This piece originally appeared on the White Center Blog, and is reproduced here with grateful acknowledgment to the WCB.
New in the Neighborhood
It’s a mild and sunlit Sunday evening in White Center, and I’m boiling tomatillos and roasting jalepenos for a batch of fresh salsa. My husband is out in the front yard, staking down black mesh for the base of the four vegetable garden beds we plan to build. We are listening to the blues on the stereo, and our dog, inexplicably, is napping away the last hours of sunlight in the back of the station wagon.
We’re new in the neighborhood. We lived in West Seattle for three years, and we savored the close-knit community we discovered there. We lived within easy walking distance of the beach at Lincoln Park, and a host of locally owned bakeries, petstores, coffeehouses and taphouses, not to mention a grand Sunday farmer’s market. We might have rented there indefinitely had a good friend in White Center not called us up one day to tell us about a house for sale in her neighborhood she thought we ought to see.
Three months later, here I am in my White Center kitchen, peeling the papery skins off steaming tomatillos, dancing around to Blind Lemon Jefferson. It took a few weeks of unpacking and settling and exploring for this place to begin to feel like home. I missed the sidewalks of West Seattle as I walked the dog, and as I made my way into my seventh month of pregnancy, I missed my easy access to organic goodies at the PCC market. But my fondness for this house and my pride in being a resident of White Center grows every day.
Having discovered I’d forgotten to buy cilantro for my salsa, I set out just now to pick some up. Piles of pink blossoms were drifted along the streets, and lilacs were in bloom in every yard, it seemed. At Castillo’s Supermarket, I found a giant bundle of fresh cilantro for forty-nine cents, and picked up a few tomatoes, some fresh ginger, and a lovely mango for good measure. Practiced my barely-passable Spanish when I checked out, and stood in the parking lot outside for a moment watching the sunset beginning to glow over the rooftops. Decided to take the long way home, and loop through the downtown White Center business district.
On my loop, I pass the Khmer Community center, the locally owned hardware store, McClendon’s, and Heng Heng, the Asian grocery store where we stock up on curries and coconut milk and rice noodles. I make a mental note to visit the New Angkor Market, and though I’ve never had a professional tarot card reading, I am curious about what they may tell me at Portal Nueva. I pass by Full Tilt Ice Cream, where my husband and I recently picked up mango sherbet and free posters from the CrimethInc collective, which is “dedicated to a freer and more joyous world.” Waiting for the traffic light at 16th and Roxbury, I peer through the windows of the White Center International Market, and add it to my list of stops to make in the coming weeks, along with the Salvadorean Bakery and Restaurant, which I know lies a block west on Roxbury. I cross Roxbury onto Delridge, and resist the urge to stop for takeout at Banh 88, the family-run Vietnamese restaurant we love. After all, I have dinner in the works at home. I loop back to the south, passing Naseem Mini Market and Spices, and a Bartell drugs with a banner reminding potential customers “We speak Vietnamese.” I add Samway Oriental Foods to my list of groceries to explore, and am reminded that we have Big Al’s Brewery right down the street, in case we need fresh local beer for picnics in the coming summer. There’s the White Center Eagles, where my husband and our friends sometimes meet for a drink after work, and our very own neighborhood bowling alley, Magic Lanes, where the aforementioned husband and friends celebrated his bachelor party before our wedding last summer. A few blocks to the east, there’s a great new coffeehouse, Dub Sea, nestled in the new Greenbridge development, home also to a beautiful community center, brand new library, and Boys and Girls Club.
Home again, I gather my cilantro and assorted produce and head inside to finish the salsa, thinking about the neighborhood, and our place in it. All too often, the arrival of people like my husband and I sets off warning bells in diverse, low-income communities. Young, well-educated white folks who sing the praises of diversity are usually the beginning of a wave of gentrification that drives up real estate prices and gradually edges out the people and businesses who’ve called a place home for years. It is true that communities are always changing. One-hundred and fifty years ago, this area was home to Salish Indian families. One-hundred years ago, immigrant families from all over Europe made their homes here, and as recently as the 1930s, the families on our street were still pasturing cows and chickens and pigs in their yards. To each of these previous White Center populations, the White Center of 2010 would look very different indeed. But the White Center of 2010 is the one in which we all live now, and it is the one my husband and I want to become a part of.
It is a paradox, to realize that we may be a part of the gentrification of White Center, and being aware of it only strengthens our resolve to celebrate and learn about and stand up for the White Center we have found. We are expecting our first child this summer, and we want him to grow up in a truly American neighborhood, one where his playmates will know different languages than he does, and white collar and blue collar folks will live side by side. We want him to come back here in twenty years and recognize this place, instead of finding another upscale Seattle neighborhood where a cup of coffee costs more than a bag of groceries.
It goes without saying that its easy to join in a community where everyone looks like you, talks like you, eats like you, and plays like you. To be an active member of a truly diverse community, one must step outside of their comfort zone. It is imperative that all members of a community learn about the others who call it home, and the issues that confront them. If one group in a community is affected by immigration laws, school board decisions, park closures, or police policies, the entire community is affected. We must all learn to think this way.
White Center is our new neighborhood, and we are proud to call it home.
