Working for businesses at the intersection of Railroad Avenue and East Holly Street in downtown Bellingham can be an exciting and sometimes unsafe experience.
The Pita Pit, The Horseshoe Café, Starbucks, Little Cheerful Café, Shahrazad, and Bob’s Burgers and Brew are confronted, to varying degrees, with a sometimes violent population that gathers there most heavily on weekend nights.
Out of those establishments, Pita Pit receives the largest degree of vandalism and violence.
Pita Pit supervisor Emily Bittner is no stranger to the action.
Four men get into scuffle as a bystander looks on, along Railroad Avenue and Holly Street. The downtown intersection is infamous for drug deals, fighting, transient activity and prostitution. Photo by Mark Malijan
"On night shifts, I have to call the cops once minimum, twice or three times on average," Bittner said. "This is mostly due to bums and fights."
The restaurant has a restraining order against some people, Pita Pit employee Ritchie Sandbom said. He recalls one incident in which a man came in and threatened customers with a stick, waving it around wildly.
"If you’re harassing customers, we’re going to tell you to leave," said Pita Pit employee and Western graduate Matt Peters. "If you keep doing it, we’re going to call the cops."
Asking customers for money is one reason Pita Pit employees may call the police, Sandbom said.
"Half the time we don’t even call the cops, we just pick up the phone, and they see it, so they’ll leave," he said.
Peters said fights outside are a regular occurrence, and he calls the police whenever a fight starts, even if it is across the street.
"I don’t want to see anybody get hurt real bad," he said.
One recent example of fighting at the Railroad-Holly intersection is a six-person fight that took place Friday, July 18, just outside Pita Pit’s windows on the Railroad side.
Peters, who was working that night, said the fight involved one man getting beaten up by five other men. He was not aware of why the fight started.
Peters described the man being beaten up as around 21 years old, wearing a white, baggy T-shirt and seeming intoxicated. He ordered a pita around 12:30, after which the fight started outside at 12:45, Peters said.
Losing the battle, the bloodied man attempted to enter The Pita Pit to avoid the fight, but he was kicked out by another employee.
"There was no way," Peters said. "If he came in here, the fight was going to follow him."
Peters saw the victim then run up Holly Street, away from the fighting.
Pita Pit employees have also come across some dangerously unsanitary situations in the bathrooms.
"We find empty little syringes in there with alcohol wipes," Sandbom said.
Every Friday and Saturday night around 12:30, Pita Pit employees will move all their tables and chairs into the bathrooms so no one can go in to use them, Bittner said.
"People go in there and shoot up," Peters said.
The bathrooms are repainted once a month because of the frequent damage they undergo, Bittner said. Graffiti extolling squatters’ rights is scrawled on an inner wall of the female bathroom.
Both bathroom doors were recently kicked in with impromptu locks bolted above the now useless doorknobs. The toilet seat in the male bathroom was once stolen, and the lid on the back of the toilet was shattered once, Bittner said.
Sandbom said even paper towel dispensers have been stolen.
Horseshoe Café owner Travis Holland said the business has several ways of dealing with unwanted people, such as remote-controlled locks on the bathroom doors. Controlled from the cashier area, it applies around 300 lbs. of pressure to keep people out, not in.
It’s a passive form of internal control, and people working at the Horseshoe know who to lock the door for, Holland said.
"Anybody who gives us a bit of trouble, we take a picture and put them up in the Book of Shame," Holland said. "Nobody wants to be in the Book of Shame."
People kicked out of the Horseshoe are banned for life, Holland said.
There is a bouncer working every Thursday through Sunday, multiple security cameras, and the payphones were taken out, but the most successful and hilarious deterrent has been antique radio, Holland said.
The Horseshoe has been loudly playing KMRE 102.3 FM, broadcasted from the American Museum of Radio and Electricity, outside the store, Holland said. He describes it as the hip-hop of the 1920s.
"Not too much emphasis on hip, to be honest," Holland said. "It’s hard to be a gangster when you’ve got Charlie Chaplin singing to you."
Employees from Bob’s, Starbucks, Little Cheerful and Shahrazad said they do not experience the same degree of internal problems that The Pita Pit does.
Little Cheerful employee Paige Walker said people treat the place fairly well.
"Over the last two years, police have been patrolling downtown on foot and on bicycles, and I think their presence has helped," Walker said.
Shahrazad closes at 9 p.m. on weekdays but stays open as late as 3 a.m. on Saturdays, co-owner Chris Kazemzadeh said. She owns the restaurant along with her husband and daughter Danielle.
"This has been a good year," Chris Kazemzadeh said.
Chris Kazemzadeh said increased police patrols over the past year have helped the restaurant evade vandalism and violence. But if commotion has decreased, it has not taken past incidents off their minds.
"You see crazy things down here," Danielle Kazemzadeh said.
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