Willamette Week| Lead Story| Seattle Envy

Vanity Blemishes Rose City's Charm; Ambition Tarnishes Emerald City's Luster.
BY ROBERT CLARKE

I am a Minnesotan with New England roots, and the first time I visited Seattle 20 years ago I said to myself, "Oh, St. Paul by the sea." I think I was reacting to the gentle, even bland, ethos of the place, its modest, unpretentious houses and its citizens, Scandinavian liberal-progressive in their politics and so law-abiding that even jaywalking was unknown. Seattle, like Minnesota, can be a bit dour, but that dourness is underlain by a self-deprecating, fatalistic sense of humor that can now and again erupt into absurdity and wackiness. Having spent some years in San Francisco (surely the most smug and narcissistic city in the country), I found Seattle's refusal to take itself seriously delightful. I had family going back almost 100 years in Washington, and when the opportunity arose 10 years ago to move here, I leapt at it. The Oregonian was first published in 1850 as a weekly.Portland's calculated attractiveness and livability exist at the cost of some of the spontaneity and unselfconsciousness that has distinguished Seattle.

I got to know Portland with some intimacy through friends and also from the five years I spent working on a biography of James Beard, who once referred to his hometown as "a city of fine homes and reactionary living." I was reminded a little of the New England aspect of my background; indeed Portland was settled by Yankees, who even by the turn of the century kept copies of the Atlantic prominently displayed on their parlor tables to remind visitors from whence they came. They had a New England sense of propriety and social class, of the need for order and self-improvement. As a result Portland was and remains a less ramshackle and more gracious place than Seattle, if also one a little more complacent and forbidding to the outsider. We do things better here, Portland seems to say, and we may or may not let you in to see them. Despite being born into an Oregon pioneer family and his considerable success and fame, James Beard never felt fully accepted in Portland, hindered as he was by his family's modest means and his homosexuality. Even after 40 years' residence in Manhattan, where he enjoyed friendships with its cultural and social luminaries, he pined until his death for admittance into the elite salons in Portland Heights.

It goes without saying that Portland's calculated attractiveness and livability exist at the cost of some of the spontaneity and unselfconsciousness that has distinguished Seattle and lent it a certain funky charm. Portland is, perhaps with some justification, a bit vain, and that spoils its beauty a little for me. I simply don't find it as warmhearted a place as Seattle (even though I can vouch that it seems to treat writers very well). But Seattle is changing--and not, I fear, for the better. Seattleites have eaten not only of the fruit of jaywalking, but of road rage, and our streets and highways are clogged with four-wheel-drive behemoths, whose occupants are chattering into cell-phones. Our previous and current mayoral administrations have a kind of rube-like fear that Seattle is not a "world-class" city and are unable to resist the blandishments of developers who promise to put our backwater town into the same league as, say, Houston or Branson, Mo. Thus is downtown Seattle being "revitalized," with national and international chain outlets that are--thanks to deals and sweetheart incentives--as economically dubious as they are vulgar. Thus has Ivar's Acres of Clams given way to Planet Hollywood; thus Frederick and Nelson to Old Navy. As I write, the Pike Place Market that activists fought to save from developers 30 years ago is being hemmed in on every side by luxury condominiums. And having had two professional sports stadiums the citizens did not want and airport expansion we did not need shoved down our throats, we are now being told that holding the 2008 Olympics here would do our self-esteem a world of good.

The innocence and lack of self-consciousness I once admired in Seattle have their price, and this, I suppose, is it. Cargo-cultists and yokels that we apparently are, someone finally offered to sell us a bridge, and we have yet to stop buying. And we don't want to leave our despoliation to amateurs: We recently elected Paul Schell, a wealthy professional developer, to be our mayor. His opponent, Charlie Chong, a crackpot neighborhood activist--or so the newspaper editorialists claimed--would have embarrassed us in the court of national civic opinion. Things have come to a pretty pass indeed in Seattle--the city that never took itself seriously-- when we worry that someone might laugh at us.

I don't know that there is much sense of rivalry with Portland here. It may in fact be true that our regional humiliation has already reached its apotheosis in the form of the Niketown that opened here a couple of years ago and was pitched to us as one of the crown jewels of our downtown. But no one seems to have much noticed, and perhaps that is a sign that something of the old Seattle is alive. Certainly the neighbors I see at our local farmers market are the gentle, self-effacing, REI-fleeced creatures they have always been, but they are also by their very nature not much inclined to alarm or protest. The other portion of Seattle's community that might offer resistance--the people that constitute the city's alternative culture--are so meta-ironic, so apocalyptically resigned, that they make the term "tragically hip" inherently redundant. In these respects, Seattle may be by its own unique character irresistibly ripe for the plucking by the entrepreneurs, poseurs and all-purpose carpetbaggers that the prosperous times have brought pouring into town.

Portland is changing, too, of course, and--although I am not well placed to comment--perhaps not entirely for the better. Of late, in certain quarters of the city I've detected an aroma of tasteful, affluent self-congratulation that heretofore was not to be savored north of Marin County. Yet arguably that tone is not far removed from what Portland has always aspired to, or at least that is the impression I gained from studying James Beard. But Seattle, I fear, is--for want of brains and by virtue of its good heart--preparing to lose its soul.

Robert Clark is the author of The Solace of Food: A Life of James Beard and River of the West: A Chronicle of the Columbia and two novels, In the Deep Midwinter and, most recently, Mr. White's Confession. He lives in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle.

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Willamette Week | originally published October 28, 1998