Seattleites were invited to submit stories, essays, photographs, and art featuring their experiences in these lost places. A beta version of the atlas also traveled to festivals and galleries as an interactive art exhibit, to receive in-person submissions. Additional interviews were conducted with community members, organizers, historians, artists, and those who stewarded or remembered culturally significant spaces. A sample of these memories were once viewable on this website via the maps and blog posts. The full cultural atlas was compiled and edited by Jaimee Garbacik, and then released in print as an anthology by Chin Music Press featuring Josh Powell’s hand-drawn maps. The Ghosts of Seattle Past anthology was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award for nonfiction book of the year.

There was originally a digital map on this site, where lost Seattle gathering places were pinned by the public. Josh Powell turned the places submitted as memories to the Ghosts of Seattle Past into a series of hand-drawn maps of the city featuring the venues, shops, restaurants, galleries, and gathering sites that haunt our hearts. The maps traveled with the original silkscreened and hand-bound anthology-in-progress to festivals and galleries, where everyone could pin and commemorate Seattle’s lost spaces. The Ghosts anthology has since been published with print versions of Josh’s hand-drawn maps inside. Ghosts curator Jaimee Garbacik’s father Robert Garbacik is the last remaining land surveyor in New England who makes maps by hand. He lent his cartography expertise to Ghosts’ maps of Seattle’s past, pinned with the phantom places we recalled together.

The original Ghosts of Seattle Past art exhibit premiered at Short Run Comix Festival in 2015. Since then, our exhibits and events have appeared on stage at Bumbershoot Music Festival, at the AIA Center for Architecture and Design, the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), Folklife Festival, LOVECITYLOVE, Bluestockings NYC, the Independent Publishing Resource Center of Portland, DC’s legendary activist bookstore The Potter’s House, and elsewhere. Jaimee co-produced a walking tour of Yesler Way with Atlas Obscura and Wa Na Wari’s Rachel Kessler. They also collaborated with Northwest Film Forum to create a series of short films about disappeared places in collaboration with NWFF’s Citizen Minutes program.

In 2017, GoSP presented their research and findings to the Office of Economic Development for the City of Seattle. We also once held an Irish Wake for Lost Seattle Places featuring a drag show, short films, musical performances, a pop-up art show, and nearly two dozen readings. We wear many hats.

The Irish Wake

An Irish Wake:

1. A commemoration of the loved and lost
2. A raucous celebration of life

At one of our most beloved events, we poured one out for Seattle’s lost spaces at LoveCityLove on E Pike and 14th in a jam-packed celebration, complete with 19 readings, 3 musical performances, a drag show, short films, a pop-up art exhibit, and beer from our friends at Fremont Brewing Company.

Residents Podium for Seattle Legacy Spaces

A discussion about what we can’t afford to lose.

Ghosts’ partnership with the BOOM! exhibit at the Center for Architecture and Design culminated in an event called the Residents Podium for Seattle Legacy Spaces. In collaboration with city council member Lisa Herbold, we asked community organizers and artists to testify on behalf of the spaces they didn’t want to see disappear. GoSP also gathered policy makers, architects, urban planners, and developers, and asked them to be an audience. We wanted to fill the ears of these city-shapers with the voices of that rapidly shifting city.

Voices included a Duwamish leader, a savior of landmarks, a keeper of music mythology, a fixture in the local African American historical scene, and many more. These community leaders and memory-keepers, activists and residents were the new urban development consultants. They spoke on crucial businesses and gathering places that they wanted to stick around, and talked about patterns of change that they thought could make future Seattle more considered and inclusive.

Download the transcripts below.

Book Release & The Tour

After the book release in 2017, Ghosts’ curator Jaimee Garbacik and mapmaker Josh Powell toured with the book and a slideshow of its art, meeting up with some of our contributors along the way. We collaborated with activist spaces, local organizations, and bookstores in Washington, D.C.; Portland, OR; Philadelphia, PA; and New York City to discuss the impact of rapid development and gentrification on each city’s own culturally significant places. It felt like we were really tapping into the heartbeat of something important, engaging in dialogues about cultural erasure and the nuanced costs of redevelopment. And as we went, we shared what had happened in Seattle, and how our maps and storytelling worked to preserve stories and raise residents’ voices. We projected digital maps of each city and demo’d how they could be pinned with memories of disappeared haunts.

Citizen Minutes

Films to remember lost spaces.

Northwest Film Forum’s community video initiative explores what’s happening across Seattle. Local filmmakers, artists, and community members offer topical conversations through super short videos  – including a number of videos produced in collaboration with Ghosts’ contributors about disappeared gathering spots.