I no longer live in Seattle. Those who remember the tenor of my writing back then might easily be led to think that I dislike it. But let’s not obfuscate the past (the one and a half years I recently spent there) with the distant past (the place I was born). Many fond memories exist, even during that year and a half in the wilderness.
So I have the right to be just a little sad that the Taco Time on Madison Street is finally going out of business. It’s probably the first place I ever had a taco, 20 years or more ago, back when that stretch of Madison was more industrial in nature and almost run down. It was the Central District back then, Capitol Hill now, and by virtue of being in between two very different neighborhoods, suffered from an identity crisis. But I always loved Madison Street because it was a 30 degree angle on a cityscape that otherwise attempted (in vain, mostly due to the hills) to force right angles at every other intersection.
Speaking of 30 degree angles, the Taco Time was famous for something other than ersatz Mexicana (Mexi-fries, anyone?) The building possesses fantastic 1960’s faux A-frame architecture, with windows that seem to creep up towards the sky at regular intervals just like Madison itself (going from sea level to 450 feet in a matter of 1.5 miles). I always loved the building for its homey, squat interpretation of mid century modernism, even if I certainly didn’t know what mid-century meant as an 8 year old.
So I’m kind of proud that this picture I took exactly 1 year 2 days ago, on November 12 of 2008, was used by a few local blogs to illustrate the fact that Taco Time was going out of business. The building is a bit small to be used as anything but a small shop or fast food place, so I am a bit nervous that the building will be demolished, and with it, a piece of pop-architectural mastery. But unlike Austin, Seattle tends to have a better galvanized preservationist community, so I hope it outlives Taco Time’s custodianship of the building.
