Seattle - just like S.F. only different

Carl Nolte

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Coming into the city from the airport, around a corner, Seattle sort of bursts into view: the tall white Smith Tower, 42 stories high and 95 years old, a symbol of old Seattle; the Space Needle, once the symbol of the city's future; and the Columbia Center, as tall as the sky and as black as midnight, a symbol of what Seattle has become.

It's always startling for a San Franciscan to go to Seattle, as we did last weekend. It's like running into a distant relative, someone who looks like you but has his own separate life. A doppelganger.

Seattle looks like San Francisco - the beautiful blue Elliott Bay, the white ferryboats, the mountains in the distance. Seattle has seven hills, and before big-time tourism arrived, the town even had cable cars. There's a Skid Road, a Chinatown (called the International District), even a subway these days. The downtown is crowded and vibrant. There are preachers and music in the streets. There is also a bit of civic smugness, a feeling that the place is very, very special.

The late Emmett Watson, a columnist in Seattle for more than 50 years, put it this way: "A man I admire once said that he had a simple test for examining the worth of a city. He wrote 'it is whether, no matter how many times I have been there, I still feel a glow of excitement on the moment of arrival.' I cannot speak for anyone else in thinking of Seattle this way, but whenever I leave it for any period of time, the glow is always there when I return. It is a beautiful city, unbelievably blessed by nature."

It is pleasant to go there and easy to imagine being in a nicer San Francisco. The people are more polite, and there are fewer beggars. San Franciscans notice that immediately.

The Pike Place Market is a wonder - a combination of San Francisco's old Crystal Palace Market and the new Ferry Building. It is a fish market, a vegetable market, a spice market, a place to eat oysters, drink beer, watch people and admire the view. It is enough to make a San Franciscan weep. If we had a place like that we tore it down.

That almost happened in Seattle, when civic boosters wanted to replace the Pike Market, which they said was the home of rats and winos, with a Disneyfied version of what it had been.

It stirred up a latent nativism in Seattle, a rebellion against fast-buck artists, shady developers and apostles of Progress with a capital "P." Watson himself railed in print against a booster outfit called Greater Seattle Inc. His answer was something he named "Lesser Seattle" and he crusaded against outsiders, mostly expatriate New Yorkers and Californians. He founded a mythical organization called Keep the Bastards Out. He meant us.

But Seattle people are too polite to be rude to visitors, and they actually seem to like to give directions to strangers.

So we looked at the Space Needle and the monorail, those two 20th century monuments to the 21st century. "Wow," said the Sailor Girl, my companion in these adventures. "We used to think that by the 21st century, we'd all live in colonies on the moon."

No such luck. Instead, the Space Needle and the monorail look oddly dated, like long sideburns and bell-bottom pants.

But Seattle isn't all old stuff: it's where grunge music comes from, and Starbucks, and Nordstrom and Boeing.

A young city: Everybody on the street seems to be 25 years old. Still, Seattle seems to be a little different, a little slower. Maybe because it's up in the Northwest corner of America, distant from the places we think of as important.

So Seattle is like San Francisco - but not really - like the guy who looks just like you, but is different.

Carl Nolte's Native Son column appears every Sunday.

This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle