Smith Tower, Seattle, Canon SD10 Digital Elph

The Smith Tower used to be the tallest building west of the Mississippi, but of course that was a long time ago. When I was a in junior high school, my friends and I would take the Metro bus from the suburbs into the city and walk around almost every weekend. Our journey was highly ritualized and almost always included certain stops (the Seattle Public Library and KFOX radio studio to name a few). One of our rituals was climbing out the window of the men's bathroom onto the upper ledge of the Smith Tower and sitting out there for a while. No one ever noticed.

One of our other rituals was emptying our pockets onto the glass plate of a drugstore photocopier when we got back to our own neighborhood. Coins, bus transfers, phone numbers, gum wrappers, KFOX radio stickers, whatever. I found some of those in a box recently and it made me remember those city trips and the Smith Tower. It made me want to ride the elevator up there to see if you can still get out that window, although I'm sure it's impossible now. I could never quite believe we could get away with it then. It's pretty hard to imagine it, a bunch of punk kids walking into a business tower, entering the men's bathroom, and climbing out the window, but we did it all the time.