YOU CAN DRIVE BY this extraordinary sight right now.

As you cruise into the heart of Ballard, there is a one-story, small corner building at 1700 N.W. Market Street amid the trees and tight parking. That’s Ballard Realty, around for five decades, started by Ray Poletti, 76.

A few weeks ago, he installed atop it an exact replica of the historic 19-foot acrylic Bubbleator from the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. 

People are already stopping by for photos. Some Reddit commenters have called it “a real-estate bubble.”

No, no, says Poletti. This has nothing to do with real estate. It’s all about the Bubbleator!

The original Bubbleator was part of an elevator in what is now the Climate Pledge Arena. It only rode up one floor, to a “World of Tomorrow” multimedia presentation projected by several hundred film projectors onto 3,200 aluminum cubes. It was pretty far out for back then; actually, even now. To set the mood, futuristic kitschy music was piped in.

For nearly two decades, the globe was in the venue known as Food Circus and later Center House. The site is now called Seattle Center Armory.

Around 88% of Seattleites were born after 1962, but the Bubbleator still looms large in the city’s collective memory. On Facebook, type in “Bubbleator,” and up come dozens of remembrances, from individuals talking about being a Bubbleator operator to sites such as “Seattle Vintage.”

This is the Seattle that’s still with us, with its quirky, sentimental attachment to the city’s history. In a city that has changed so dramatically in recent decades, people long for the oddities of Old Seattle.

“I think I was, well, I was just compelled,” Poletti said about his motivation to build the sphere. “I don’t know why.”

He thinks about it. “Maybe I was compelled to see if I could actually create it, put it on display, and, you know, just say that this is something that shouldn’t be forgotten.”

Poletti remembers being 13 and bicycling with friends to the World’s Fair. “We used to kick around there. Maybe we paid our way in, maybe we didn’t. That was a long time ago. I remember that summer going a lot.”

Over the past year, in a nearby warehouse space he rented, Poletti estimates he spent 2,000 hours and $200,000 to fulfill his vision. Both figures are conservative estimates, he says.

Here’s an example: an $85,000 bill for 18 lens-shaped acrylic panels, custom-made at a specialty firm in Grand Junction, Colo.

Poletti hasn’t added up all the dollar costs. “I don’t really want to know,” he says.

His wife, Glenda, got used to weekends alone while Ray worked in the 2,400-square-foot warehouse, often by himself. On Saturday mornings, he was joined by friends, even on freezing days. “It was a lot of camaraderie,” he says.

Glenda says, “I thought it was crazy. I did not grow up in Seattle, and it was hard for me to connect with what he was connecting.”

But this was a mission for Poletti, a proud Ballard High Class of 1967 grad.

The vision, as sometimes happens with visions, didn’t follow a linear path. It kind of evolved.

Around five years ago, Poletti was closing a property sale that was near the former site of another legendary local artifact. It was the original Hat ’n’ Boots gas station location at the corner of Corson Avenue South and East Marginal Way South. It shut down in 1988, leaving soil contamination that had to be addressed.

Ray began reading about this striking celebration of Americana, a giant cowboy hat 44 feet across that once perched over the station’s office, and giant cowboy boots 22 feet tall, one each over a restroom. They were made out of steel beams, chicken wire and plaster. In 2003 they found a home at Georgetown’s Oxbow Park.

With Poletti doing all this research online, the algorithm began popping up stuff about other local artifacts, including the Bubbleator.

The more Poletti read about the acrylic globe, the more hooked he was.

Laura Phillips, archaeology collections manager at the Burke Museum, understands.

“The reason we care so much about memorializing something is that we care about the memories we attach to it. It’s not just the Bubbleator that was important to him; it’s those collective memories. That is how we often decide something is important to preserve,” she says.

Nicholas Vann, executive director of the Washington State Historical Society, also understands.

“I have spent my career in historical preservation, and in history, there’s nothing more powerful than some of these memories that people have,” he says.

Take the pink Elephant Car Wash sign that used to be at Battery Street and Denny Way, he says.

“It was very uniquely Seattle. It evokes a strong memory, driving by the pink elephant going to a Mariners game,” Vann says. “It gives a city its identity.”

Soon, Poletti was visiting the Des Moines home of Gene Achziger. Back in 1985, Achziger found the original Bubbleator dismantled in parts in a warehouse; he bought them for $1,000 ($3,200 in today’s dollars).

Eventually, Achziger put the sphere back together in his front yard and tried turning it into a greenhouse. The concave parts magnified the heat inside and fried the plants.

If you search “Bubbleator” on Google Earth, it zooms right to his place. Tourists stop by to take pictures.

These days, Achziger decorates the sphere for the holidays. For the Fourth of July, he put a large inflatable rooster inside the sphere, and, hovering above from the second story, a lit-up American eagle ready to pounce. Now, that’s a memorable image.

Achziger remembers about Poletti, “He seemed diligent about pursuing his dream.”

In one trip to Des Moines, Poletti brought along Don Rosen, 89, the engineering manager at Alaskan Copper Works, a metal fabricator in Sodo. Rosen began working there in 1960.

Rosen was in his early 20s during the World’s Fair, and he remembers the original Bubbleator. “It was this goofy thing.”

Poletti asked Rosen if his firm could make the circular aluminum frame to hold the acrylic plates. They’d need to be at a very, very specific radius and be formed in two different directions to give a bubble effect.

Rosen replied, yes, it was possible.

“It was a combination of engineering and really experienced craftsmen. That came out very lucky,” Rosen says.

Now, all those parts had to be put together. Poletti was willing to try. “I’ve had experience turning wrenches, but nothing like this.”

He owns and has worked on five classic cars — a 1935 Ford and four Lincoln Zephyr 3-window coupes from the late 1930s. He estimates that together they’re worth $800,000 to $1 million.

“Let’s say I worked hard enough that it afforded me the ability to do this crazy stuff,” he says.

On June 10, Poletti dismantled the finished Bubbleator replica at the warehouse. He marked every piece with a number and where it fit. Then he rented a flatbed truck and a forklift and had it all transported to his realty. In a few days, it was put back together on the roof.

But with a project like this, there’s always more.

The original Bubbleator had a futuristic stainless steel and chrome operator’s chair, from which passengers were told, “Step to the rear of the sphere. We only have room for 100 of you.” Maybe it really did squeeze in that many.

That chair is at the Museum of History & Industry, and based on its measurements, Poletti had a custom one built.

The Flash Gordon-like silver uniforms for the operators also needed to be found. Glenda and Ray, watching TV and scrolling through Facebook’s Marketplace, found an original uniform at a consignment shop, along with an usher’s Bubbleator uniform. They bought both for $800.

With the replica outside in all kinds of weather, the uniform would be exposed to a variety of temperatures. Glenda is sewing a copy of the operator’s uniform to be displayed inside the Bubbleator. The original they’re keeping in a special display case in Ray’s office.

Also to be ordered online is the spacey music that greeted Bubbleator visitors in 1962.

It’s from an LP titled “Man In Space With Sounds,” by Attilio Mineo, a Brooklyn composer. The album is a sometimes disjointed mix of electronic sounds, violins, xylophones and organ sounds. Think of one of those old-time spaceship movies.  

Poletti sounds quite happy.

He still can’t quite explain why he had immersed himself in this project, but that’s all right. This is Seattle. You can do stuff like that.

You are not a Seattleite if you haven’t driven by the life-size, 18-foot, 9,500-pound, concrete-covered elephant atop steel posts outside Aurora Rents at 8800 Aurora Ave. N.

It’s been on the property, except for a year for restorations, since 1946.

The elephant was created by Giovanni (John) Braida, an Italian immigrant and tile-and-marble artisan in the early 1900s. His family lived in the Fremont area.

“John Braida began to specialize more and more in mosaic and concrete garden ornaments, which he could display in the garden of his house on Woodland Park Avenue. For many years, streetcar riders enjoyed going past this ‘concrete zoo’ with its life-size animals, including an elephant with a howdah (seat) on its back,” according to the website Wedgwood in Seattle History.

In 1946, the elephant was sold for $500 ($9,200 in today’s dollars) to a flower shop at North 88th Street and Aurora Avenue.

When Larry Steele bought the property in 2006, he considered scrapping the now-dilapidated elephant. But the elephant had fans asking Steele to reconsider. He did.

Steele spent $10,000 with a concrete contractor to restore the elephant. That meant replacing missing eyes, part of its trunk and tail, a dented hide, plus dealing with the droppings of pigeons that had lived inside its hollow body (no more pigeons; screens have been added).

Steele says the visitors don’t come as often to take pictures, alluding to the street goings on Aurora Avenue.

Or, he says, maybe Seattle has changed so much that the Aurora Elephant doesn’t much matter anymore.

Anyway, the elephant isn’t going anywhere.

“It’s completely waterproof. It’s almost maintenance free. It’s solid,” Steele says.

Before visiting these two sites with remains of the Kalakala, and what’s been done with them, you really should click on images of its heyday. Here are a couple.

Just one look, that’s all it took for its fans: A sleek, art deco, silver-painted, rounded vessel that seemed to have landed from outer space. There was no ferry like it as the Kalakala traveled Puget Sound from 1935 to 1967. In its early years, it was used for moonlight cruises featuring an eight-piece orchestra.

Then it was over, auctioned off, and used in Alaska for fish processing. There was more ignominy. The beautiful boat was grounded for use as a cannery.

It was brought back to Seattle in 1988 by Seattle sculptor Peter Bevis, but to no avail. The $5 million to $12 million to restore the ferry just wasn’t there. Entrepreneur Steve Rodrigues then bought the boat, and it would be towed from the Seattle waterfront to Lake Union, to Neah Bay and finally to the Hylebos Waterway in Tacoma. Rodrigues’ dreams, too, went by the wayside.

In February 2015, the Kalakala was demolished. Parts were saved for collectors.

You can see the wheelhouse, rudder, and other parts in the parking lot of Salty’s on Alki. It’s a forlorn sight of rust and bent metal.

In Kirkland, various parts of the Kalakala are commemorated at Feriton Spur Park, along the 6-mile-long Cross Kirkland Corridor, a former rail pathway.

The most dramatic is a 30-foot-wide and 15- to 20-foot-high metal sculpture hovering over a small amphitheater. It’s called “Kalakala in Flight,” as the boat’s name loosely translates to “flying bird” in Chinook. It features bird shapes crafted from salvaged boat parts.

Considerably less forlorn looking, to be sure.

If you are in the right spot, looking out at Elliott Bay, you will see a vestige of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It competed with The Seattle Times in print for more than a century. Longtime Seattleites remember the P-I globe at the newspaper’s former headquarters at Sixth Avenue and Wall Street, lighting up the sky in red, blue, green and yellow neon.

The globe weighs 13½ tons and is 30 feet wide, and has an 18-foot-wide eagle on top.

In 1986, the P-I and the globe moved to a five-story office building at 101 Elliott Ave.

On March 17, 2009, the P-I had its final press run. It is now an online publication with no local address and no contact listed for the newsroom. The site appears to be an aggregation of stories from various sources, along with ads.

These days, the globe doesn’t radiate much at night. A spokesperson for the Seattle Housing Authority, which owns the Elliott Avenue building, says “minimal lighting remains as most of the original fixtures have either been removed or no longer function properly.” The slogan “It’s in the P-I,” which used to rotate around the globe’s equator, is now frozen in place.

The week before that final print edition, Dan Barry of The New York Times visited the globe. In a March 16, 2009, story he wrote, “In Seattle, everyone knows what you mean when you say ‘the Globe’ … For some, the P-I Globe is the finest landmark in Seattle, surpassing even the Space Needle. When aglow at night, it seems to float upon the cityscape …”

In 2012, Seattle declared the globe a landmark. The globe is still owned by Hearst; its real estate division did not return emails or voicemails for comment. MOHAI says it has talked with the media company about restoring the globe, but not in recent years.

In 1956, the Elephant Car Wash opened in a triangular lot at Battery Street and Denny Way, with two pink neon signs that greeted motorists heading into downtown Seattle from the north.

A smaller, stationary sign, roughly 10 by 10 feet, was at the south corner. A larger rotating sign, 22 feet high and 17 feet wide, was at the north end. Both came down in 2020 after the owners shut down the location.

They were designed by Bea Haverfield, “Seattle’s Queen of Neon,” who also designed the giant Rainier “R” and the Pike Place Market neon clock.

Why do the signs like these matter to Seattleites?

Leonard Garfield, MOHAI’s executive director, says it’s for the same reason the P-I globe matters, and the Space Needle matters.

“In different ways, they express almost unrestrained optimism about Seattle in the 20th century. This is our place on the world stage. The pink elephant uses humor so we can enjoy our status as a big city,” he says.

The smaller pink elephant was donated to Amazon and reinstalled in December 2022 at Seventh Avenue and Blanchard Street by its campus. The company has applied a clear coat to help with weather damage. If you stop by the elephant, you can scan a QR code there or at other local Amazon sites to hear a narrated history.

The larger sign was donated to MOHAI. It’s been refurbished at Western Neon.

Now, says Garfield, the museum has to figure out a place for it, since the sign won’t fit inside its building. “It’s really meant for outdoor display,” he says.