The Rivoli at 100 - Part 2!

Part Two: Bad Days, Ghost Stories and Our Crazy Modern World

From the time of its construction in 1910, the Rivoli served as cheap housing for those who worked at the docks and in the downtown area. Its fortunes, as with those of Belltown, fluctuated with the economy. The twenties were booming, the thirties were awful and the forties were again booming. In the fifties, things began to change. Dock work became more mechanized, skilled and higher paying. Thanks to those innovations, there were also fewer jobs available. Also during the fifties, Belltown's most prominent industry, film distribution for all major studios, was also changing. The studio systems that had functioned so efficiently from the teens onward was unraveling. By the sixties, the neighborhood was in a state of flux and by the seventies it was in obvious decline. I have no sources to tell me how the Rivoli fared through these decades or about what happened here and when, but the fact that the place is still standing testifies that things couldn't have been overly terrible. Once the eighties dawned, however, things would take a turn for the worse.

In the early eighties, Belltown was not exactly the ideal Seattle neighborhood. One of the most dangerous places in the entire city was the Pike Place Market at night. The corner of 1st & Pike played host to prostitutes and a wide variety of lowlifes. Belltown had its own bad spots. The Rivoli was one of them. Its absentee owner was determined to sell the building off to developers. As a result, it had sunk into a state of serious disrepair. Many of the units were uninhabitable. You could always tell the occupied units, because they had large padlocks on them. People, many of them local junkies, used to come into the building armed with crowbars to pry apartments open and empty them of their contents. The padlocks seemed to help keep them out. The hallways themselves became dangerous. People were robbed and assaulted on nearly every floor. In 1982, there was a rather infamous murder here. A tenant was killed by her crazy boyfriend. He stuffed her body into the unit's Murphy bed and fled town. After a few weeks, neighbors complained about the smell and the grisly discovery was made. Soon after that, the owner instructed the manager not to rent any more units. He was serious about getting rid of the place and was trying hard to make a deal. The building's population dropped to just four. At the same time, the Rivoli's neighbor, the El Rey, was closed and boarded up. It seemed that a similar fate was awaiting the Rivoli. But whatever deal the owner tried to strike fell through and he once again gave the manager the go-ahead to start renting the habitable units. Those were just over half of the building's apartments. The rest had broken windows, missing appliances, no electricity or something else wrong with them that would make living in them impossible.

By the mid-eighties, things had improved in the neighborhood and its environs. Police sweeps of the Pike Place Market and Belltown had made conditions more bearable. The economy had improved and the Rivoli's new crop of tenants were fitting in well. Many were artists or artisans who customized their apartments to their liking. Some of those units, including mine, remain to this day. No one is exactly sure how, but the Rivoli was picked as one of the main locations for the Alan Rudolph film Trouble in Mind. It's not the greatest film in the world, but it does show the building as it was in 1985. For the next five years, things continued to improve. At the end of the decade, the building was sold to its present owner who turned it into low income housing. This involved giving it a major renovation to make all units habitable. At the end of the project, I moved in. That was 20 years ago. The neighboring El Rey Apartments were renovated a few years earlier and has since become home to some of Belltown's craziest residents.

Because of its age and checkered past, the Rivoli has earned a place on the Seattle Ghost Tour. I've heard the stories, because the guides give their spiel right under my window. I'm flattered that the place where I've lived for two decades is garnering such attention, but I'm afraid to say that all the tales are untrue. The Rivoli is definitely not haunted. Honestly, it isn't. The apartment where the notorious murder took place in 1982 is right across the hall from me. My former neighbor lived there for 18 years and never saw or felt or noticed anything strange. She left because she'd been living here for 18 years and felt it was time for a change. Likewise, the tour claims that two guys died of AIDS in the building. Actually, they both passed away in hospice care, not in the building and, believe it or not, one of those poor fellows occupied the other apartment across the hall. It's not haunted, but it does seem that people who live there stop paying their rent for unknown reasons. Finally, the tour spins the yarn about haunted toilet. It goes something like this: in the early eighties, a crazy woman named Christine lived in the building. She was quite desperately lonely. She was in the habit of clogging her toilet with paper towels so that the building maintenance man would visit her. She later died in her apartment. To this day, the toilet in that unit mysteriously clogs at odd times. Absolutely not true. Yes, there have been crazy people who have lived here, but there was never a "Christine" in the mid-eighties, there wasn't a maintenance man - the building was way too cheap to hire one - and there is no haunted toilet. But it does make a good story, as do all the others. Take my word for it, though, this place isn't haunted.

In the twenty years I've lived here, Belltown has changed quite a bit. It went from a place where all the bums knew your name to a fortress of shiny condos peopled with temporary dotcom millionaires to a crack-saturated hellhole to the relatively tame club and restaurant mecca that it is today. Some of those things overlap, but whatever Belltown has gone through, the Rivoli has seen all of it. The apartments are small and drafty, but there are a few people who have called this place home for even longer than I have, so it does have its appeal. What does the future hold for the building? Well, it beats me, but some ultra-blogger in his jet pack might be celebrating its 200th anniversary in a century's time. This place is built surprisingly solid. So the next time you're passing by on 2nd & Blanchard, you'll know that a lot has happened here over the last 100 years.