MAY1997
Matt Briggs
Who Killed Yesler?
This Building Expires
Who Killed Yesler?
by Matt Briggs
This Building Expires: June 5, 1989
To know Seattle one must know its waterfront. It is a good waterfront, not as busy as New York's, not as self-consciously colorful as San Francisco's, not as exotic as New Orleans', but a good, honest, working waterfront with big gray warehouses and trim fishing boats and docks that smell of creosote, and sea gulls and tugs and seafood restaurants and beer joints and fish stories--a waterfront where you can hear foreign language and buy shrunken heads and genuine stuffed mermaids, where you can watch the seamen follow the streetwalkers and the shore patrol follow the sailors, where you can stand at an open-air bar and drink clam nectar, or sit on a deadhead and watch the water, or go to an aquarium and look at an octopus.
page 5, Murry Morgan, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle, Viking Press, New York, 1951.
Even ten years ago, this picture of the Seattle waterfront seemed closely observed, with the intermingling of vice and tourism with the actual ongoing labor of a working waterfront where trains crept below Western Avenue and freighters waited in deep water to unload cargo. Really, there wasn't that much to do for a fifteen year old boy.
Anything
could happen and anything had happened on the waterfront. Ye Olde Curiosity
Shop, even as full of tourists as it was, was also full of strange charms
and amulets, hooks and weapons from the whaling industry alongside the cheap
blue, yellow, and red plastic toys. Once, a teenage prostitute propositioned
me, which still seems strange to me because I had just come out of Zanadu
Comixs and I wore my nondescript mid-eighties uniform of Izod golf shirt,
Reeboks, and black nylon windjacket with epaulets. She swerved drowsily
down from a stoop on 2nd Avenue and her friends or partners or whatever
nodded and glanced me over and shook their heads. "Girl, sit back down."
Sometime
in the last ten years, the rail tracks morphed into a bike trail and trollies
began to operate on the few remaining lines, and the old Ye Old Curiosity
Shop burned to the water line.
Last week,
walking along the waterfront, I suddenly stumbled into a gigantic, empty
superstructure. The light came down across the Sound and cast sharp shadows
and I thought for a second I was in a Paul Delvaux landscape. An International
Trade Center had sprung up overnight like a toadstool. The entire city has
suddenly cast off the buildings built in the 1950s and anything else that
can't immediately produce its Historical Importance papers or any other
passport to the twenty-first century, where I imagine that Seattle will
electrollically remove the whiskers of its industrial past and become just
another city of software coders and supermall cashiers. I'll be able to
bicycle, after a twelve hour day working at a computer screen where I don't
need to move except for the proscribed ergonomic calisthenics necessary
to keep my few moving parts -- i.e., fingers, especially the mouse yes/no
pointer finger -- operational -- bicycle from Elliot Bay to the Snoqualmie
Pass on the old Pacific Northern Tracks through peaceful suburbs with recycling
bins lining the sidewalks.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997