Danny Westneat / Times staff columnist
Future of Hendrix's childhood home looks hazy

ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES The childhood home of rock icon Jimi Hendrix sits vacant and boarded up on a city lot at Jackson Street and 20th Avenue.

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A man gives me a vacant stare. He's lying in the underbrush outside a boarded-up shack. He rolls over and covers his head with a black plastic sheet. Nearby lie a condom wrapper, an old boot, some beer bottles. A ragged roof tarp flaps in the breeze.

I peek under the house, which sits on steel girders like a car on blocks. Underneath is the source of a putrid stench — a dead possum rotting in the dirt.

Welcome to what has to be the saddest monument in Seattle, the childhood home of Jimi Hendrix.

Since being saved from the wrecking ball nearly three years ago, the house where a 12-year-old Hendrix was said to have played air guitar with a broom has deteriorated into a crash pad for prostitutes and the homeless.

Once called Seattle's "Graceland" by an overly exuberant city councilman, the house was moved from its original site in the Central District and parked on a vacant city lot at Jackson Street and 20th Avenue.

There it sits, awaiting resolution of a trial this summer in which the entire Hendrix clan is fighting over control of the rock god's name, music and $80 million estate.

Investors affiliated with Leon Hendrix, Jimi's younger brother, still have dreams of restoring the house and converting it to a museum.

But city officials say they failed to submit plans recently to develop the property. Now someone else has filed to build office space and housing on the property, meaning the Hendrix home must be moved, again, by November.

"We don't want to demolish it, so that means they need to find another spot," said Ken Takahashi of the city's Office of Economic Development.

It's another chapter in the depressing story of Hendrix after his death, what one author called "an unedifying tale of litigation, exploitation and the rubbishing of Jimi's memory by his hometown, Seattle."
 
Or, as Jimi once sang: "The wheels of a bandwagon cut very deep."

I often drive by his abandoned childhood home while running errands. One day I stopped to see how it was holding up.

The doors and windows are nailed shut with plywood. Neighbors had complained that prostitutes and drug users had camped inside.

The cream-colored siding is marred with painted-over graffiti. What's legible contains nothing about Hendrix, just gang tags and obscenities.

"It's heartbreaking to see the damage that's been done," says the house's owner, local businessman Pete Sikov, a friend of Leon Hendrix. "But we are still hopeful we can save it. I hear all the time that people want to see where he grew up."

Passersby called it an "eyesore" and a "crack house." No one I stopped was aware it was once the home of a rock legend.

I don't believe this house is going to exist much longer. If you are interested in Hendrix's Seattle story, you should visit it now.

In its disheveled state it makes a powerful statement. I stood there and imagined what it must have been like to be Jimi, growing up in poverty, raised mostly by his father because his mother was a drunk.

It was from the roof of this house that Jimi used to jump, dressed in a plastic cape, imitating his hero, Flash Gordon.

Those must have been happy moments, but he supposedly had no love for Seattle. When he returned here as an international music icon, in 1968, he allegedly said this while leaving the Center Arena stage: "I hate you Seattle! I hate you Seattle! I hate you Seattle!"

And now his city is allowing his boyhood home to rot away.

As sad as that is, it occurred to me as I stood outside his bedroom window that this may be an honest way to pay tribute to Hendrix.

"And so castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually," he once sang.

He meant, I think, that nothing can be depended on, from love to happiness to material possessions. Everything is ephemeral, which is why life is so cruel but also filled with great beauty.

It was a central Hendrix theme, in both his life and his lyrics.

Today, there's no question his music endures. But I like to think Jimi wouldn't mind that we're standing aside, watching, as his boyhood castle melts into the sea.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday.

Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.