These are truly tragic times for this very special city of ours. Lately the ongoing project of certain Seattle city mothers and fathers aimed at making the erstwhile Emerald City safe for the rich and boring has aggravatingly accelerated into Vulcanized overdrive, as affordable rental housing is being demolished at a frightening rate to make way for garish million-dollar condos and townhomes. Along with the impending transfiguration of The Old, Weird Seattle into a giant yuppie Habitrail, we're losing not only economic and social equity within Seattle proper, but also truly representational diversity of the sort that only the hungry can provide. One must wonder whether locally, to quote the great twenty-first-century Nashville troubadour Todd Snider, "there's a war goin' on that the poor can't win." One important bulwark against such a venal process is the preservation of a great city's history--including and especially said city's most uncouth history. Which brings us to the truly tragic news of the recent death of Walt Crowley, local historian, lefty rabble-rouser extraordinaire and friend to countless many, both in person and in print.

You've likely heard, courtesy of the local mainstream media, the basic obituary facts by now: after a long struggle with cancer of the larynx that had recently recurred, resulting in a stroke after failed surgery, Crowley passed away in the early evening on Friday, Sept. 21, surrounded by family and friends in a room at Virginia Mason Medical Center. He was 60 years old--tragically young, it's true, especially in a time when other noteworthy sixty-somethings, such as Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, are still shining brightly as public voices of the American Baby Boom. Nevertheless, he lived quite a full life, much of which made him of particular interest to the readers of an explicitly political newspaper such as the one you're now reading. Indeed, Walt Crowley first made his mark on civic Seattle as a co-founder of The Helix, the legendarily brash alternative weekly that served as the leading voice of Seattle's profoundly high-on-rebellion counterculture from 1967 to 1970.

That paper's local legacy is the most obvious point of affinity for ETS! and its many faithful readers and supporters, who have helped us last eleven years compared with The Helix's criminally short three. But Walt Crowley's many other noteworthy accomplishments should also strongly endear his memory to the ETS! community. (We should also note one particular way ETS! has benefited from Crowley's fathomless intelligence and energy: much of the massive database for our Reclaim Our History column was culled from Crowley's books on local history back in the 1990s, when ETS! was still toddling in the alternative media playground.)

Here is a mere sampling of Walt Crowley's grand civic litany: After the demise of The Helix, he co-founded and became Executive Director of the U District Center, a grassroots community resource providing temporary shelter for that neighborhood's then-growing population of street people and transients. Soon after his UDC gig, he became involved in (or, one might say, "infiltrated") Seattle's city government, first getting hired by noted liberal mayor Wes Uhlman as a mediator between City Hall and the many local radicals who so often raucously dropped in to say hello to the mayor back in the Vietnam day. Following that gig, Crowley eventually became deputy director of the city's Office of Policy Planning, where his nascent love for local history found a practical purpose in his advocacy for historic preservation over new development.

In 1977, Crowley left the city government to resume a career in journalism, eventually working for Seattle Weekly, first as a freelancer, then as a staff writer. In 1979, he ran--unsuccessfully--for Seattle City Council. (His main opponent, interestingly enough, was a certain Nick Licata, who also lost.) In the 1980s he became a political commentator for KIRO-TV, most notably opposite local archconservative John Carlson in a weekly Point-CounterPoint segment that ran from 1986 until 1993. In the early 1990s, he led many local efforts toward preservation of developer-threatened landmarks, including and especially his lifelong favorite beer joint, the legendary Blue Moon tavern. Finally, in 1997, along with his old friend, Helix co-conspirator and fellow radical historian Paul Dorpat, Crowley co-founded Historylink.org, the indispensable Washington State history website.

Crowley's tragic passing couldn't have come at a more uncannily watershed moment for Seattle. Due to the aforementioned creeping gentrification, Seattle is now in grave danger of losing much of the evidence of the rich and gritty history that Crowley worked so hard for so many years to document and publicize. According to a Sept. 23 Seattle Times report, three days before his death Crowley penned a two-page letter addressed to his wife and colleague, Marie McCaffrey, detailing how Historylink.org should be preserved in the event of his death. With his numerous local connections, that project will surely survive to remind us all that Seattle has been, and should continue to be, so much more than the vapid developer's paradise that Greg Nickels, Paul Allen, Jean Godden and others apparently desire it to irreversibly become.

Meanwhile, those of us who wish to reverse the emerging de-evolution of Seattle into a city by, of and for the rich and boring had better accelerate our own efforts to lay claim to the city's future. For political activists, that means, among other things, aggressively supporting the current candidacy of Joe Szwaja for City Council, whose great agenda includes renters' rights among other anti-gentrification items. It would be a truly fitting tribute to the memory of Walt Crowley for the genuinely progressive Szwaja to join the council where Crowley could not. For local historians both amateur and professional, now's the time to begin not only assiduously preserving, but also aggressively publicizing, the role that the poor and the working class have played in making Seattle what it's been at its best, the better to make the case for our right to remain an integral part of both Seattle's complex present and its high-stakes future.

History can be a form of resistance. That is surely one reason why Walt Crowley, who began his public life as a grandly revolutionary rabble-rouser, slowly but surely added local history to his bag of activist tricks. Resistance, in turn, can be a form of revenge, specifically against the forces of oppression and alienation that resistance in all its forms can potentially overthrow. It follows of course logically that history can be a form of revenge. For the many great landmarks and humble houses of the hungry that have already been sacrificed to gentrification in Seattle, gentrification's ultimate defeat, with history serving as a non-violent combat tactic towards that defeat, would be sweet revenge indeed. Not to mention Walt Crowley's first great posthumous achievement as a sterling example to follow for current and future local historians, rabble-rousers, and friends of our very special, and very precious, city.