If you check into most hotels on First Avenue tonight, it'll run you at least $400. Not so in 1981, when low-income people found affordable rooms up and down "Skid Road" in single-room-occupancy hotels — for a night, or for the rest of their lives.

That was changing even then, as SROs shut down and high-rise condominiums sprang up throughout Downtown. Jim Simon wanted to capture that moment in time when working-class folks, many of whom had made their living on the waterfront as far back as the early 1900s, faced eviction, or at least an uncertain future.

Simon, a longtime Seattle Times reporter and editor (now managing editor at Honolulu Civil Beat), had been working at the Pike Place Market Preservation & Development Authority at the time — and spending a lot of time on and around First Avenue. He won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Washington Commission for the Humanities to record oral histories of residents up and down that street.

Simon teamed up with Roz Barnett and photographer Nancy Walz for the project. Now a freelance photo editor in Maryland, at the time Walz was a staff photographer for the alternative newspaper the Seattle Sun. Walz's photo exhibit, "First Avenue, Seattle," showed at the Museum of History and Industry in 1982. Simon's oral history recordings aired on community radio station KRAB-FM.

"Photographs were simply everywhere you looked," Walz remembered. "It was still full of a wide, wide range of people." The gentrification Walz and Simon witnessed in the early 1980s reminds them both of what Seattle is experiencing today. "Over time, you lose a richness of diversity and these communities that we don't necessarily really think of as a community," Simon said. "They just sort of disappear."

What passed for a dirty movie in the 1950s was pretty mild. The first time Frank Ottersbach, a former beat cop, raided an arcade and checked out the machine, he saw a scene of two girls sitting on chairs, one in her underwear, the other in a housecoat that would flop partly open a few times. “None of the garbage you see today,” he said.