The Westin Seattle is a strange place when you stop and think about it. Two giant towers rising out of downtown like something out of Battlestar Galactica. Twenty-four hours a day it's full of business travelers, tourists, conventioneers, airline crews, politicians, celebrities, and fancy dogs. Thousands of people passing through its doors every single week.
And directly across the street sat Danger Island.
No more than a tiny triangle of pavement left over when Westlake Avenue cuts diagonally across Seattle's otherwise orderly street grid. Too small to build anything useful on. Just a strange little sliver of land sitting between two worlds.
We didn't call it Danger Island because we were particularly creative. We called it Danger Island because it was dangerous.
When I first started at the Westin, I remember wondering why people were always hanging out over there. Eventually one of the valet captains explained it to me.
"Oh, that's Danger Island."
It immediately made sense.
There was always something happening over there. Always. Homeless camps would pop up. People drinking. People getting high. Drug deals. Prostitution. Arguments. Fights. Police activity. Sometimes late at night, sometimes right in the middle of the day. You'd be helping a guest into their limousine while simultaneously watching someone have what could only be described as the worst day imaginable twenty feet away.
Seattle is funny like that sometimes.
There was a particular group of gutter punks that seemed to occupy the island fairly regularly. If you've never encountered the subculture, gutter punks are homeless or transient young people who've adopted the look and attitude of punk β unkempt dreadlocks, patched-and-studded jackets, face tattoos, piercings, often a dog on a rope. They call themselves crusties, travelers, dirty kids. Many of them ride the country by freighthopping β literally hopping freight trains β and drift between the cities where they congregate: Portland, Berkeley, New Orleans, the Haight in San Francisco, and, reliably, Seattle. They panhandle (they call it "flying a sign" or "spanging," short for spare-changing), busk with beat-up acoustic guitars, squat in abandoned buildings, and generally live by a code that's equal parts anarchist philosophy and pure survival. Danger Island was one of their Seattle waystations.
One guy wore what looked like a raccoon tail hanging from his back pocket, as though perhaps he had decided he was part raccoon. It was its own strange little subculture playing out across the street from a four-star hotel.
Here's the part that always got me, though. One of the valet guys β a kid who'd grown up on Mercer Island β told me that some of these gutter punks weren't runaways from broken homes at all. A number of them came from serious money. Medina, Mercer Island, the kind of Seattle zip codes where the lawns are professionally maintained and the driveways have Range Rovers. He swore he'd gone to high school with the raccoon-tail guy. Grew up a few streets over. Good family. And here he was, on Danger Island, with a raccoon tail on his belt and a very different life. I never knew whether to believe it, but I also never had any reason not to. The island collected all kinds.
You couldn't help but watch it. There we'd be, moving luggage carts around, greeting tour buses, unloading airline crews, and checking in Princess Cruise passengers while the vice-squad version of Seattle carried on directly across the street.
The juxtaposition was always remarkable.
Two Different Cities
One of the things I learned after working at the Westin for twenty-one years is that hotels occupy a strange place in a city. You don't just see the beautiful version of a place β you see all of it.
We would have guests arriving from all over the world to spend thousands of dollars on their Seattle vacation while simultaneously watching police officers sprint across the street because something was happening on Danger Island.
The guests would rarely notice. We always did.
The Day the White Van Came
There are dozens of Danger Island stories over the years, but one stands above the others in my memory.
It was a hot summer afternoon. Nothing particularly unusual was happening at the hotel. We were doing what bellmen do β moving luggage around, helping guests, preparing for arrivals.
Then we heard screaming.
Now, screaming coming from Danger Island wasn't particularly noteworthy. That's like saying it rains in Seattle. This screaming, however, was different.
From what we could gather, one of the gutter punks was having what appeared to be a very bad trip. Meth-induced psychosis, perhaps. Who knows. There was lots of yelling happening from his friends, who themselves didn't appear to be operating at one hundred percent.
Things escalated quickly.
Eventually Seattle Police arrived, which wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that they couldn't control the situation. This guy had what people sometimes call "superhuman strength." The officers couldn't get him restrained.
So they called for backup. And then it arrived.
The White Van.
At the time, there was a specialized unit whose job it was to safely transport people experiencing severe mental-health crises or drug-induced episodes. If memory serves, this was their territory.
The white van rolled up. Now we've got police officers, the white van, a growing audience of gutter punks, and approximately every bellman and valet captain casually pretending not to watch what was unfolding directly across the street.
The experts from the white van determined tranquilizers were apparently the next logical step.
And that's when things became less Seattle Police and more Animal Planet.
They tranquilized him with what I remember being some sort of dart gun.
Success. Down he went.
Or so we thought.
They began loading him into the van, and we collectively assumed the situation had reached its conclusion.
It had not.
The tranquilizers apparently represented little more than a mild inconvenience. This gentleman woke back up. And now he was really upset.
What followed was perhaps the closest thing I've ever witnessed to someone auditioning to become a Marvel superhero.
The police deployed their Tasers. Then some more Tasers. And this guy was still moving around. At one point, as best I could tell, he tried to make a break for it β actually attempting to run down the street with the Taser barbs still stuck in him and the wires trailing behind. Not for lack of the officers trying to stop him. He just kept going.
At this point he's tranquilized, Tased multiple times, screaming, and somehow still making life difficult for everyone involved. The police couldn't use deadly force, nor would anyone want that outcome. So everyone just collectively continued attempting to solve what had become an increasingly complicated problem.
Eventually they managed to move him behind the white van where, I'm assuming, additional tranquilizers entered the conversation. After roughly an hour of absolute chaos, they finally got him safely into the van and took him away.
Meanwhile, his friends weren't saying much of anything, and the rest of us were left trying to piece together exactly what we had witnessed.
And then⦠a Princess Cruise tour bus arrived.
Hospitality Never Stops
That's one of the funny things about hotels. No matter what just happened, someone needs help with their luggage.
Five minutes earlier we'd been watching one of the more remarkable police interactions I've ever witnessed. Five minutes later we were checking cruise passengers into the Westin.
They had absolutely no idea what had just happened. The sidewalks had been cleared. The police were gone. Danger Island had returned to its natural state. And the hotel continued doing what hotels do.
For the guests arriving from Alaska, Seattle was beautiful and welcoming. For us? Well, we'd just spent an hour watching someone survive tranquilizers, multiple Tasers, and what can only be described as an epic afternoon on Danger Island.
Just another day at the Westin Seattle.
Ironically, Danger Island has always been a strange little place. Long before any of us worked across the street, there was actually an underground public restroom hidden beneath the triangle. It was sealed and filled in during the 1960s and largely forgotten.
For decades afterward it became something else entirely. By the time I knew it, Danger Island was less a place than it was an ongoing sociology experiment taking place in plain sight.
Today it has largely been transformed along with the rest of the neighborhood. Amazon arrived. The shelters disappeared. The commuters returned. It's flatter, cleaner, and considerably less dangerous than it once was. But places remember what they were.
The Roundup
Danger Island still exists. People walk across it every day without giving it a second thought.
But for twenty-one years, if you stood at the Westlake Avenue drive long enough, you learned that little triangle of pavement had stories to tell. Some funny. Some sad. Some dangerous. And some so strange they could only happen fifty feet from a luxury hotel in downtown Seattle.
Just another day at the Westin.