Puget Sound Notes

After spending a week in Oregon, I went up to the greater Seattle area for my second week in the Northwest.

Seattle just makes me happy. It's funny--I have never lived in Seattle. But I feel more at home there than any place I've been since I left home. It's just a great city. Seattle certainly has its problems, one of which I am writing about for a near-future post. But I am just a happy person there.

Film festivals are crazy. The Seattle International Film Festival is going on right now. They are showing hundreds of movies over a period of around a month. Seriously--hundreds. What do you go see? How can you navigate this? I love movies. I thought I knew a lot about them. I guess maybe I do. But compared to some people, I am a complete imbecile.

I also went to the area of White Center for the first time. An unincorporated section of King County, just to the south of the city, White Center, despite the possible historical origins of its name, is quite diverse. I was taken there to eat Pho, the Vietnamese soup. The place we went--well, wow. That was some amazing Pho. Just wonderful flavors. There were tons of Vietnamese places around in what passes for downtown in the neighborhood. Also, it is evidentally significantly cheaper to live there than nearer downtown Seattle. Naturally, however, I burned my tongue on the soup, something I have a consistent problem with. I rarely drink hot beverages for this reason. Just not worth scorching my tongue for.

I also spent meaningful time in Tacoma for the first time. I had been through Tacoma quickly several times but I never really spent quality time there before. But the Washington Historical Society is there and they have a lot of useful material for my dissertation. So I went over there on a few different days. One day, after the archives closed, a friend and myself met downtown to check Tacoma out.

I have long referred to Tacoma as the Albuquerque of the Northwest. Both towns have reputations as pretty rough places. Neither are generally seen as nearly as pleasant as nearby cities (Seattle, Santa Fe). Both have a real aspect to them that neither Seattle nor Santa Fe have. Tacoma and Albuquerque have people who work for a living. With all the warts that the working-class is associated with, there is something refreshing about being around people who actually function in the real world. But in reality, Tacoma is better off than Albuquerque. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the environment. But I would far rather be in Tacoma than Albuquerque.

Like Albuquerque and lots of other places, Tacoma is in the middle of a downtown revitalization. What Tacoma has that Albuquerque doesn't is an already existing historical core. In Albuquerque everything looks the same, thanks to the Santa Fe-style architectural enforced conformity. But Tacoma still has lots of buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century that actually look like buildings from that era (in New Mexico many buildings from that era were later renovated to look like adobe) and that look different from modern buildings. The oldest building I saw dates from 1889 but there may be some older buildings as well. These wonderful old Victorian buildings provide downtown Tacoma with a great deal of character to build around. Most of the shops downtown are occupied, it has a little monorail system, and is a not unpleasant place to be. What's less good are the consequences of urban renewal. Tacoma was gutted during the 1960s and 1970s with stupid urban renewal projects. There is an area along the main drag downtown that is just worthless. It is occupied by a parking garage that goes on for like 3 blocks. It does have a few shops underneath but it is ugly and uninviting. It reminds of the kind of parking garage you saw in the movies and TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s where people got shot or raped. What do you do with this kind of space? No matter what Tacoma tries to do to spruce up their downtown, it still has this hulking monster in the middle. Perhaps they could tear it down and build something new there but where is the money for that? How would downtown merchants react to the loss of their garage. And I have nothing against parking garages. In fact, I am for them if they are done right. Something that sprawls for several blocks is not done right. Parking garages should facilitate multiple downtown functions, not get in the way of using the space in any way.

Tacoma, a long-time center of the lumber industry and shipping in the Northwest, has also started to clean up its environment. We walked along its restored waterfront. Across the bay was still industrial activity but on the south side, it was a nice walk. They had signs about the restoration, now presumably finished. More interesting perhaps were the recently completed lofts on the bay. Like most of these new urban lofts, they were quite expensive, running at over $200,000 for a 1 bedroom. But on the other hand, for me, living in tight urban quarters is a more meaningful environmentalism than restoring the bay and shoreline. The latter has value, no doubt, but the sheer amount of land saved by intensive urban living is stupendous. If you have 200 units, think of all the land not being built up in homes in Maple Valley or some other suburb. How many acres remain unbuilt upon? Not to mention the building of community by consistent interaction with your neighbors and the value these kind of residences give to keeping the city active and vital. I find it difficult to consider one an environmentally-conscious individual if you live far from work on a large tract of land away from your neighbors. The future of environmentalism is in urban living. Not to mention the saving on gas by living close to where you work.