Richard Flynn :: no comment

A comparison is often drawn between Seattle and San Francisco. On paper, it’s easy to see why this would be: here are two Pacific-coast cities which portray themselves to the outside world in a similar way, with a fairly affluent, smart, well-educated, and ‘liberal’ (in the U.S.-American social sense) population. They also both have a large tech industry: the San Francisco Bay Area is home to ‘Silicon Valley’, including many of the recent successful Web startups as well as industry giants like Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple; Seattle is home to many major tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon.com, and, er, The Omni Group. While on paper the two cities seem to resemble one another to a great extent, my own experience suggests that the two cities are not as similar as all that.

Where San Francisco seemed laid-back and natural, Seattle felt self-consciously artificial: a city which always wants to live up to its manufactured image, even if this image isn’t accurate. I was also very surprised by how seedy much of the city is: there is a massive discrepancy between the extremely smart boutique shops covering about four blocks of the downtown area, which is surrounded by pawn-shops, dodgy liquor stores, and other insalubrious places. Don’t get me wrong, though: Seattle is a very interesting city, with a very pretty skyline, and I enjoyed my time there. It’s just not as close to what I had experienced in San Francisco, which is what I had been expecting, more or less, before I arrived.

San Francisco

San Francisco is the city I have most enjoyed visiting so far on this trip (as I write this, I am on a train trundling through central Canada). It’s a clean city, with every amenity that you might otherwise expect in London, Paris, or Sydney. In fact, people do often make the comparison with Sydney, and while I wouldn’t go overboard, it does give off the same sense of ‘global city’¹ which people feel in Sydney.

The geography of the place requires little introduction. On one side of the city sits the Pacific Ocean, and downtown San Francisco is almost cut off from the rest of California by the San Francisco Bay. The almost-daily thick fog which comes into the Bay through the Golden Gate (the opening of the Bay into the ocean) is famous: I heard someone saying that it comes about because hot, dry air trapped inland south of San Francisco by the hills can only meet cool, moist, ocean air across the Golden Gate. On the evening that I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and back again to take photos, though, there wasn’t much fog in evidence. The hills really are as steep as—if not steeper than—they are portrayed in film and on television: so steep, in fact, that I felt far happier walking uphill (in spite of the considerable effort) than downhill, because of the worry that I would do some classic Flynn manoeuvre and end up ankle-over-shoulder. The effort was worth it, though, since at the top of each hill there was another little neighbourhood to poke around, and a new view over the city and bay below.

In retrospect I didn’t ‘do’ much in San Francisco, except walk around the city itself. What I particularly enjoyed was just the general vibe of the thing, really. Thinking about it, San Francisco is a city of very distinct neighbourhoods which still make up a coherent whole. I spent (and enjoyed) half a day in the large Chinatown, but the Chinese influence is not confined to those city blocks: signs on streets and in buses have Chinese in addition to the English and Spanish I had seen everywhere else I had been so far.² On the other hand, I got the impression that the whole city was perfectly happy to pull together when needs must. When I was there, for example, there were notices everywhere—especially on the buses and trams—about the closure of the Bay Bridge for essential work to strengthen it against earthquakes, which was to take place over the forthcoming Labor Day weekend.³

The city does seem to be very conscious of its own history. One specific excursion I made was to the Cable Car Museum. The cable cars are iconic of San Francisco.⁴ However, as the museum makes clear, after the 1917 earthquake nearly completely destroyed the city, the cable car lines were not re-built. In fact, it was lobbying by the rubber and oil industries for the use of buses that led to the city government’s decision not to re-install the cable cars. The Franciscans⁵ revolted and wrote letters in their hundreds to the city council, and ensured that four of the original cable car lines (there had been many more before 1917) were re-built. Their arguments principally revolved around the fact that the cable cars were part of San Francisco’s history, and that they were iconic of⁶ San Francisco: everyone else, after all, had buses!

This historic consideration does not seem to extend, as far as I could tell, to a pervasive consciousness of the city’s origins: to the Spanish missionaries which had founded the place and given it its name. I’m sure people are aware of it, and in fairness I wasn’t specifically looking for any such detailed history (having already got the idea in San Antonio and Los Angeles), but it seems to me that this particular aspect of its history doesn’t fit into much of the city’s modern self-image. That said, there are a huge number of very beautiful and well-maintained churches all over the city.

The one thing which I really wanted to do but was unable to, was to visit Alcatraz. Ferries run to and from the island several times a day, and there are extensive guided tours of the infamous (and now closed) federal gaol which housed Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly. I don’t think I’d realized how popular an attraction this is, and so tours are booked up at about a week in advance, if not longer. I’ll be able to visit some other time, I hope.

Seattle

If you were to watch Frasier (and I have, believe me), you might end up with the impression that Seattle is a city populated by high society: a place where ridiculously snooty Frenchmen can sell a can of dog-food for $6;⁷ where the residents of a building which doesn’t allow dogs but doesn’t mind exotic birds will throw out a tenant who tap-dances;⁸ or where if you are not ‘seen’ at the gala event of the day people will assume that the wife from whom you have recently separated has ‘won’.⁹ Maybe these things do exist in Seattle, but I certainly wasn’t aware of them when I was there.

I was staying in Belltown¹⁰, which the Rough Guide to the USA says ‘was the home of the grunge music scene in the 1980s, but has since developed into ground zero for yuppie-friendly condominiums and fancy restaurants’. I could see this to a certain extent, but I didn’t feel especially safe walking around the area in the evening or at night. On the Sunday afternoon I went to the university district (‘the U-district’), principally because Google Maps was leading me to a laundrette there, and that wasn’t a terribly nice neighbourhood either. Don’t think me naïve: I don’t expect student neighbourhoods to be luxurious (cf. the Cowley Road), but this was downright dodgy. It was also poorly maintained: I tripped on an uneven paving stone and twisted my already-sprained ankle. Perhaps that pain coloured my reaction to the whole place, but I don’t think so.

Seattle Center

Seattle Center certainly has a run-down feeling to it. It was built for the 1962 World’s Fair (the ‘Century 21 Exposition’, from which the international group of estate agents take their name), and while it wasn’t nearly as deserted or decrepit as Daejeon when I went there, it still felt like it could do with some rejuvenation followed by some intense promotion. The most famous attraction today is the Space Needle; the observation deck is very well laid-out, with the opportunity both to sit inside and to walk all the way around on the outside. On the day I went up the clouds meant that I couldn’t see all the way to any of the mountains, but there was nevertheless a good view over the city and over Puget Sound.

I believed the Rough Guide when it suggested that the science museum within the Seattle Center is really for children, so gave that a miss. There is a building housing a run-down food court within the complex: I walked through there, and was not particularly attracted by any of the offerings. There was however a small display-case containing brochures and other souvenirs which were sold for the 1962 World’s Fair: they were fun to look at, although it’s a pity that so little attention is given to them.

Seattle Art Museum

I was able to spend a few hours at the Seattle Art Museum, whose collection is quite large, and best described as ‘eclectic’. There are quite a lot of modern pieces—some very interesting, others what I would describe as ‘because we could’ art.¹¹ There was an exhibition of work by Andrew Wyeth, whose work (and name) I had not previously encountered. There was a very pleasant—if disparate—collection of European art, as well as some (Australian) Aboriginal paintings. Then there is a large amount of African tribal art on the top floor. See what I mean about eclectic?

Pike Place Market

I spent a very enjoyable afternoon at Pike Place Market. I had had a very pleasant lunch in a French restaurant within the market with a friend of my parents, and then wandered around, watching people come and go, taking photographs of colourful stalls. It’s easy to see why this is such a tourist attraction: there is much to see and do without thinking about what the weather is doing outside.¹² Imagine the Covered Market in Oxford, scaled up slightly, with fewer pig and cow carcases hanging from the ceilings, and more fish and flowers in their stead, and you’ve got an idea of Pike Place Market in Seattle. 

Opposite the main section of the market, in Pike Place itself, there is the ‘first’ branch of Starbucks. As I have noted elsewhere, that title is somewhat misleading because the first branch moved within a relatively small area a couple of times before sticking in its present location (this all happened before any other branch was opened, which is why this one can always be called the ‘first’ outlet). I stopped inside very briefly and was perhaps slightly surprised to see no tables and no drinks being served: this branch still operates as it always did, selling coffee beans and grinding/espresso equipment. The Rough Guide snootily (or, perhaps, ‘snottily’) refers to this Starbucks location before going on to suggest that ‘you’re better off sampling a local brew that you can’t find in your hometown minimall.’ It doesn’t make any allusion to the fact that you can’t find any ‘brews’ in that Pike Place Starbucks. Bang-up job, Rough Guide!

Museum of Flight

I spent the day before I left Seattle at the Museum of Flight, south of the city, at Boeing Field, where Boeing’s first operations began. Boeing still operates a large number of facilities around the Museum of Flight—including the landing-strip and private airport—but their principal plant is now thirty miles north of Seattle at Everett. The Museum of Flight is probably the best museum of its kind I’ve ever been to: the number of exhibits is huge; the information about each exhibit is detailed without being completely overwhelming; and the whole place is very well maintained.

The one exception to this last is the open-air Airfield, where you can see a B.A. Concorde; a Boeing C-137 (the military designation of the 707) as used by several U.S. Presidents; an American Airlines 727; a NASA 737; and the prototype Boeing 747, City of Everett. These aircraft all had a pretty neglected look to them, with faded paint and every impression of the unfortunate onset of corrosion. I was also sorry that you are only allowed to walk through the Concorde and the Presidential plane, although this is understandable given my already-stated concern about the planes’ exterior decay; I wanted particularly to be able to see what was inside the prototype 747.¹³ In fact, this was my first time on board Concorde, and while I knew that things were poky inside, I was surprised at how small the seats were, and how little leg-room there was. Passengers on these aircraft were effectively on a supersonic omnibus.

There was so much to see in the museum that I decided to concentrate particularly on the passenger aircraft and those on display in the museum’s main hall. I pretty much ignored the exhibition devoted to space exploration, and passed very briefly over the aircraft and other exhibits used by American airmen in the two World Wars. I did, however, enjoy the ‘tower’ exhibit, wherein you can watch over Boeing field, listen in to the field’s ATC tower, and watch the planes come and go; there was also a computer showing all aircraft in U.S. airspace at that moment. There were a lot of those.

Final paragraph, in which I attempt to make some perspicacious observations, thus bringing this whole article together and to a close

As I have been writing this I have come to realize that I did really very many enjoyable things while in Seattle, especially compared to how little I did in San Francisco except simply ‘seeing the city’. I think what this leads me to say is that Seattle has got a lot to attract the tourist, but that I could never be so beguiled by the city as I was by San Francisco, which is somhow entirely something else. The bay, the ocean, the hills, the people, the variety—all these things somehow work together to make San Francisco such a charming place.