, and the importance of preserving it in book form.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Let's back up a little bit — what inspired you to start Vanishing Seattle?

I started Vanishing Seattle in 2016 in response to what seemed to be this accelerated rate of small businesses and gathering spaces in Seattle that were closing, being pushed out. There was a particular place that was the catalyst that led me to actually go and start the profile — a Filipino restaurant on North Beacon Hill called Inay's that closed in early 2016. And so, yeah, I think it was just kind of, like, seeing what was happening in general in the city and also just feeling the impact on myself, my friends, and my community.

You've been doing this project for so long, and I think — in a lot of cases — even breaking news. What's your process for gathering information about places closing? Do you have an on-the-ground network or do people know to come to you about closings?

When I first started out, I didn't have a grand plan in mind. I had this urge to start the account on social media and I was just posting places that I came across on the daily. But since then, it's really expanded in terms of where I get my information from, which I'm really happy about because I can't know what's going on everywhere all the time in the city [laughs]. Of course, there's things that I miss or I don't know about — my inbox is pretty inundated with folks that might be customers, small-business owners, residents that are letting me know about closures they are witnessing or they know are gonna happen.

They also reach out with requests for support or to highlight places that might be struggling or would like some shoutouts. I'll do a "Not Vanishing" [post] as well to try and put a spotlight on places that are still around that people can support. People will also send me their personal stories and sometimes share pictures and things. I do have a network in terms of people all over the city that are continually sharing with me what they know. I feel like in that respect it's become much bigger than me. So it's kind of like a collective citywide project in some ways.

I know you grew up here — have you noticed any trends from growing up and over the last four pandemic years when it comes to iconic places closing?

From my own personal experience and documenting stuff through Vanishing Seattle, it seems like, in general, it's just a much harder environment for small businesses. Whether it's barriers to entry with even wanting to start something and making it happen to staying in business. I think there are a lot of different factors — rising cost being a huge one, rising rents. We'll also see places close because there's not a lot of commercial rental protections that I know about. So the landlord might decide they wanna get a higher-paying tenant and jack up the rent as much as they want or sell the building.

A lot of times, I'll see businesses that are displaced for redevelopment and there's not really any provisions for them to be able to move back into the new building or to get assistance to move elsewhere. It can be hard, too, because consumer interests have changed since the pandemic. But that being said, I think there's a lot of really brilliant, creative, and resilient ways that businesses, artists, and other people who wanna make stuff happen and be active in the community — they're coming up with ways to keep doing what they're doing.

The book is based on an exhibition you did at RailSpur. Can you tell me a little bit about that exhibition?

I was approached last spring by ARTXIV and Forest for the Trees, who had worked with RailSpur — this historic brick and timber warehouse building in Pioneer Square that used to have railways running through it. Before that, [it was] home to FX McRory's, which is a really well-known restaurant down there — and RailSpur's owners [wanted] to program the building for artists and for exhibits. They approached me to see if I wanted to have a floor of a building, a 12,000-square-foot space to do a Vanishing Seattle exhibit activated as a satellite event to the Seattle Art Fair. The idea we came up with was having a large-scale immersive exhibit of signs.

There's an interesting intersection between the artistry and the signs, and also the signs representing the spaces that they were attached to. We had basically, I wanna say, two months from idea to opening to the public [laughs]. I put out a call through Vanishing Seattle to see if folks had signs or memorabilia or other artifacts, not really knowing what I would get back. Luckily, hundreds of people responded. We ended up getting a lot of really cool signs, a lot of super huge ones that we weren't even sure how we were gonna get [them] in the building.

Luckily, we had support with installation, because I'd never done anything like this before. [The show was made by] regular folks from all over Seattle who had probably in a lot of cases salvaged these signs that otherwise would have ended up in the trash heap. They'd just been storing them in their businesses or basement storage.

I was kind of shocked to see the Thumper's rabbit ears from a '90s Pride parade were preserved so well — those looked so cool!

That was really fun. I was super lucky to have some gay bar veterans — [Thumper owners] Steve Nyman and Nathan Benedict — reach out to me. One of them used to work at The Mocambo, which played an integral role in early gay liberation as a meeting place for groups. They had a lot of things to offer — memorabilia, flyers, posters, signs. I went over to pick up some stuff and they showed me the rabbit ears, which were on top of the Thumper's float during the 1996 Pride parade. Once I saw them, I was like, okay, I can't not include these.

What else at the exhibition jumped out at you?

Oh, gosh, it's so hard to choose. We got some cool stuff from Asian American and Chinatown-International District businesses that date back to the '20s or even earlier. Enough that we tried to roughly group things thematically. Although, of course, there's overlap, people could go to an area for music venues and then restaurants and bars and such. For the exhibit texts, I would write some history on the places or had some volunteers help me with the writing. With some of these places, we would ask the sign donors for any information they had or any context on these businesses on the signs, who painted them.

Some of them were total mysteries, but we were able to go down the rabbit hole and piece together some information. I'd say there definitely were some places like Longacres Cafe — that was actually in Renton, and the building is still standing, but that one took a long time to piece together information. There was also some stuff from the old industrial and fishing history of Seattle — like some old parts of packing crates from these fish companies that are along the waterfront that dated back to the late 1800s, early 1900s.

Why was it important for you to turn this exhibition into a book?

I really have to credit my book partner and book designer Thomas Eykemans. He has his own independent press, Tome Press, and he also works for Marquand Books, which does museum exhibit books. He donated one of the music venue signs for the SS Marie Antoinette, which was this all-ages DIY punk venue on Westlake. Then he came to the exhibit and approached me with this idea. So I really have to credit him with not only kind of originating that idea, but also just helping me through the whole process and even beyond the design. I'm really grateful for that, because the exhibit was meant to just be up for that long weekend corresponding with the Seattle Art Fair. Then I did get it extended for maybe like three more weekends after that. But it was pretty short-lived, and it was just such a huge effort. It's nice to have it immortalized in a physical form here.

RSVP to the book launch on July 28 and preorder the book on Vanishing Seattle's website.

Featured Image: Vanishing Seattle's new book 'Signs of Vanishing Seattle' documents signage from beloved businesses of our city's past. (Photo by Gavin Argo, courtesy of Vanishing Seattle.)