Seattle Trip

January 20, 21 & 22, 2003

by Kay McCrary

 

Seattle was wonderful, very cosmopolitan, a stimulating melting pot of many cultures.  If my children were nearby, I would enjoy living there.  I was surprised that the weather is relatively mild, thanks to sheltering protection of mountains ranges which block weather fronts. Puget Sound provides a sizable waterfront.  I especially like Seattle’s “gentrification”‑‑ people have moved into downtown to live.  Downtown Seattle has many high‑rise apartments and condos, many parks and walks, and lots of terrific “tall malls” with reasonably priced food courts featuring delicious foods from all over the world.  During the short trip, I tried Russian pierogies (stuffed pastries like sandwiches) for the first time, ate my first ever delicious vegetarian Indian curry over saffron rice with Nam flatbread, plus also ate Greek and Mexican meals.  I missed the chance to eat fresh seafood at the Pike Place Public Market downtown on Puget Sound.  I could have had an oyster dinner for $6.95, but I had just enjoyed the pierogie so had to walk on by.  Space Needle Park, site of the 1992 Olympics, was a good experience.  The U.S. Chess Championship, our reason for this trip, was being played there.  That one park was home of a huge coliseum for events, a concert hall for an orchestra, a ballet theater, a strange‑looking experiential museum of rock music, an aquarium, a children’s museum, yet another international food court, plus playing fields and plenty of green space.  I also liked getting to see the spectacular downtown football and baseball stadiums with their retractable roofs.  And the mountains, particularly Mt. Rainier, were breathtaking.  ‑‑Definitely a great place to live!

 

I took a guided bus tour and learned fascinating bits of Seattle area history. 

 

I learned that Seattle marketed itself as the “Gateway to the Klondike” soon after that gold rush began.  Canada would not let prospectors cross the border unless they brought a pre‑set list of supplies.  Seattle made a lot of money selling supply packages to prospectors, and unscrupulously continued to do so even after there were clearly no unstaked spaces for new claims left in the Klondike.

 

I was also fascinated by the tales of Underground Seattle.  The original section settled in Seattle is called Pioneer Square.  It is near the Puget Sound waterfront.  After it got well established, the streets had to be raised due to flooding.  Strangely enough, the streets ended up being eight feet higher than the sidewalks.  Pragmatically, the city of Seattle just put ladders on the ends of each block, so a person would climb the ladder down to the sidewalk, shop that block, climb the ladder up at the other end of the block, cross the street, climb the ladder down, and so forth –you get the picture!  They did that for 15 years before the sidewalks were raised to street level. 

 

Someone brilliantly planned for glass bars toe embedded into these new sidewalks so that sunlight could shine through, lighting the original lower level sidewalks.  The glass rods were purchased from the lowest bidder by municipal contract.  Once installed, the glass turned purple, making the downstairs area dark, gloomy and unenticing. 

 

No one wanted to go down to the lower level.  The stores down there went unrented.  Storekeepers on the main level began dumping garbage down there.  Next came a problem with rats, thanks to the garbage.  Then deadly bubonic plague swept through Seattle, taking a big toll of lives.  Underground tours are offered every Thursday.  I wish I could have taken that tour, and plan to do so if I ever return to Seattle.

 

A couple of other interesting things about Pioneer Square were the firemen statues and the Smith Building.  The life‑sized bronze firemen statues were striking.  They reminded me of the statues of the soldiers at the Viet Nam and Korean War memorials in Washington, DC.  The firemen were shown with their hose, vigorously struggling to put out a blaze.  They commemorate four heroic firemen who tragically perished in a nearby waterfront warehouse fire that occurred in the early 1990's.  The fire was purposely set by the son of the rich family.  He had just inherited the abandoned warehouses and wanted to collect the insurance.  Seattle’s citizens became alarmed, fearing that homeless people may have been sleeping in the abandoned warehouses, so the firefighters responded.  Four died.  By the way, no homeless people were in the warehouses.  The fire‑setter is now in prison serving a life sentence. 

 

The Smith Building is a shrewd monument to a rich man’s ego.  Smith was a wealthy businessman who provided capital to develop and profit from other men’s inventions.  He gained considerable wealth and fame from his partnership in manufacturing Smith and Wesson firearms and Smith‑Corona typewriters.  Seattle was his headquarters, and he wanted to have the tallest building in town and in the whole country.  For a time, the Smith Building was exactly that.  Smith overcame an interesting complication to achieve this because another wealthy man also wanted the tallest building.  An expensive competition ensued.  Smith tricked the other guy by having a meeting with him to settle things, agreeing that both would have tall buildings of the same height.  Smith got the guy drunk and was able to get him to agree to let Smith have a tower on Smith’s building.  Then Smith would raise the tower another story whenever something taller was announced.

 

A town named Fremont, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, was a my favorite discovery, totally charming me with its public art.  The guide told us that many Haight‑Ashbury hippies relocated from San Francisco to Fremont.  Certainly high (pun) creativity was apparent. 

 

First we saw the bridge troll.  Fremont had a problem with drug dealing under that bridge.  Every time the police came, the dealers disappeared but were back within minutes once the police left.  The solution? –Public art!  The city of Fremont had a contest through the Art Department at the University of Washington.  The troll won.  (After growing up hearing the story of “Three Billy Goats Gruff”, of course trolls and bridges make sense together!)  Now so many tourists are at the bridge taking photos that no drug dealer wants to go anywhere near there.  The troll is huge and is eating a real Volkswagen bug. 

 

A couple of blocks from the troll is the center of town.  There I saw “the center of the known universe”!!  At least that’s what it said on the directional signpost.  So I’ve stood at the center of the known universe, and it is in the center of downtown Fremont. 

 

A block from the center of the known universe is a huge statue of Lenin.  A local man was working in Czechoslavakia and saw it in a city dump there, a leftover from the fall of Communism.  He bought it for $15,000 and sent it home to Fremont as a gift to his mother, so she put it in the yard at her house.  Later when the son died of cancer, she admitted that she never really liked the statue but had not want to hurt her son’s feelings, so she donated it to the city to get it out of her yard.  Now its downtown.

 

A block from the gigantic Lenin is an ICBM missile.  This particular type of missile was discontinued.  The city learned it could get one for free, so, true to its name Free‑mont, it got one and attached it to the side of a building downtown.  Then the city fathers rigged the missile up with a lawnmower motor inside it so that anyone could put a quarter in a coin deposit on the side of the missile to “turn on” the missile.  The lawn mower motor would start roaring, smoke would come out of the missile, and red lights would flash on and off.  Then it would stop, just giving a quarter’s worth.  Well, the nearby residents got tired of hearing it.  Somehow or other the coin deposit mysteriously got smashed, was repaired, was smashed again –it took three times sabotaging the missile’s sound and light effects for the city to finally get the message and quit repairing it.  By the way, the building to which it’s attached is painted puce and teal colors.  How aesthetically appropriate!  I love Fremont.

 

The fifth monument to civic taste in Fremont is the statue named “Inner Urban”.  Like the troll, it is the color of concrete.  It is a very realistic portrayal of four people standing at a bus stop waiting.  ‑‑Inner Urban waiting, with the life of the mind becoming active as a result.  From behind, you see a dog sticking his head between two of the people.  From the front, instead of a dog’s head you see the head of the councilman who did not like the statue and complained that Fremont did not get its money’s worth –hence the artist’s response to his criticism.  Which is exactly what Michelangelo did when a bishop complained about the nudity in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel‑‑ Michelangelo painted the bishop's portrait into the section portraying Hell.  But Michelangelo also painted his self‑portrait in the Sistine Chapel's Hell.  I’ll close with that thought.