The Kalakala - newest Rustbucket on Lake Union
text & photographs by Leslie Strom
On St. Patrick's day, the owner of the out-of-commission ferry Kalakala moved his floating landmark from the Seattle waterfront to a new location on Lake Union in order to continue refurbishing the battered vessel into something more dignified than its past life as a mired Kodiak cannery. It was a slow procession, as one might imagine, and they took their sweet time about it in order to maximize the time people could admire the roundy portholes and Buck-Rogers lines. Folly or treasure? I heard reactions ranging from misty-eyed adoration to scoffing.
The Kalakala (pronounced, by the way, Kuh LAH ka luh) was guided fore and aft by tugs from the piers on Elliot Bay, through the Battleship lock in Ballard, down the ship canal firing off budget fireworks past a bagpipe salute at the new Adobe office campus, through the Fremont bridge, around Gasworks park (where the photographer's Money Shot was - Kalakala in front of the city skyline from a high vantage - a quirk in front of a cliche) to its new home next to the old wood-sided ferry Skansonia on Northlake, now doing duty as a restaurant.
There might have been 50 people at the Chittenden locks in Ballard, waiting in the rain for a good look at the old ferry. A small child hopped up and down. "There it is! Is that it? Where's KING action news?" Good question, kiddo, but action news it was not. It crept along as slow as drying paint, first obscured by the lead tugboat, then... looming huge, a patchy, blotchy gray monster. Some of the round portholes had been replaced at some time in the past by aluminum square windows, probably for practical reasons. Her sides were papered over with material that conformed to her shape in ragged patches. She was supposed to be silver, but she was as silver as 30 year old linoleum. She was a silver as the shovel I carry in my truck. A videographer riding majestically on the top of the ferry taped the trip from his vantage on the boat's top. Good thing, too. He'll have the last pictures of a view of Lake Union unmarred by the big huge ferry for a few years.
The lock filled up and raised
the Kalakala to Lake Union's elevation. She was pushed out of
the lock and the crowd broke up to follow her voyage. I drove
to the Fremont bridge and waited for a few good pictures. She
was a tiny speck at the end of the canal, shooting off fireworks.
A Fremont resident told me that they would raise the bridge long
before she got there, so I wouldn't get that perfectly-centered
photograph I was going for. He led me down some stairs to the
canal to a better vantage, and I waited there for the bridge
to go up and the Kalakala to pass under it.
Then I heard it... bagpipes. A small group of people stood in front of the new Adobe office and played the bagpipes and clapped and cheered. Maybe it was because it was St. Patrick's day. Maybe they were expecting her. The people high atop the old boat waved as though this greeting were right and proper.
The tugs finally rounded Gasworks
park and left her in her new spot, now a close neighbor of other
Seattle icons, Ivar's Salmon House, the Burke Gilman trail, Northlake
Tavern. She sticks out into lake Union and fills the waterfront
with funky form. I'm waiting for someone to complain that she's
blocking their expensive Lake view, so I can tell them like it
or not, she IS the view.
For the next several years, she'll be repaired and worked on, already subject to curious kayakers, tourists, and passers-by. Perhaps the ferry Kalakala will even beat out the Space needle for postcard popularity for a while. Both are overly-styled Cold War visions of a future that fortunately... never materialized.
To read more, have a look at the official Kalakala website
Leslie Strom looks out her
window in Lower Wallingford and can see the Kalakala every day
now. She holds the old deco marvel in the same regard she reserves
for Sputnik and Bakelite.
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