Here we have a city: black and beige and boxy up front, the towers of Chicago or Tokyo planted in soil that once held a glacier and fed a forest. Such bulk, piled on land so rumpled, pinched by an enormous lake on one side and an inland sea on the other. It’s all very new, and all very tentative, for Seattle is a city that can’t decide what to wear. The city has changed its look three times in the last thirty years, and half a dozen times in the last century. The hills that once rose steeply from the central waterfront—they’ve been cut in half. The Black River, a salmon stream that flowed from Lake Washington to the Duwamish and into Puget Sound—it’s gone. And the tidelands which nurtured a bouillabaisse of sea life—buried. Still, the city is not finished; every wave of fresh tenants wants to remodel. So, the flat-topped hills of downtown, minus their natural summits, are sprouting new skyscrapers by the month, and the forested edge of the city is leveled for Weyerhaeuser’s newest product: the instant neighborhood. When humorist Fran Lebowitz recently visited Seattle, she was asked what she thought of the city. “It’s cute,” she replied. “Why are they tearing it down?”
In the spirit of earlier inhabitants, I approach Seattle by kayak, entering Elliott Bay on a weekday morning; it’s like landing at O’Hare Airport on a kite. Overwhelmed by ship traffic, I hug the shoreline, trailed by sea birds looking for French fries. The wake of a passing container ship, four city blocks in length, gives my small craft a muscular nudge. Rainier floats atop the southern skyline, a hooded cone above the industrial congestion of the Duwamish Valley. There is the Kingdome, a cement cavern without sufficient daylight to adequately support a baseball team, plopped on fill-dirt that used to be tidelands. Farther south is Boeing Field, where the Duwamish River was straightened and its old bed leveled to provide a runway for newly hatched jumbo jets. Towering over downtown is the Columbia Center. A thousand feet high and black as a charred forest, it’s stuffed with enough lawyers to replace nearly half the attorneys in Japan.
Looking around, I see a few hints of traditional life in the temperate zone: a rock crab scrambling over exposed pilings, some loose kelp, a cormorant riding a northern breeze. At the entrance, Elliott Bay is nearly as deep as the Space Needle is high, a depth of six hundred feet that hides a half-blind octopus of three hundred pounds which paralyzes its prey with a toxic squirt. In these waters live squid twenty-four feet long, century-old clams with necks of pornographic dimensions, starfish bigger than an extra-large pizza—in all, more than two thousand kinds of invertebrates. All of that is below me, out of sight. What I see when I paddle into Elliott Bay is the dominance of one species.
I try to imagine George Vancouver, who was the first to pencil Puget Sound onto a map that showed no such thing. For one month in the spring of 1792, at the age of thirty-four, he had the feeling of God during Creation Week. Traveling up the Pacific Coast, the Discovery and the Chatham took a right turn at the Strait of Juan de Fuca and proceeded east toward an immense volcano anchored in the North Cascades, which Vancouver promptly relieved of its native name, Koma Kulshan, and replaced with that of his cartographer, Joseph Baker, the “undistinguished biped” cursed by Winthrop. Then south, to an inland sea and an even bigger volcano at its southern end, which he named Rainier. He passed through Admiralty Inlet, the weather clear, the water calm, the mountains polished on either side of him. All around, the land rose up in storm-sculpted detail, the islands carpeted by forests, streams leaping out of steep canyons. The air opened his sinuses and expanded his imagination. Vancouver, already ill with a mystery disease that would kill him before his fortieth birthday, was in the Northwest to map and chart a course for future commerce. A detail man, humorless, he would flog his men in front of other sailors to make his disciplinary point. But when he entered Puget Sound something happened, as if he’d tossed his old spirit overboard in a rush of spring euphoria. The first thing he did was give his men a holiday, their only day off since they’d passed Cape Horn at the toe of South America. From then on, his journals started to sing.
To Vancouver and other British explorers, wild land was evil land, bad until proven civilized. That attitude changed when he came upon the garden of Puget Sound. It was perfect as it was. Vancouver wrote: “As we had no reason to imagine this country had ever been indebted for any of its decorations to the hand of man, I could not possibly believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture.” Farther down the sound, he anchored off Bainbridge Island, just across the water from the future city of Seattle. Vancouver then penned what is perhaps his most famous passage:
To describe the beauties of this region, will, on some future occasion, be a very grateful task to the pen of a skillful panegyrist. The serenity of the climate, the innumerable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages, and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined.
In short order, the place would be full of villages and mansions and cottages, but their inhabitants felt compelled to assist nature. In Seattle, they nearly overwhelmed it.
On that spring evening in 1792, a six-year-old native boy by the name of Sealth is said to have looked out across the water at the Discovery, surely a vessel that could not have been assembled with any product of nature. The Olympics were topped by the gold trim of sunset, the Cascades dark blue in repose. Never again would such a view belong to one band of people. Sealth was the son of a native slave woman taken in one of the periodic raids which the Coast Indians engaged in to replenish the tribal stock of females. The city that was built around Elliott Bay was named for Sealth, changed to Seattle because the original pronunciation (See-alth) made the speaker sound as if he had a lisp. But that came much later, more than a half-century after Vancouver passed by.
When Winthrop visited Puget Sound, Washington Territory had just been carved from the Oregon Country and contained fewer than four thousand whites. It was a wilderness twice as large as New England, stretching from the Columbia River to the Canadian border and east to Montana. Like Vancouver before him, he felt this land would need no customizing from humans to improve it; instead, things should work the other way, with the land reshaping its inhabitants—Winthrop’s central prophecy. Already the cities of the East, some of them two hundred years old and falling into industrial mayhem, were not working. The nation was torn by slavery; seventy-seven years after the start of the American Revolution, a class system was still in place in many parts of a country where the theory of democracy and the practice of same were an ocean apart. Strange religious cults, centered around leaders who traded in ecstasy and redemption, sprang up in New England, New York and the new states of Ohio and Illinois and Indiana. Here in the Far West, in a maritime valley between two mountain ranges, was a fresh chance for a new nation to live up to its promise. Starting over is the oldest American impulse.
From my kayak today, I look one way at the forest of new skyscrapers and the other way at Bainbridge Island to a grassy opening in the trees where Sealth is buried. There is a white cross atop his stone grave; in his later years, he converted to Christianity, and the first historians of Seattle treated him well as a result. Had he remained true to his native religious beliefs, he would have burned every day he heard his name mentioned in relation to the ever-expanding city in his midst. Once a person died, his name was supposed to go with him, evoked by mortals only on the most solemn of occasions. Sealth had always been one to compromise; some would say he sold out, early and often. He was tall and tough, a warrior in his younger days who owned eight slaves at one point and eventually freed them after Abraham Lincoln did the same thing for blacks in the South. He lived to be a very old man, going from aboriginal king of Elliott Bay and the river that drained into it, to a withered curiosity on the muddy streets of what would become the largest city in the country named for a Native American.
Sealth was there when two dozen members of the Denny party landed off Alki Point in a November rain storm in 1851. The plan was to build a city on this narrow beach strip west of Elliott Bay. In the spring of that year, four wagons had left Cherry Grove, Illinois—a town which has long since left the map—and crossed the continent to Portland. They traveled the Oregon Trail at the same time that David Swinson Maynard, a clever, hard-drinking physician on the run from a bad marriage and a mountain of debt, was making his exodus from Cleveland. To this day, Seattle’s divided character can be traced to the dual nature of its two founders. Maynard was a boozer and a visionary; Arthur Denny was a teetotaler and small-minded. Maynard quickly learned to speak the native language and set up alliances with several tribes; Denny despised the Indians and considered them useless except as snitches against their own people. It was Maynard who named Seattle, scribbling it into the territorial register after first scouting the location and conniving with Chief Sealth, who had been in exile while feuding with a rival native leader. Sealth planned to use the white party’s arrival at his longtime fishing grounds as a means to his triumphant return.
When the twelve adults and twelve children of the Denny party landed at the wind-lacerated shore of what they called New York–Alki, the appearance of Sealth and his tribe shocked them. It was a collision of Midwestern, church-going, cow-eating, monogamous people with a Northwestern, polytheistic, salmon-eating, promiscuous band. The white women, their starched bonnets collapsing in the rain storm, broke into fits of tears. There was supposed to be a cabin waiting for them, built by one of the younger members of the party. There was; but it had no roof. From the very beginning, this place of brooding green was no Illinois, although the city founders would spend much of their time trying to make it so. The new reality set in quickly: Mary Denny, unable to nurse her screaming infant, came up with a formula of clam nectar.
Doc Maynard arrived in late winter and quickly concluded that the log cabin at the base of the windswept bluff would not do for his city. They could keep New York–Alki. He paddled his dugout around Alki Point and into Elliott Bay, protected from the winds and extraordinarily deep, and found the spot he had earlier scouted, where the Duwamish River drained into the bay. Several steep, forested hills rose above the tideflats. In accordance with the Oregon Donation Land Act, he claimed 320 acres for himself and 320 acres for the wife in Cleveland whom he had yet to divorce. Denny had also been exploring the Duwamish drainage; four months after settling into New York–Alki, he moved his party to the superior site on the bay. He platted one section of town in a neat grid patterned after Cherry Grove; on the same day, Maynard platted an adjacent section in a not-so-neat grid patterned after his native Cleveland. Thus was born the last great American city to rise during the frontier experience, 211 years after John Winthrop founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and used the words “City on a Hill” to describe the New World promise.
Within a few years, Maynard’s section of Seattle was wide open, a lumberjack’s version of an eternal lost weekend. Denny’s section was proper, picket-fenced. On Maynard’s plat was the house of Madame Damnable, a two-story, Southern-style mansion and bordello that became one of the most popular destinations north of San Francisco, and the seat of local justice. On Denny’s plat was built an Episcopal church. While the whorehouse thrived, the church folded for lack of attendance. Seattle still ranks at the bottom of all American cities in number and percentage of church-goers.
Most towns that were carved from the weeping forests of the Pacific Coast in the days before the Civil War were built in a spirit of speculation. Great chunks of land were free for the taking. Large sums of money were then made when that land was sold off, lot by lot, to immigrants who were convinced that their muddy plot would double in value within a few years. It was a kind of pyramid scheme, dependent on every new settler attracting three or four additional friends. As Winthrop wrote, “Whenever one has hit on a good site for a town, his next neighbor starts a rival one, so that there are often two settlements within a quarter mile in open warfare.” While waiting for property values to rise, the towns had to do something to stay afloat and to make a name for themselves. In Seattle, they sold timber and sex—the only two reasons for a ship to tie up at the mud village in Elliott Bay. A few months after the Denny party arrived at Alki, they loaded a cargo of logs onto a brig bound for San Francisco, which the goldrush had transformed from a tent camp of a few hundred people to a rough city of 35,000. But every few months Baghdad by the Bay caught fire; in four years’ time, San Francisco burned down five times.
The forests of northern California and Oregon were full of the straightest, tallest and thickest timber whites had ever seen, but the woods were impenetrable, and it was impossible to land a ship along most of the raging coastline. In Puget Sound, the lumber merchants from San Francisco found safe harbor, compliant pilgrims from the Midwest, and wood that could be purchased for a fraction of the price it would bring back in California. By 1853, the year Winthrop canoed past Elliott Bay, Seattle was home to the only steam sawmill on Puget Sound. Logs were cut from the hills above Madame Damnable’s and skidded down a grease-planked road to Henry Yesler’s mill. In San Francisco, after one of its town-consuming fires, those logs could bring as much as $300 per thousand board feet, which is not far from the price paid for raw logs today. As long as there were trees to cut, the people would prosper. Initially, the town looked no different than Port Gamble, the Pope & Talbot Company milltown on the other side of the Sound, or any other Northwestern timber village choking on sawdust and clay muck. Seattle was a filthy, foul-smelling lumber camp and vice pit that would, within a few generations, be called the most livable city in America.
By the time coal was being gouged out of the nearby Cascade foothills for export, Seattle was a full-blown resource colony, and a rowdy wart of a town at that. There were mob hangings, riots against the Chinese, saloon shootings, plagues of venereal disease. The Indian prostitutes who roamed the roughest parts of Maynard’s plat were known as “sawdust women.” A famous story has it that a hat remained in the middle of the muddy street for days on end because residents were afraid to pick it up and see who might be under it. Chief Sealth, appalled at how his emerald garden had been trashed so quickly, wrote a letter in 1854 to President Franklin Pierce. “The whites, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than the other tribes,” he wrote with the help of a translator. “Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in waste.” To the white founders of the city, the new land was not a garden to be cultivated, but a wilderness to be crushed; it was not a paradise populated by an ancient race, but a vacant lot.
Sealth died in 1866, one year after the city which bore his name passed an ordinance to ban Indians from town. His youngest daughter, Angeline, continued to live in an eight-by-ten-foot shack on the edge of Seattle for another thirty years. She became a sad-faced curiosity, the frequent subject of sympathetic photo-essays. In the summer of 1889 the entire city went up in flames, and when the immense purple cloud lifted, all traces of the old town of driftwood shacks and wood-planked sidewalks were gone forever. Rebuilding in stone and steel, the new city musclemen went on a pell-mell push for greatness. The native land ethic and Sealth’s warning to a president would return, but not for several decades.
There was a lot of work ahead in the reshaping of the natural setting. First, they took up pickaxe and shovel against the seven miles of earth separating Puget Sound from Lake Union, a canal project completed in 1916 with the help of an army of immigrant laborers, mostly Scandinavian. Then, on a belief that the city could not expand because of the steep hills, civic leaders began the most ambitious earth-moving project of any urban center in North America: the war against Seattle’s hills. These bizarre regrades would take half a century, move more dirt than was displaced by the Panama Canal, and reduce the city’s downtown elevation by 107 feet. Day and night, the glacial till of Denny Hill, Jackson Hill, First Hill and smaller city lumps were sluiced and gouged away—sixty-eight square blocks in all. “Some people seem to think that just because there were hills in Seattle originally, some of them ought to be left there,” said R. H. Thompson, the chief city engineer, clearly disgusted by such an attitude. A few houses, their owners refusing to cooperate, were left teetering on the remnant towers of the old hills. At times, the city resembled a moist moonscape. The tidelands where Sealth’s people used to dig for clams and set weirs for salmon were filled in, two thousand acres in all, first with sawdust, then with regrade dirt from the shrinking hills.
Murray Morgan, the Northwest historian, has said that the natural scenery of this city is better than if it had been planned. But from 1876 to 1930 more than 50 million tons of original Seattle was scraped away like gravel in a goldmine—a horror to the aesthete, a delight to the technocrat. Seattle was praised by the American Society of Engineers as a city “that had the courage to fill in its tideflats and regrade its hills.” The great urban crew cut, they noted, “is the result of allowing full play to the imagination and creative energy of the engineers.”
Winthrop would’ve been shocked at the initial appearance of the biggest city in the Northwest, an area he said was endowed with “the best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature.” In this part of the world, poet would never be dwarfed by engineer, he predicted. Winthrop never mentioned Seattle in his book, in all likelihood because it appeared as nothing but a curl of smoke from a distant mill as he paddled past Elliott Bay, heading south for Nisqually. The prophet of 1853 found only the seven forested hills over which Seattle would eventually conquer and sprawl, but no city. He was high on Puget Sound, calling it by the native name, Whulge, and saying “Whulge is more interesting than any of the eastern waters of our country.” Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, Long Island Sound, “even the Maine archipelago cannot compare with it.”
Stirred by the soft beauty of the Sound, Winthrop wrote:
Again, I thought of the influence of this most impressive scenery upon its future pupils among men. The shape of the world has controlled or guided men’s growth; the look of the world has hardly yet begun to have its effect upon spiritual progress. Multitudes of agents have always been at work to poison and dwarf poets and artists in those inspiring regions of earth where nature means they shall grow as naturally as water-lilies by a lake, or palms above the thicks of tropic woods.
More than two million people live in metropolitan Seattle, a population larger than that of the entire states of Idaho and Montana put together. With all that open space just across the mountains, why cram onto a narrow band of land situated at a latitude farther north than half the homes of Canada? Tonight, stuck in traffic on a rain-slicked freeway at the edge of town, I grope for a type-A answer to this question. The new crowds of the city have forced the pace of thought and the pulse of routine. Gone from these streets is the favorite bumper sticker of the West: “If You Can Read This, You’re Driving Too Close.” Large, full-windowed houses with big yards and wonderful views are grafted to every available lot from south of Seattle to Everett, a forty-five-mile stretch. In between are three Boeing plants, each with its own police force, its own passports, and, at the 747 plant in Everett, a building so large clouds have been known to form inside. It’s hard to see why jet factories have grown so naturally in this climate. An accident of timing, a world war, plenty of cheap property, and before you know it, the land of salmon and evergreen trees is the airplane capital of the world.
I turn off the freeway and head west toward the Highlands, which is where Bill Boeing settled after he sold his interest in the company. Overlooking Puget Sound and secluded by natural boundaries, the Highlands is to Seattle what Beverly Hills is to Los Angeles. It’s much more understated and Northwestern, of course; this is a city where only lawyers, bankers and fresh-minted MBAs are consistent tie-wearers, and one in three residents belongs to the REI co-op. I pass the Tudor mansions and stone estates of old Seattle wealth, the descendants of timber barons who now live among some of the oldest and tallest trees left in the Puget Sound area, a long way from the ravaged stumpland of timber towns like Forks or Raymond. The homes are tasteful, devoid of ostentation, shadowed by the big firs. Each has its own stately view of the water, the islands, and the Olympics, an edge-of-the-world perch.
But, just as most of the big trees disappeared, these homes—this life—seem threatened, a feeling not limited to rich people in the Highlands. Stewart Holbrook, the writer of old tales about the young Northwest, described a feeling years ago that now is taken seriously by some. “Like many a native,” he said, “I am privately of the opinion that this entire region should be set aside as one great park before it is wholly overrun by foreign immigrants like me.”
A park it will not be. But a campaign essentially to freeze the region’s biggest city, to do for Seattle what President Franklin Roosevelt did for the Olympic Peninsula, is gaining steam, even as it runs into the historic impulse of each wave of new residents to inflate and shape the city to their own liking. The idea of forcing newcomers to check their expansion plans at the city’s door goes against the basic vision of the West—faster, bigger, better, the buzzwords of the American tomorrow. Seattle no longer wants to call itself New York–Alki, or even be compared to such a thing. After a century and a half of war, many in this city want to make peace with their surroundings while there is still enough of it left to bring them the good life prophesied by Winthrop. This sentiment has gone well beyond the sloganeering phase; taking the arcana of zoning laws into their own hands, Seattle citizens are set to vote on a measure that would cut construction of downtown skyscrapers by two-thirds. There is talk of banning cars from the central city, and keeping new houses from the last open spaces left in King County.
This movement began, in large part, with Emmett Watson, a newspaper columnist and author locally famous for founding Lesser Seattle, whose members commemorate month-long rain storms and civic failures with press releases to other cities. Watson is not a tree-hugger or backpacker; he chain-smokes unfiltered cigarettes, slurps black coffee ’round the clock, and walks with a half-step and hunched back. His constant companion is a runt poodle. Deaf in one ear, he briefly played semipro baseball for the Seattle Rainiers in 1942. When he was replaced on the roster, the coach was asked if the new player could hit. “I don’t know,” he answered. “But at least the son-of-a-bitch can hear.”
Tonight, in honor of Watson’s seventieth birthday, people from various backgrounds are crowded into the borrowed Highlands mansion to fete the founder of Lesser Seattle and talk up the promise of a restrained tomorrow. Off in one corner is Vasiliki Dwyer; she is with her husband, Federal Judge Bill Dwyer. I want to ask her about a certain mountain in the North Cascades, but I decide against bringing up Fred Beckey’s legacy. I’m drawn to another face, that of a man who is nearly one hundred years old: Dave Beck, the old lion. Once he was considered, next to the President, the most powerful man in America. Now he has the countenance of an infant, free of hair and teeth and the dead weight of responsibility.
For much of this century, nothing on wheels moved in Seattle without Beck’s permission. Later on, little in America moved without his permission. As president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters during the height of its power in the 1950s, Beck was the lord of labor. Born in 1894, a time when Chief Sealth’s crease-faced daughter still prowled the streets looking for garbage to take back to her driftwood-framed shack, Beck is a living link between the mud village of New York–Alki and the overburdened megalopolis of today. His family came to Seattle in 1898, at the height of the Klondike goldrush, which enriched Seattle far more than it did the waves of argonauts who tramped through the snows of the Yukon. A brilliant publicity campaign convinced prospectors that they couldn’t set foot in Alaska, 1,300 miles to the north, without first dropping most of their savings on merchants in Seattle. In two years’ time, Seattle had more people than Los Angeles. In twenty years’ time, it grew six times over. In the West, only San Francisco was bigger. Seattle had grown so quickly from primitive milltown to a showy urban upstart that a writer from Harper’s Weekly remarked: “In the story of civilization, there is probably no record of more astonishing growth.”
Like other immigrants, Beck’s parents came to Seattle intending to board a ship for Alaska, but never got out of town. Beck himself was driving a laundry truck when Seattle was paralyzed by the only general strike ever to shut down an American city. Goldrush prosperity was followed by corruption so far-reaching that the police chief built and operated a five-hundred-room whorehouse with the full permission of the mayor. World War I heated up the timber, fishing and ship-building economy, all of which crashed following the Armistice. By 1919, the streets were swollen with newly unemployed shipyard workers, no-luck vets, three-fingered timbermen from the labor camps of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), fruit pickers, foreigners fired up by the revolution then raging in Russia, and assorted hungry men from the sea and woods of the Northwest. There were several bloody riots between workers and company goons. Massacres made instant martyrs of Wobbly leaders. The city was ready to explode. A strike call, issued in sympathy for the shipyard workers, went out to the entire town, and on the morning of February 6, 1919, nothing moved in Seattle. In the labor paper, Anna Louise Strong, the onetime school board member and civic volunteer, wrote the words that would follow her to her grave in China, where she was an early supporter of Mao Zedong: “We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country, a move which will lead—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE.” The strike ran out of steam precisely because it had nowhere to go.
Dave Beck, the laundry-truck driver taking his self-improvement courses at night, learned a valuable lesson. He proceeded to organize every trade and profession with more than a handful of members, and he disciplined their leaders. In time, there was seldom any reason to call a strike; Beck had such control that most labor disputes were settled with a phone call. Business leaders came to like Beck, an Elks Club member, a teetotaler, a man whose word was law. His absolute power was predictable, which made for a smooth economy. Together, they promoted Seattle. Growth was oxygen, and the city inhaled it in great gulps.
Within a generation of the general strike, Seattle was no longer a scruffy labor town, but a citadel of the middle class. Union stevedores spent the weekends at their cabins on Puget Sound, or took off the first week in September to go salmon-fishing, same as their bosses. As president of the international, Beck became a wealthy man; union funds were used to pay inflated prices for property that he had purchased. The man who had once been so poor he shot rats for a bounty bought himself a mansion overlooking Puget Sound, complete with swimming pool. Despite repeated attempts by federal prosecutors and Senate racketeering inquiries to get him, Beck held on until 1962, when he was sent to prison for income tax fraud. He did three years’ time at McNeil Island in Puget Sound, a prison term he said he found so restful that it added ten years to his life.
Now the growth crusades of Beck’s prime have given way to a broad campaign to prevent too many people from moving here. The credo of many at this party is found in the words of Edward Abbey, who wrote that growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell. Each person who comes up to Watson tonight has some story to tell about confusing a tourist or obstructing plans for the latest housing development at the edge of town. I hear much talk about the unbearable traffic, the frozen lines of cars on the Lake Washington bridges that connect Seattle to the generic neighborhoods spilling east to the mountains, and the forty thousand new people a year pouring into the Seattle metro area—a figure bandied about like the latest blood pressure reading of a terminally ill patient. An architect says too many of the new buildings look like Houston. Houston! And what about these Los Angeles drug gangs, the worst export of a town that has long been viewed as the Satan of cities? Unlike L.A., where residents don’t look twice at the most popular yard sign in many neighborhoods—WARNING: THIS HOUSE PROTECTED BY ARMED RESPONSE—Seattle has not made the effortless shift to a siege mentality. Still, control seems to have shifted; more than ever, power is with forces from outside of the city, coming this way—a force of urban magnetism.
There is a certain smugness to all this talk; wouldn’t Detroit or Cleveland or Buffalo or Denver like to have a little boom of its own? But beyond that, the growth angst has an edge because it goes to the very reason why people live in Seattle. Here in the corner attic of America, two hours’ drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.
The rain has always been the secret weapon. Winter days can be so dark and dank that a flashlight is helpful on a midday stroll. For nine months out of the year meteorologists issue one basic forecast: rain turning to showers. Turning to showers? How can they tell? The clouds are seldom forceful and usually tentative. The volume is nothing unusual—less rain falls here than in any city on the East Coast—it’s the threat, the constant ambiguity in the sky, that drives people crazy. Now, however, with skin cancer and global warming, the sun is losing favor. On top of every other growth concern, even the Seattle drizzle has become fashionable, as good for the skin as a daily facial.
Watson gave the slow-things-down movement a name and a voice. As with many Seattle political trends, it started as a joke. While attending a luncheon of civic leaders who talked of further campaigns to expand the city—more industry, more people, more tourists—Watson squawked from the back of the room: “Who needs it?” Scorning formal organization and using his newspaper column as a bully pulpit, he commissioned anyone who shared his sympathies to become a “KBO agent.” During an interview on the Today show, Bryant Gumbel winced when Watson answered his question about what the initials stood for: Keep the Bastards Out.
A writer with an ear for the talk of many lives, Watson has spent a lifetime chronicling the odd characters of the new city on Puget Sound. His father was a basement digger, and Emmett remembers tagging along as he cleared the sliding glacial till for new home foundations. Later, he moved to a farm east of Seattle near Snoqualmie Falls. The Depression broke his father, the bank took his farm, and he moved back to the city and went on welfare. He died shortly thereafter.
When Emmett came of age, the regrades and earth-moving projects were done, and the city was starting to show signs of fulfilling the Winthrop prophecy. A fine public university was built on a hill facing Mount Rainier—a promenade from the center of campus seems to spill into the mountain’s north face, like the road to a glacial Oz—spread out over six hundred acres, accessible by water, and designed in Gothic style by a graduate of the Beaux-Arts school in Paris. Seattle attracted social tinkerers, lifestyle experimenters, political radicals. A Northwest style of architecture evolved, featuring windows big enough to allow the feel of winter storms, lots of unpainted wood, and clean trim lines in place of Victorian flourish. The subjects of native art—eagles and salmon and killer whales and wolves—and the muted colors of the sea and forest were evident in the work of many young artists. When Nellie Cornish arrived early in the twentieth century to found her school for the arts, she said the physical elements that surrounded the city would serve as the fount of a spirit and artistic style such as the country had never known. Eventually, Seattle became an important theater town. Ten professional stages provided Broadway and the West End with a steady source of original hits, although the directors of these theaters insisted they were creating original works for the people of the Northwest, not serving as a farm team for New York and London. When I asked Dan Sullivan, artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre, why Seattle supports so much theatrical activity, he pointed to the drizzle outside his window. “The rain,” he said. “It makes you go into dark places to tell stories.”
Watson, who grew up listening to baseball games from distant ballparks, always thought he would move away to a real city. But he never left town. After baseball, he stumbled into the even cushier job of sports-writing, which led him to the better gossip tables in town and an expanded column format. He knew the bohemians and socialists, the Woody Guthrie crowd who sang until dawn at Lake Union houseboat parties; he followed Mark Tobey as he made a career painting the moods of the Pike Place Market; and when Ernest Hemingway passed his last day in Ketchum, Idaho, it was Watson who found out the death was a suicide and broke the news to the world. He helped the crusaders of the early 1960s as they campaigned to clean up Lake Washington, expand the region’s park system and launch a world’s fair that would leave the city with a landmark, the Space Needle, and a performing-arts complex.
Seattle was a place where a few citizens, not necessarily powerful but with access to a voice or a money source or a Senator, could change things. People moved here from the East or Midwest determined to do good, and in five years’ time they were part of the power structure (and five years later some of them were part of the problem). Long before there was an Environmental Protection Agency or a Clean Water Act, a young bond lawyer shamed the city into paying for a massive cleanup of Lake Washington. Freeways which threatened parks or the quiet of settled neighborhoods were stopped in midair construction (they became known as the ramps to nowhere). A forested park was created on a lid covering Interstate 5, and an aging industrial plant was transformed into a public playground and kite-flying mound. Unlike Los Angeles, a city set in a Mediterranean paradise which long ago lost its resiliency, Seattle tried to practice some self-restraint.
But then things started to change. National magazines, beginning with Harper’s in the mid-1970s, declared Seattle the most livable city in America. In the 1980s, Rand McNally rated the city the number-one vacation destination in the country, and Savvy magazine said it was the best place for women to live. Sports Illustrated pronounced Seattle a haven for the urban outdoorsman. The television news magazine 60 Minutes said Seattle was the best place in the country to have a heart attack because the emergency medical response was so good. Trade periodicals wrote that the average Seattle resident read more books, attended more movies and purchased more sunglasses (lost between solar appearances) than people in other cities. Esquire weighed in with a story on the Seattle lifestyle—“a major subculture of lawyers-turned-carpenters” and “some significant going home at four-thirty,” and “on a famous ferry going into famous Seattle, dusk on a November night, the sky, the water, the mountains are all the same color: lead in a closet. Suicide weather. The only thing wrong with this picture is that you feel so happy.”
All of this was acid in the face of Lesser Seattle. With each accolade came strangers who wanted a piece of Seattle and wanted it now, with some alteration. It was a curse, this Most Livable City tag, the revenge of Chief Sealth, coming at a time when the Northwest, like the rest of North America, was giving up its farms and becoming a continent of urbanites. Two-thirds of Oregonians now live within a hundred miles of Portland; seventy percent of Washington’s population lives in the Puget Sound basin, and half of British Columbia’s residents crowd the area around Vancouver. In Seattle, growth begat gridlock, drug wars and office buildings that broke through the ceiling of the cloud cover but greeted pedestrians like a basement wall. The Scandinavian business tradition which helped Nordstrom go from a single shoe store on Pike Street to the largest clothing retailer in the nation gave way to bigger money from the outside and bottom-line executives who couldn’t give a damn about the water purity of Lake Washington or how some season-ticket holder felt about “his” Seahawks. To the old motivation of greed was added a new reason for the changing cityscape: ego. Martin Selig, a diminutive developer who owns a third of all the office space in the city, remade the skyline faster than a troop of volunteers had done just after the Great Fire of 1889. He reached the zoning code zenith with the seventy-six-story Columbia Center, the tallest building on the West Coast when completed in 1981. Paul Schell, who came to Seattle from Iowa, took a look at the Columbia Center and said, “If Martin Selig had been six-foot-five instead of five-foot-six, that building would be only half as big.”
In the midst of Seattle’s growing pains, Watson went to Switzerland to visit Mark Tobey during the painter’s final years. Long after he left the country, Tobey continued to draw upon Seattle as the source of his inspiration: the sky could make four different faces in an hour; the wind jumped off the water and tumbled through the streets; anywhere you looked, from a hilltop neighborhood to a waterfront dock, at any time, the curtains might open and a mountain range would appear. If those peaks had been in hiding for a few weeks of winter, they looked new. Tobey was crushed by the march of the megalopolis toward the Cascades and the wave of generic skyscrapers downtown. Overnight, cities were shaking off their past and repackaging themselves in a single uniform. Seattle in the late twentieth century, once again ignoring the natural blueprint of its setting, was going the same way. “Landmarks with human dimensions are being torn down to be replaced by structures that appear never to have been touched by human hands,” said Tobey.
Tobey’s disgust became fighting words. The Downtown Seattle Association wanted to tear down the century-old Pike Place Market, heart and soul of the city and Tobey’s favorite hangout, and replace it with a ritzy mall. They had their eyes on Doc Maynard’s old plat, the century-old stone buildings of Pioneer Square, as bulldozer fodder. Both were saved by a vote of the citizens.
Land is finite and fragile; once it’s capped by pavement or smothered with buildings, it will not answer to the laws of nature. The no-growth movement gained strength with people who said there was nothing wrong with big trees and steep hills and small buildings. They challenged the long-held assumption that the West was a blank slate that would only reach a semblance of civilization when it started to resemble the East, or Europe. Sure, more people brought more sophistication, but, for all the fine talk, it made for less room. The most audacious statement in the early days was made by Oregon Governor Tom McCall. “Come and visit us again and again,” said McCall. “But for God’s sake don’t come here to live.”
Watson’s approach was along the same lines, with humor as the main weapon. The only National Basketball Association game ever to be called on account of rain (a leaky Seattle Coliseum roof) was touted as cause for a civic holiday. Presidential visits were rated by order of disaster: William Howard Taft was stung on the neck by a bee; Warren G. Harding caught a cold in the damp Puget Sound weather and died soon after his brief visit; Franklin Roosevelt was drenched when his open car was hit by a sudden squall; and candidate George Bush’s motorcade at rush hour so backed up traffic that it helped to shift sentiment in favor of his Democratic opponent.
Still, all the Lesser Seattle talk only made those coveting a piece of the new city think the citizens were hiding some secret. And when they came and settled into their four-bedroom homes on a ridge bordering Mount Si near the site of the old Watson family pea farm, they joined Lesser Seattle. The city was caught in a paradox: As long as Seattle was seen as fresh and malleable, it would not be left alone. So, in the 1980s, the metropolitan area’s population grew at twice the national average, and the central business core took on more office towers than downtown Los Angeles. Frustration mounted, pooled into those intersections wherever two or more waits to pass through a traffic light were frequent. In response, a group of citizens, most of them recent arrivals, put together an initiative to cut new skyscraper construction by two-thirds. And so the question of whether the premier city of the Pacific Northwest answers to the rhythms of the land or the demands of the marketplace has been reduced to a vote on how big and how fast new buildings can go up in the old haunt of Doc Maynard.
The obsessive need for growth is seen, in the Lesser Seattle view, as insecurity, a hangover from the resource-colony days. A city that has no confidence in its own ability to prosper is doomed to control by outsiders. While the vote nears, the debate is over who runs Seattle, what its true destiny may be. As when three owners of the same house try to decide how to remodel, there is no unifying vision. Some say Seattle should aspire to be the Paris of Puget Sound, accepting growth with grand European style and direction, a meeting of the ideal with the inevitable. This recalls New York–Alki, a city groping for greatness by trying to be like something else, instead of creating itself from the elements of its natural setting. Others want to seal the city entirely, drawing a line at the forested edge and putting up the Keep Out signs. The arguments rage for months, and then on a spring day when the Cascades hang in the grip of alpenglow till 9 P.M., a hundred years after the city burned to the ground, the verdict is in: by a nearly two-to-one margin, citizens of Seattle vote to curb future development drastically. What’s important about Seattle, they say, is not glass and steel and money—those are the elements of Texas—but air and light and water.
At the Pike Place Market, where Emmett Watson lives and works and has decided to hang his birthday gift, a neon Lesser Seattle sign, I order a shot of espresso, buy a cigar from the woman at the Athenian Cafe who always calls me “Honey,” and then walk out into the Marrakesh of the Northwest. The small-market concept has caught on in other cities of North America and in the suburbs as well. But Pike Place Market is little changed over the last century; Disney could never come up with this strip of commercial chaos on the bluff above Elliott Bay. The city that surrounds this market is all new. Yet Mark Tobey could sit here on his stool today and see truck farmers and crab-vendors and anarchists shouting to nobody; then as now, the market was the soul of the city.
Just below the market is the site of the old Longshoreman’s Hall, where I used to go when I skipped college classes in search of a day’s work. They’d call my number most times, and then I’d be sent to unload boxes from one of the big container ships tied up in Elliott Bay. The old guys would always talk about how their union could shut down the whole West Coast, and the young guys talked about getting laid and getting stoned. For one day’s work, I’d make $75, about as much as I paid for my share of the monthly rent at our college house on Corliss Street. Then I’d walk up here to buy oysters and a piece of baklava and a bottle of good wine. After a plate of raw Quilcene oysters, I’d go home feeling as though I’d just had my blood changed, and not caring whether I ever made any money or finished school.
The Longshoreman’s Hall is a condo now, peach-colored, I think. I meet Watson, and we talk about the recent vote and sports and a bunch of new writers he’s discovered and how all the new construction has disemboweled the city. He shuffles and puffs on unfiltered cigarettes. We look out at the bay where I’d kayaked. Some of the towns on Puget Sound stink of sulfur and have poisoned their harbors by kowtowing to the mills. Seattle, having finally passed through its phase as a Resource Town, is healing, free at last of the forest-industry smokestacks. Perhaps, with the recent vote, it is also free of the need to pump itself up like an insecure body-builder. The last big sawmill within the sprawl of the city, a Weyerhaeuser plant near Snoqualmie Falls, has closed down. There is something in that news nugget for historians and prophet-checkers: built on the lumber trade, Seattle no longer has a sawmill, but has become a more active theater town than any other place outside of New York. Its two chief export products are now Boeing jet planes and Microsoft computer software.
Today is one of those days when Seattle can’t hide: the sun makes everything appear fresh-painted and makes everybody walk as if fresh-charged. From the hillside market, we see the island where Vancouver parked his ship, the grave of Chief Sealth, the passageway of Winthrop. Cities are transient, reflecting the tastes of the time; but the spirit of a place is much harder to recast. Try as they did, humans have not been entirely able to shake Seattle from its inclination to be wild: blackberry brambles spring from cracks in the cement covering the sawed-off hills, and a few eagles still nest in the snags of Seward Park, a shank of old-growth trees ten minutes from the skyscrapers of downtown.
As we walk down the crowded market aisles, everyone says Hi to Watson. When livability replaced progress as the chief concern of many citizens here, he became one of the city’s best-known celebrities. They give him slaps on the back and talk up the recent rain storms and the vote to cap the skyscrapers—that’ll keep the bastards out, huh, Emmett? The Pope of Lesser Seattle puffs on his Pall Malls and moves on. He knows better than to encourage them.