|
---
|
publisher's desk
Crocodile Rocks Belltown Again
by Alex R. Mayer
Crocodile Cafe 2.0 opened on March 19 with a (carefully-orchestrated) spontaneous performance by millionaire rock star and abusive airline passenger Peter Buck.
You'll recall that Buck is the 52-year-old ex-husband of disgraced former Croc owner Stephanie Dorgan. Dorgan treated the old club like a vanity project and ended up running the historic
money-machine into the ground. Makes no sense that Buck would perform at this reopening, but there's no point in trying to understand millionaire rock stars.
The Seattle Times gushed about the opening. The hack journalists of the Twittosphere gushed and gushed. The Weekly/Stranger got all moist about it. It’s left to me, as usual, to write the
first negative words about the new Croc, which I'm doing right now. I'm not from around here originally, so I'm not congenitally civil.
My top two Crocodile memories: seeing Kim Thayil perform with Yoko Ono and that cokehead she gave birth to; wandering by on
the afternoon of Cobain's suicide and watching a bewildered Japanese TV crew suffer abuse at the hands of an inebriated local Aboriginal-American.
Notorious Belltown slumlord Howard Close is tickled to have had the Croc's Seattle rock royalty partners (Susan Silver, Peggy Curtis, Sean Kinney and their man in
the trenches Marcus Charles) spend the past few months pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the build-out of his property.
The re-hab eliminated the old Croc’s big picture windows and replaced them with a black wall with tiny jail-like windows. From the outside it's seedier looking
than the old Croc – more like a private mafia club than that old inviting place where passersby could gaze in on folks blearily enjoying brunch and the smell
of stale beer on a Sunday morning.
|
♥ VISIT THE DOWNTOWN DISPATCH NEIGHBLOG ♥
|
