Willamette Week| Lead Story| Seattle Envy

You Say Monorail; I Say Oregon Trail
BY LIZZY CASTON

"Urbanites often define the identity of their city by contrast to another. In the Pacific Northwest it is important for both cities that Seattle is the 'fast town' and Portland is its stay-at-home sister. Seattle has had high times and low times since it ran off with the Klondike miners. It is the city that worries about trends and styles. Portland has a relaxed confidence and a smugness about the superiority of life in Oregon to high-speed Los Angeles or New York."

--from Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth Century City by Carl Abbott, professor of urban studies and planning, Portland State University

How can two cities with similar climates, geographical proximity and shared regionalism have such distinct cultures and political arenas? Cities are inherently organic. Despite the best intentions, the most seamless plans, the most controlling laws and policies, they often change of their own accord and at their own pace. To understand the differences between Seattle and Portland, we need to examine their pasts.

According to many urban theorists, river cities are generally a bit more conservative and set in their ways. They are more interested in local economic development than in playing in a "world-class" ballpark. Seaport towns search outward, embracing a constant state of cultural immigration; they are much more interested in how they fit into the scheme of large global economics. While Portland has its own seedy history, Seattle--since its early Alaska gold-rush days--has often been about fast development.

In Seattle's cyclical history, fast money means fast growth, which means big development, which means more money--until the boom becomes a bust, dragging down the rest of the regional economy, too. Economic declines at Boeing in 1971 prompted the erection of a billboard reading, "Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?" Portland has certainly had its highs and lows, but they are not as glamorously dramatic, as comparatively intense in scope. Seattle has manic-depressive fluctuations between being a nouveau riche rock star and a used-up junkie lying in the gutter underneath the Alaska Way Viaduct. Portland is the creative writer on Prozac--often brilliant, sometimes smug and antisocial, but convinced of its own intellectual superiority. Seattle flashes its condos, builds new stadiums and screams, "Look at me, world, I've made it to the big time!" It goes about marketing its regionalism, selling its own brand recognition to the world--as manifested in everything from coffee to the more elusive concepts of youth culture and outdoor lifestyle (thanks, Sub Pop and REI). Portland goes about its business with its head in the clouds, doing things its own way. It is a little less concerned with what the rest of the world thinks. When congratulated on its progressive urban planning, its experimental social programs, its successful civic engagement, Portland says, with an aloofness bordering on arrogance, "Well of course it's good. Things are different here."

For these reasons, Portland is often accused of being provincial, overly serious and stiflingly cliquish. Seattle builds and stretches towards the future. Portland attempts to control and pace growth, proclaiming that it's all about the quality of life, gosh darn it. The nicknames of both cities are telling: Seattle is "Jet City," and Portland is "Puddletown." Seattle has the loud, cartoony architecture of the Jetsons-esque Space Needle. Portland has Portlandia, a retro homage to neoclassical statuary that is almost invisible to the passerby.

Seattle looks toward space-age technology to solve everyday problems, but its modernist inventions often fail (think of the Monorail, the train to nowhere). In a million-dollar partnership, Seiko and the University of Washington developed a watch that would inform the user whenever he or she approached traffic congestion. In test trials on Seattle's roadways last year, this proved to be ineffective: The watches beeped so often that the wearers turned them off in annoyance. Area researchers are currently working on--I kid you not--a traffic television channel, where you, too, can experience road rage without ever leaving the comfort of your own home. Meanwhile, Portland pokes around and updates an old response to traffic management: street trains. Portland says, "What the heck. Maybe if we made it easier for people to walk and ride their bikes, they wouldn't clog the streets with so many cars." The city of Portland is often shaped by ideas from the past, while Seattle continually looks toward the future.

Lizzy Caston is pursuing her master's in urban and regional planning at Portland State University. She lived in Seattle from 1989 to 1994 and now makes her home in Northeast Portland.

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Willamette Week | originally published October 28, 1998