On a walk one morning, I spotted a raccoon, freshly stripped of its fur, on the corner of a fence. I was horrified, but my boyfriend calmly reminded me of the man we often see in McLendon’s Hardware dressed mostly in animal pelts. In any other ’hood, such a sighting might point to some gruesome teenage prank, but in White Center, it’s likely a humble witness to a grizzled bachelor’s survival skills. Annexed neither by Burien or Seattle, White Center, in unincorporated King County, remains a vortex where such encounters are commonplace. You’ll surely find some on 16th Avenue, which retains its infamous sex shops, dive bars, and now multiple marijuana collectives. Yet that street also boasts one of the area’s best breakfasts (Meander’s Kitchen), fabulous pizza (Proletariat), and a hipster ice-cream shop (Full Tilt). Nearby, there are amazing burgers at Zippy’s, great coffee at DubSea, good local suds at Big Al’s, and fine cocktails at Company Bar, where you can dine on croquettes while homeless folks loiter 10 feet away on a sidewalk littered with condoms and barbecue-sauce packets. It’s rough around the edges, but it also offers a look at urban life, sometimes through strange coincidence, unlike anywhere else in King County. My boyfriend and I recently found a bag of weed—about $1,000 worth of herb—on the sidewalk. We knew it had likely been forgotten in a stoner’s haze and took it to a neighbor in the biz. It was his brother’s stash.