The following is a facebook post from Facing Homelessness, which I’m reposting here because I thought it was interesting (and also infuriating how obvious the corruption is).
lastSTAND:
Ben Gant hasn’t been back to 3rd and Pike since the city removed his newsstand on a Sunday evening in the spring of 2024, tearing it from the spot it had occupied for over a century. “Not the next day, not since. I don’t see the point,” he said. “I gave everything I had. It feels like I’m a stump now.”
For nearly all of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, a newsstand stood at Seattle’s busiest intersection. Taking many forms — from a modest wood rack, to a metal booth, to eventually a glass-and-steel hut — Turco’s Last Stand was a fixture of that corner, offering a place to buy a paper, then a candy bar, then, in its final years, a place to get Narcan, a free phone, or a moment of someone actually listening.
By the time it was gone, it had quietly become one of the few consistent points of contact between the city’s exploding homeless population and any kind of help at all.
Ben’s own chapter in the stand’s history came when he purchased it in 2002. Frank Turco, its founder, was president of the Newsboys’ Union, an AFL-CIO delegate, and vice president of the General Strike Committee during Seattle’s 1919 General Strike, held two years after he founded the stand. He even ran for city council three times out of the newsstand itself, using it as his campaign headquarters.
He was a pillar of Seattle’s labor, news, and political life.
“He’s kind of like Seattle’s Abraham Lincoln,” Ben said. “It’s all one big story that’s interconnected,” he said — the strike, the labor movement, the newsstand, and eventually the pandemic and the city’s worsening homelessness crisis, all threading through the same few blocks, with the newsstand never far from the center of it.
When Ben bought the newsstand in the early 2000s, 3rd and Pike had crossing guards posted at rush hour and some 30,000 people passed through every day. Print journalism had already begun its decline, but there was still money to be made selling subscriptions, for a while. Ben was in his twenties, making enough selling the P-I and the Seattle Times, and the corner was thriving. “It was fun. Cheap bars, cheap food everywhere, tourism booming,” he said. Old-timers still came by to hang out and talk.
By his account, 2016 is when he started to notice a real change in the neighborhood. Across the city, rents were rising significantly, more people were drinking in public, and the orange caps from used needles littered the sidewalks. “It went from alcohol to fentanyl and meth, and things became unreal by the time the pandemic hit,” he said.
Ben closed the stand in 2020, as office work went online and other downtown businesses shut their doors out of precaution.
Then he got a letter from SDOT — the agency that issues Seattle’s sidewalk permits — saying that if he didn’t reopen and operate the business, his permit would be revoked. Ben saw an opportunity.
He reopened, but on his own terms. “The city required I stay open two hours a day, which was plenty. I’d go down, hand out Emerald City Resource Guides,” he said.
Eventually, he found food to hand out, too. “Piroshky Piroshky started donating their leftovers,” he said. “I was constantly trying to find temporary housing or shelter referrals and almost never could — you’d be surprised how hard it is to get a shelter bed or tiny-house-village referral in this city.”
Then he started working with King County. “They’d bring me Narcan, condoms — there’s a major sex-trafficking problem down there too. Women forced into prostitution would confide in [me], terrified,” he said. “Pretty much everything you can imagine, we dealt with.”
By his own estimate, Ben personally witnessed one to three overdoses a day. His camera roll was dotted with photos of people being brought back to life on the sidewalk. Every so often, Google sends him a “memories” photo from those years, prompting flashbacks.
“I knew a lot of people who died down there — mostly overdoses, but some homicides too. It was hard to relate to people who hadn’t been through anything like it,” he said.
Ben got a letter from Art Wahl — part owner of the building, a prominent Downtown Seattle Association member, a longtime Seattle real estate broker, and a former managing director at CB Richard Ellis, one of the largest property management firms in the world. It read: sell him the newsstand for $7,500, or he’d do everything he could to have it removed.
Ben brought the letter to the city, calling it extortion. They wouldn’t help.
Speakers went up outside the building — formerly home to a Ross store — blasting pop and Christmas music meant to deter loitering. “After that I could only work about an hour and a half before I couldn’t function,” he said.
Ben filed a complaint with the council, and within days, SDOT pulled his permit.
The newsstand came down on a Sunday night in 2024, without a scheduled removal date. He got a phone call telling him it was gone. He hasn’t been downtown since.
A Department of Justice investigation into the permit revocation ran for eleven months and found evidence but not enough to bring charges. Ben still isn’t sure whether to pursue it further. “Honestly the whole thing is still painful and I’m not sure I want to poke at it,” he said.
What he really wants is for the newsstand to go back up and for its history — Turco, the strike, the pandemic and its unglamorous emergency response — to actually be acknowledged instead of erased.
“I felt like I served in the Peace Corps in Sarajevo for 18 months and then got dishonorably discharged,” he said.
He’d like to talk to Seattle’s current mayor about it. He’s not holding his breath, but he hasn’t let go either.
“I’d like some redemption,” he said. “It would be nice.”
Downtown Neighborhood | Brendan
submitted by /u/chromeled
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