Seattle unshrouded

Understanding one of America’s loveliest, trendiest and most influential cities.

VISITORS OFTEN BECOME INFATUATED WITH MY CITY DURING THE DAZZLING, DRY weeks of high summer, when perfect temperatures, low humidity and clear views of that towering sundae called Mount Rainier give lie to the city’s damp reputation. Seattle, we like to remind everyone, has less precipitation than New York or New Orleans.

But it is during the long and dim drizzle months, when horizons shrink to pewter and the Emerald City turns silver, when newcomers either confirm the love affair or flinch.

It’s then that the glow of the ubiquitous Starbucks stores provide the same sense of refuge as Irish pubs, that Seattle’s bookstores offer burrow-like comfort, that software engineers hunker into artificial realities, and the city’s buildings take on the wet gleam of beach stone, gunmetal and Boeing aluminum.

At the winter solstice, when June’s glorious sixteen hours of daylight have contracted to eight (Seattle is the nation’s northernmost major city outside Alaska, on the same latitude as Newfoundland), the city can seem as dim as a Swedish art film.

So do what the natives do. Put up the hood of your REI parka (the company was founded here, and any enthusiast should visit its waterfall-fronted store at Yale and John, just north of downtown) and venture outdoors. You’ll find the rain is mostly mist, and the mild temperatures are invigorating. Seattle can only be understood by looking outward, and when the clouds lift to reveal the snow of the Olympic and Cascade mountains, the view will take your breath away.

Let the city’s sea smell whet your appetite for microbrews as dark as a winter pond, Olympia oysters as delicate as earrings, cappuccino foam as silken as the voice of a late-night DJ and salmon fillets as red as kissed lips.

The city’s character

Seattle is an edge city, far from the nation’s fulcrum of population. Geography has traditionally made us self-reliant, insular, reserved and progressive, the soberness of the city’s Scandinavian heritage always at odds with its boom-and-bust entrepreneurship. By necessity, we look west to the Pacific Rim, and in the last few decades, we’ve been transformed not just from provincial to hip, but from reticent to-at the height of the dot-com boom-positively roaring. But since the crash, we’ve slowed down and taken our breath.

Many residents tend to be from somewhere else, and our products are mostly sold somewhere else. Seattle hums with aerospace, biomedicine and computers, and its fog-shrouded imagination produces impressionistic art, moody novels, wry theater, thriving music and, yes, a seeming overabundance of serial killers, such as Ted Bundy and the Green River’s Gary Ridgway.

Software success has made Seattle the home of two of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and what was once a brawling port and frontier town of union bosses and brothel madams now is a yuppie bastion of blue jeans and laptops. Seattle has one of the highest costs of living, relative to wages, in the nation. It has also drawn one of the highest percentages of “creative class” workers, or people who think for a living.

Locals still don’t care much who your parents were, what school you went to or even what you do. They’re more curious about who you are and how you spend your weekends. The goal is not just to win, but to balance: to be.

Seattle has had its tumultuous moments, from a socialist-inspired general strike that briefly shut down the city in 1920 to the World Trade Organization riots of 1999. Yet, those were exceptions to our normal civility, taking the city by surprise. It’s hard to win an argument in Seattle, because it’s hard to start one. Boasting is considered indelicate, and privacy is held in higher regard than self-promotion. Hustle if you must, but please be unobtrusive. Accumulate wealth, but don’t display it.

The moss-like sponginess and yet resilience of Seattle, its earnestness, its endless indecision about civic projects, its furious ambition that remains so quiet it dare not speak its name-all these can strike an Easterner as odd. Seattle is the anti-Manhattan.

You can get a sense of the city’s character in its new crystal palace of a downtown library, at Fourth and Spring. While most libraries are book bunkers, this one is a monument of glossy European finishes that looks outward, its floors stretching the building’s skin this way and that to get glimpses of Elliott Bay. Here in Nerdistan, books and views are equally cool.

The library is the closest downtown comes to a central park: Seattle, the greenest of cities, doesn’t have one, nor a great plaza. Seattlites retreat to their neighborhoods to play, or, better yet, head for the mountains. Ski slopes and trailheads are less than an hour away. Three national parks--Rainier, Olympic and North Cascades--are on the horizon.

Seattle’s heart is its residential neighborhoods. Proclaimed as “urban villages” by City Hall, each has a distinctive character and retail cluster that make
city politics as complicated as that of medieval Germany.

William Dietrich is a Seattle journalist, author and Puget Sound native. Email William at editor@executivetravelmag.com.

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