Seattle Über Alles

I took the train down to Portland over the weekend to play a variety show called Live Wire, broadcast on Oregon Public Radio. The show is like A Prairie Home Companion, if you replaced the laconic Midwestern drollery with a socks-and-sandals Oregon sense of absurdity. It was unpretentious and fun, and it really set me thinking about Seattle's character and how a few small changes, however unlikely, could make this city a much more livable and enjoyable place.

Before I start, let me just say that no one hates reading "What Seattle can learn from Portland" lectures more than I do. Portland, despite its charm, has 1,000 percent more mimes, jugglers, and crusty potters than any city outside of Germany, and this fact permanently disqualifies Portland from teaching any civics lessons or from standing as an example of responsible growth. Until they fumigate their city of all its jugglers, it will only be possible to appreciate their example by piecemeal.

Still, it is an undeniably nice small town, all the more impressive for having been formerly—within recent memory—a totally scary left-coast wreck. It was only a few years ago that you practically had to wade through junkie prostitutes just to get your chain-mail fitted at the renaissance smithery, and the only interesting thing about the city was the curious abundance of punk-rock/hippie chicks who dressed like a cross between Minnie Pearl and Tank Girl that you could find nowhere else in the world. Except for Germany.

Fast-forward to now, and Portland feels like an Epcot futureland, where people are home-brewing biodiesel from bat guano and kiwi fruit, plucking banjos made from old PC circuit boards, and eating nuclear waste and shitting diamonds. The 50 years of benign neglect that once threatened to destroy the city under a carpet of moss now looks like a brilliant master plan to deliver an intact 19th-century city to a 21st-century population of preservationists, recyclers, and fixer-uppers.

In contrast, our fair Jet City has much to be sorry about. Throughout the 20th century, as Portland was tending her weeds and listening to mice scurry around the attic, Seattle was busily and industriously leaping from one ill-conceived reinvention to the next. No giant earth-moving project was too farfetched, no architectural treasure was too beautiful to be destroyed. Seattle once had a fabulous Beaux-Arts Carnegie library on Fourth Avenue, a grand and stately edifice dating from 1906, which was demolished in 1957 to be replaced by the "internationalist" rat's-warren of escalators and windowless corridors that stood there until 2001, when that too was demolished to make way for the already-decaying spaceport-of-a-small-planet-where-it-rains-all-June we have now. Portland just held on to their gorgeous Georgian library from 1903. Maybe they pressure-washed it a couple of times. There are thousands of similar examples in which Seattle's ambition and bully-bully civic boosterism rushed us into destroying and remaking the landscape to match the latest fancy, depriving us of our old theaters, our streetcars, our neighborhoods of grand mansions, and in the process our heart and soul.

I'm not writing this to bemoan our infrastructural deficits, nor to sit shiva over our cultural patrimony. What is lost is lost. Whatever combination of Scandinavian sailor's hubris, Yankee mercantilism, and Southern post-Reconstruction inferiority complex drives this city to overachieve, the fact is that our decision-making process is still being affected, and we are still making irreparable mistakes. I believe that two examples will suffice to make my point, neither of which is irreversible. We still have the opportunity to make good choices. A day trip to Portland should be enough to convince anyone that there's no magic to making a city livable, you just have to get out of the way. We've already rid ourselves of mimes and jugglers; let's take a look at what else can go.

Firstly, our Liquor Control Board is out of control. I don't know what quirk of city government invests them with so much unchecked power, but their Talibanic ways do more cultural damage than if it rained drunk frogs for a year, and I say that as a nondrinker. The newspapers are full of the Liquor Control Board's triumphant adventures, busting clubs, fining bartenders, setting up elaborate minor-with-alcohol stings, cracking down on teen dances, breaking old ladies' kneecaps, and enforcing Seattle's already-draconian policies with unwavering zeal. My God, can't they lighten up? Whatever massive damage our culture would sustain if a 20-year-old managed to sneak into a bar and drink a five-dollar beer, it can't possibly be worse than the damage incurred by forcing people in their 40s and 50s to suffer the indignity of being ID'd like penitentiary visitors every time they visit a club.

This kind of paternalism, this fascination and obsession with rules and regulations to the exclusion of all other considerations, adds a small and unnecessary unpleasantness to every single outing. Adults, who make up the overwhelming majority of clubgoers, get treated like errant children just so a few errant children won't mistakenly get treated like adults.

This past Saturday I stood outside a Portland bar talking to a guy who was casually drinking a beer. I asked him if it was legal in Portland to drink a beer on the sidewalk in front of a bar, and he shrugged "No" like it was a stupid question. I was ashamed, because it is a stupid question. Of course it's not legal, but it's not a big deal either. Unfortunately, in Seattle he'd have been on the ground in a headlock with two guys standing over him shouting into walkie-talkies. The Liquor Control Board must have too many paid employees to be wasting everyone's time and energy this way. May I suggest that they be downsized and that two-thirds of them be given more life-affirming jobs, like cheesemongers, Female Body Inspectors, or electronica DJs.