Drive through Mountain View and you’ll see a dozen attempts to cure one of the city’s roughest, poorest neighborhoods — to repave it, to bring it art and low-cost housing and retail jobs and social services. You’ll see trailer parks closed and flowers planted. You’ll see a new middle school, a new library, a new shopping center and a string of made-over buildings, new paint and glass and corrugated metal.

But you won’t understand the neighborhood unless you find its commercial heart. It’s shaped like a Red Apple.

In a city of polished corporate aisles, of Fred Meyers and Carrs-Safeway and spendy City Market, there is no other store like the Red Apple Market, an oversized Mom & Pop operation where prices are low and inventory spans the globe.

Shoppers trail in speaking Arabic and Lao and Yup’ik, looking for international phone cards and money orders. Carts wind by carrying Wonder Bread and Western Family peanut butter, coconut water and pilot bread, head cheese, pork ribs, mangosteen, tripe, Moon Pies and frozen chicken prepared “Buddah-style,” with head and feet attached. Customers waiting in line wear dashikis and lava-lavas, low-slung work pants and knock-off Apple Bottoms jeans. They push baskets on the floor with their feet. There’s a case of Coke and pork chops. Chiles, diapers and frozen catfish nuggets. Hannah Montana cereal and Bird’s Nest Drink in a can.

Recently, I raised the suspicions of one of the managers by browsing with my notebook. Red Apple is competitive with its prices. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t from another store. I told him I was a writer. Several times I’ve asked Red Apple to let me spend time inside the store with a photographer for a feature story, but the local owner of the franchise politely declined.

Mountain View is not an easy place to get to know. A lot of people there work two jobs. Some don’t speak English well. I’ve found my way through the neighborhood over years of writing stories. I sat with monks at the Lao Buddhist Temple on Schodde Street. I visited a Samoan mother raising her sons and half a dozen other boys in a two-bedroom apartment on North Flower. I listened to old Pasert Lee, the Hmong shaman, calling the spirits from the balcony of a four-plex on Parsons Avenue. But it seemed the Red Apple understood the place far better than I did.

I asked the store manger how they know so precisely what people want in a neighborhood with vastly different customers.

“We just ask ’em,” he said.

After that I went down the road to the cavernous new Old Navy in the Glenn Square Mall. I was picking through $5 tank-tops when it struck me how the people in the Red Apple and the people in my stories seemed totally disconnected from the other events that brought me to the neighborhood when I was a reporter: news conferences about urban renewal projects.

I watched Glenn Square open more than a year ago, heard then-Mayor Mark Begich talk about how the suburban style development with its big box stores would bring commuters to the neighborhood and create jobs for locals. But now the parking lot was mostly empty. Many of the storefronts stood empty too. The multiplex movie theater, which was announced in a balloon-festooned press event I attended, canceled plans to move in.

It was just the latest well-intentioned Mountain View fix, built on bringing outsiders into the neighborhood, that hadn’t worked. There was the refurbished Sadler’s building, with its beautiful European modular offices meant to lure high paying tenants, that had a “For Lease” sign outside years after its debut. Noble Diner, the local food bastion that never quite took hold. And the Color Creek Fiber Art building, part of a push to make the neighborhood a destination for artists. That was torn down to make way for a bank. (Also an experiment in a neighborhood where a good number of people don’t use checking accounts.)

Still, some businesses thrive in Mountain View. The Polynesian lunch counters, the laundromat, the Asian video stores, the Red Apple. I wondered: can you really revitalize a place by painting over its character, by building there in hopes outsiders will show up and make things different?

Or could the politicians and developers learn something from the Red Apple, a vibrant destination in a poor, rough neighborhood? Maybe the secret wasn’t to make Mountain View more like somewhere else, like a suburban center or a hip artists’ neighborhood, but to encourage it to be more like what it is already: the richest cultural district in the city.

That would mean connecting with the people who live there to find out what they want and what they have to offer. That isn’t easy, but Red Apple shows it isn’t impossible. All they did was ask.
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