Avocados Two for a Dollar

This building is gone. It came down to make way for the newer construction on that corner, so what you are looking at is a shop that no longer exists, photographed by someone who had no idea he was making a record at the time.

The reader board turns out to be the most useful thing in the frame. Avocados two for a dollar. Pyramid Ales six ninety-nine. Those two lines fix this evening in time far better than my memory does, and anyone who has bought groceries in this city recently will feel exactly how long ago it was without being told.

Montlake is small and boxed in, with the cut on one side and the Arboretum on the other, and a neighborhood that shape runs on a short list of places. A market on the boulevard was not a charming detail. It was the shop, the one you walked to, the reason you did not have to move the car for a carton of milk. Losing one of those is a different kind of loss than losing a restaurant.

I pushed this warm because the honest exposure was a grey building on a grey evening, accurate and completely uninteresting. That was a straightforward aesthetic decision at the time. It reads differently now that the subject has been demolished, more like a memorial than a treatment, which was not the plan and is not something I can take credit for.