When family’s in town, Seattlest usually troops to Pike Place Market so the out-of-towners can say they saw our city’s bustling bazaar. Though we’re not repeatedly thrilled by it, the Market is a sense-assaulting place to burn an afternoon with all-ages, crowd-tolerant kin. But it’s something else entirely beyond the northernmost booth or on the exit stairs facing the viaduct. It’s a trashy, scare-little-cousin-Susie jungle out there. Even now, with the Centennial Celebration in full swing.

On Sunday, we took nearly-Mrs. Seattlest’s dad to Pike Place. We parked under the viaduct and started up the litter-peppered hill. Being a fireman and a father of girls, he notices stuff like discarded drug paraphernalia, minor drug deals going down, and shady dudes scoping the parking lot, quite possibly, for cars to jack. And he pointed them all out as we climbed the stairs. He wondered about the safety of the stuff in his rental car; he stopped and stared—his civil-service-wheels turning—as cash and junk changed hands in full view of passersby.

Knowing there’s a big show planned for Friday’s finale—where both Shawn Smith and Mike McCready will perform—we squeezed through the overcrowded people-tube and made a beeline for an info booth to ask where the surely-massive audience will be corralled. The girl behind the table said Steinbrueck Park, which we’d heard but hadn’t believed. It seems a little small, we said. Her (paraphrased) response? “And dirty. If you go over there today, it’s a mess.” She laughed. “But it’ll be nice and clean on Friday.”

“Um,” we said, catching her surprising—from a PR standpoint—meaning. We pictured the homeless folks and derelicts we’ve seen hanging out at Steinbrueck, wondered where Market organizers would shoo them off to. Or would they be invited to the party? We walked away, not really wanting to know.

Heading back down to the rental car later, our future father-in-law stopped and jutted his chin ahead of us. Ten feet away was another little cash/drug exchange. And ten feet below that was a large family, a few kids in tow, headed upstairs. The dude who’d bought walked two yards off the steps, kneeled and lit up his crack pipe. He shared a hit with a buddy. A second buyer twitched in anticipation. His girl, carrying a walkie-talkie, rubbed her scab-marred face. The first buyer took another hit, his smoke an indifferent halo. We’d stepped right into Crack House, and the family, unaware, just kept climbing toward the set.

Moving again, our fiancée’s dad told the lead man of the family, “There’s a couple of guys smoking crack ahead. Watch the kids.” The father looked up, stopped, gawked at the al fresco drug use, and raised an arm, palm back, to stop his daughters, et al. The offending dudes didn’t see this, didn’t care, just kept on tokin’.

What should we do? Ask them to leave, to go smoke crack at home? So we all just move on, passing trains on trash-strewn tracks.

It’s effed up to unceremoniously shove Steinbrueck’s patrons out to accommodate Pike’s patrons. It’s effed up for a Market representative to casually laugh about the park’s unfortunate residents appearance. But it’s even more effed up for the Market Foundation (or whoever’s in charge) to turn a blind eye on its seedy boundaries; to throw a massive shebang, invite the world, and have no security or police presence in place—we didn’t see a single officer—to help keep people peaceable.

If we’re in the mix Friday night, we’ll keep an eye out for the deposed and addicted—not solely in the interest of lawfulness, but also to see how Pike Place officials, and Seattle, handle “dirty,” would-be crashers of their birthday bash.

Market neon (Always clean, I guess) courtesy of Seattlest Flickr pool contributor scovophoto.