In December 2008, a rare snowstorm dropped a foot of heavy powder on downtown Seattle. The city does not as a rule deal well with snow—people panicked. Abandoned cars lined the freeway. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer suspended publication for the first time in seventy years. (Six months later, under clearer skies, it would stop for good.) Two charter buses carrying students slid through the barrier of an overpass and teetered above Interstate 5—no one was injured, but the hole in the barrier remained. Like most residents, I was unable to get to work. Garbage service stopped; people went sledding on an old couch down Denny Way, the arterial connecting Capitol Hill to downtown. Retail businesses, unable to shut so close to Christmas, counted on their employees to make it in somehow—a housemate of mine snowshoed half an hour each way to his job at the downtown Patagonia. Another housemate, Adam, a financial analyst, was able to stay home with a clear conscience: along with 3,500 other Seattle-based employees of Washington Mutual, he had been laid off the month before. A number of former Starbucks employees were able to stay home as well: the coffee colossus was closing 600 stores nationwide, including five in its home city. Seattle was used to a little weather and the business cycle, but snow and subprime were something else. The city, like Starbucks, had overextended—and now it was hardly working at all. (...)
Steely gray in winter, dim and dove-like in spring, cloaked in fog in fall—Seattle’s weather is one of its bitter joys. Our famous rain is abstract, diffuse. More cotton ball than sheet, it is a woozy, three-dimensional rain that softens the city’s hard corners. Calling up moss and mushroom and penetrating everywhere with a kind of psychic damp, the climate almost literally grows into you. In summer, though, when the rain dries out and the clouds clear up, the city is a different place altogether. Not for nothing did Perry Como sing, “The bluest skies . . . are in Seattle.”
The weather, being in its way quite romantic, lends itself to introspection, bookishness, and a sort of unaffiliated mysticism. Seattle is considered the most literate city in the country—over half the adult population holds at least a bachelor’s degree. More of us are atheists than anywhere else in the US; quite a few people meditate. Support for same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, and gun control is a given. But beneath city’s tendency to quiet contemplation, progressivism, and art-making is what Greil Marcus calls, in reference to the Aberdeen, WA (two hours south of Seattle) rock band Nirvana, “True grunge: not just some music-business catchphrase, but dirt.” Early in the city’s history, workmen used a chute, or skid road, through what is now Pioneer Square to send freshly cut timber to the sawmill below, and the drunks and derelicts who filled the area gave rise to the meaning of the “skid row.” Kurt Cobain chose it as an early name for his band. Grunge, that disaffected, famous-for-hating-fame ethos, captured something in the city’s spirit: its real romance with self-contempt, sarcasm, and despondence. Depression here sends people to the bar or to the bridge, to the needle or to California. Homeless residents stare at magazines in downtown’s Rem Koolhas-designed public library, where they are allowed to be but not to sleep. Drunks still wander up and down skid row; along University Way, pierced and wayward kids crouch on the sidewalk with their dogs.
Grunge took the country’s youth culture by storm in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, a more insidious nationalization was slouching toward unsuspecting urban areas that were in the process of classing up. In 1971, two teachers and a writer had opened a storefront in Pike Place Market where they sold custom-roasted coffee beans. They named it Starbucks after the first mate on the Pequod—the one who didn’t want to chase the whale. A decade after the store opened, they hired Howard Schultz, then running American operations for the Norwegian plastics giant Hammarplast, as head of marketing and operations. Five years later, Schultz had bought the company from the original owners and started on a headlong drive to expand it all over the world. Starbucks opened stores in Chicago and Vancouver in 1987; the first New York store opened in 1994. That same year, a young hedge fund analyst named Jeff Bezos, noticing the astonishing growth in home internet use, quit his job to move to Seattle and open a business, Amazon.com, out of his garage. For a while it seemed that Seattle could succeed on something other than its rain and grungy, anti-establishment sulk. Early in the last decade, at the height of Seattle optimism, even the local bank got into the spirit of things: Washington Mutual took itself national, aiming to become, as its CEO said at the time, nothing less than “the Wal-Mart of banking.” WaMu launched an ad campaign, which debuted during the Oscars, featuring the rosy (and in retrospect worrisome) new slogan, “The Power of Yes.” Almost any loan, regardless of the income or situation of the borrower, would be approved, and WaMu proceeded to peddle its “flexible lending” with a sense of cheery informality—commercials ridiculed other lenders and their “rules.” Even the bank’s remarkably casual new ATMs were on-message, greeting customers with a “Hi there! May I have your secret code?” Instead of “Yes” or “No,” WaMu offered “Sure” or “No thanks.” It was as though someone had boxed up a bit of Seattle nice: clubby, a little corny, resolutely laidback, and self-consciously inclusive to the point of non-commitment—you needn’t even bank with them to avoid a fee. WaMu wanted to be more like a friend than anything else: “If we’ve done our jobs,” CEO Kerry Killinger said in 2003, “five years from now you’re not going to call us a bank.” This turned out to be true, though not in the way Killinger probably meant.
by Jenny Hendrix, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Seattle streetcar visualization study. From lmnarchitects.com
