Seattleness

FOREWORD

What’s your favorite thing to do when you visit a city for the first time?
 
For me, it’s getting lost for a few hours. As in, well and truly lost. I head to a known landmark, then put away my phone, guidebooks, and whatever else I have that might want to tell me what I should do in this new place. And I wander.
 
I do this because for me, getting lost in a new place for a little while is one of the most enjoyable ways to establish a personal connection to it.
 
We all likely remember the first time we ventured far from home, but we almost certainly remember that moment, that journey, and that place for different reasons. Each of us establishes these personal connections a little differently. Maybe some of us found the landscape especially beautiful, while others were taken with the strange road signs helping us navigate that landscape. Maybe you thought the people were unusually friendly—or not friendly enough. Maybe the trees were greener than you ever thought possible.
 
Whatever it was that first stuck out in your mind from that trip became the first pin in your mental map of that place, permanently fixing, in a highly personal way, your memory of what you saw or smelled or tasted or did in that space and time.
 
I savor being in a place for the first time and, through wandering, identifying that very first pin. Eventually, I know, there will be many more as I start to build out a brand-new mental map.
 
Sometimes when we’ve visited a place several times, or when we’ve settled in one spot, we forget to keep adding pins. The personal lens through which we view that area can become fixed. We get stuck in our routines. We start focusing more and more narrowly on what we know to be true about a place because we’ve seen it and slogged through it over and over again.
 
But I think the magic of geography and the magic of mapping are that, with a little nudge, we can see everything afresh—and, even better, that everything is always fresh.
 
Seattleness will nudge you in countless ways and challenge you to see the city and region through new, crisp, and yes, sometimes even warped lenses. Some of what is presented here may even find its way onto your own mental map of Seattle and its hinterlands. You will be introduced to a city of flannel, pinball wizards, extraordinary women, and rain, rain, rain (but not the world’s most rain, just really frequent rain).
Through the maps, charts, diagrams, illustrations, and photography in this book, you will be treated to a perceptive visual tour of Seattle. This tour may confirm some things you think you know about the city (e.g., seriously good coffee), but it also will inevitably spin what you know in a way that surprises and excites you (e.g., the greatest concentration of seriously good coffee shops is around Pike Place, the neighborhood home of the first Starbucks). At the same time, this book is also a tour that will smack you in the face with information that is truly bonkers (did you know sightings of UFOs of all shapes and sizes have been reported across Washington state?!).
 
How we experience places and how we use maps (be they paper, digital, augmented, or virtual) are constantly changing. But it seems fair to say that the global usage of maps that are made by just a handful of companies worldwide does not bode well for people hoping for a means to explore a place’s true nature and spirit. Map conventions designed for quick reading—and for an audience of billions—have oversimplified landscapes and made cities that are thousands of miles apart look identical.
 
Seattleness stands strong in the face of maps that present places as if they are devoid of geographical, political, or cultural diversity (but it also shows you when such diversity is lacking in a particular area). It embraces the far-flung and wacky as much as the more comfortable and familiar. And it brings to the forefront the historically underrepresented and forcibly hidden aspects of what makes Seattle, well, Seattle. In so doing, it puts forth a clearer, more complete, and valuable picture of the city.
 
The creators of this volume all experienced Seattle, synthesized those experiences, and portrayed them in their own unique way. I recommend you enjoy their efforts the way I enjoy a new city. Put away your phone, extricate yourself from the internet, and wipe your mental map clean. Dive in, start to wander, and ultimately, get lost. By the time you put Seattleness down, these authors will have inspired you to see and think of the city afresh—and to rebuild your personal collection of mental maps of the region into a full-fledged mental atlas of Seattleness.
 
 
Tim Wallace is a geographer and graphics editor at the New York Times, where he makes visual stories with information gathered from land, sky, and space. He has a PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but he first got into mapping as an undergrad at Macalester College, where he also met Natalie Ross, one of the authors of this book.

INTRODUCTION

The idea of an atlas has a definitive air: hefty and authoritative. But the way in which we experience a place that we were born, live, or have left is fleeting, changing, and subjective. So while the geographic and spatial form this book takes is that of an atlas, the resulting collection of impressionistic and ephemeral explorations were undertaken as portraiture--that of a city constantly in flux, its features and telltale scars coming in and out of focus, ambivalent at their own discovery.

Our process was akin to painting--beginning with broad strokes of light and shadow. We holed up in a midcentury bungalow with a view of Puget Sound and discussed what makes Seattle special--gray skies, frontier psychology, strong women, and strong coffee. Together we collaged a patchwork of impressions that, when squinted at with lowered eyelashes, had the quality of “Seattleness.”

From here, we dove deeper into the quirks and characters, letting Seattle’s exclamation points draw us into more complex stories and associations. The construction cranes that loom so large in the current zeitgeist led to the discovery of subtler subterranean shifts in the urban strata. We discovered that CenturyLink Field isn’t just for football games and that the skies over Seattle are 3,650 colors of blue gray. These were the points and lines that began to make up a more recognizable likeness of the city we sought to discover.

Like Italo Calvino before us, we allowed ourselves to be lost in the real and imagined spaces of our city’s past and future. We invoked the names and genre-bending works of W. G. Sebald, John McPhee, Lygia Clark, and Buckminster Fuller (to name a few) as a means of inspiration to explore beyond the spurious boundaries and fortifications set up between people and place, architecture and landscape, past and present, the individual and the collective. We sought to grapple with the dynamic entropy of place and memory, all in an effort to look beyond our everyday silos and experiences to see greater connections to one another and this city we precariously inhabit at edge of the sea. We soaked up the stories of Paul de Barros and Paul Dorpat, essays by David Williams, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Lindy West. We got lost in the fictional fever dream of Shadowrun’s near-future apocalypse and watched the tides rise to bury the Seattle we know today. The expertise and imagination of these Seattle storytellers would take a lifetime to explore, and could fill a thousand books.

Seattle’s representations also take on a multiplicity of personalities, ranging from brooding and solitary to bursting with song. Like the expressions of a moody teen, these faces and traits layer over time and space to create an individual likeness, albeit a murky and mysterious one. We sought to capture that in our own portrait on the adjoining pages, made entirely of the stories and data we have collected on this journey. Our investigative sojourns led us into creative territories and down rabbit holes. We often found ourselves dangling from compelling and gnarled loose ends, where both humble fictions and monumental myths were clearly entangled with human recollections and history. These points of interest, with fact separated from fiction, are represented in the first section of this book. Represented in the second half are many of the linear and nonlinear threads--illuminating connections between natural phenomena, historical events, current events, people, the past, the present, and the very soil we’ve put down roots in. The portrait brings together these two sections. Data from points and lines take shape, like a half-developed Polaroid, to embrace the city’s oscillations, its poetic flaws of both past and future.

We emerged from this process changed, as the city itself shifts. Armed with stories and blueprints, familiar scenes were transformed, as if with x-ray vision, to become radically altered and tenuous, on the brink of further mutation. We love, then lose, then learn to love again this lost-and-found Seattle. The reader may find this portrait familiar or unrecognizable to the Seattle they know. But we hope that it inspires you to see the city anew, as an ever-changing collection of imprints, marks, and traces.