Driving Home, page 32
Yet the natural features that make Seattle a real flower of geography—its enveloping mountain ranges, its deep hook-shaped bay, its Tuscan-style hills, its internal lakes, and offshore suburban islands—also serve to break it apart, to put its citizens at cold arm’s length from one another. At the last official count there were a hundred and sixty-one bridges in the city. Any place needing that many bridges to connect its separate quarters is surely suffering from a chronic sense of isolation and dislocation. We have lifting bridges, swinging bridges, floating bridges; bridges to span the I–5 freeway, which rudely bisects the city north to south; bridges to straddle the mile-and-a-half-wide gulf of Lake Washington; bridges to overarch yet more bridges. We have a bridge that goes nowhere, abruptly stopping in midspan above the marshy wetland at the south of Union Bay. This long-unfinished bridge, reaching out bravely but failing to connect with anything at all, has taken on the air of a venerable civic sculpture. One might title it, simply, Seattle.
The grandest bridge is still the seventy-five-year-old one that carries Highway 99, Aurora Avenue, over the Ship Canal from high on Queen Anne Hill to high on Phinney Ridge. This is the bridge the jumpers use. Its lamp standards are pasted with Don’t Do It! notices, put up by the Samaritans, but the jumpers go on jumping (nine people killed themselves from here in 1995). They die instantly: when you hit the canal from a fall of a hundred and eighty feet, the water is as unyielding as concrete. It may be that some jumpers cherish the irony of employing a bridge to make the ultimate act of disconnection. It would be an interesting thought to carry with you on the plunge.
Until quite recently, Seattle’s most vexing disconnection was the city’s isolation from the rest of the world. I know many people of roughly my own age and temperament who grew up here, then escaped at the first possible opportunity. Life in Seattle was dim, dull, wet, constrained. My coevals felt that they were in a state of Siberian provincial exile from the big bright city of adolescent daydreams. They fled Seattle for the intellectual glamour of the East Coast, or for the sybaritic promise of Haight–Ashbury or Venice Beach. What is strange is how many of them came back in their forties, drawn by the same physical geography that charmed Henry James. Remembered from a high-rise condo in New York or a traffic-choked exit ramp in L.A., the mountains and water of Seattle have the power to hex the Seattle-born and drag them reluctantly home.
Last year, an Italian journalist here on a five-day visit came up with a happy insight. A friend in Milan had strongly advised her to cut Seattle from her American itinerary because, despite all the hype in the Italian press, it was “boring and provincial,” and not worth the considerable effort involved in getting there. Livia came anyway. On the road to the airport when her five days were up, she remarked, “I don’t think Seattle is ‘provincial’ at all. I think it is a frontier town.”
She was right, I think. Frontier towns were communities of strangers, each of whom was there to make a killing and move on. They attracted the footloose and the loners, the mobile hunter-gatherers rather than the stolid farmers and settlers. Seattle has a long history (long for the West, at least) of being just such a town. People first came here to make a killing out of timber, then out of Alaskan gold, then out of the bonanza salmon fisheries, then out of the aircraft industry in the 1940s, then out of software and stock options in the ’80s. Now it’s dot-commerce that is pulling in young hopefuls by the planeload, all trying to get a piece of the action in a dizzy Internet start-up. Most of them here today will be gone tomorrow. As soon as the company downsizes, or the options vest, they’ll take wing again and head out, on their Seattle money for one of the warm and fashionable Santas—Barbara, Monica, Cruz, or Fe.
With half its population on the hop like this, Seattle’s social life is predictably threadbare. People meet more regularly for coffee than for dinner; and except when funds are being raised, the Seattle dinner party is a rare and often burdensome occasion, with invitations sent out weeks in advance to guests who have little more in common than their zip codes. In such random and heterogeneous company, the standbys of the metropolitan table—national politics, new books and plays, salacious gossip—are of little use here. Conversation, or serial monologue, tends to veer between the relentlessly personal and the relentlessly careerist. In this early-rising city, the yawning is likely to begin promptly at 9:15 p.m. That’s my experience, anyway—though I still fantasize that sometime in my eleventh year in Seattle I may be admitted to some elusive social circle where the animated talk flows with the wine into the small hours.
On its bad days, or mine, Seattle can seem like the world’s capital of transience and deracination; a city run on the lines of a giant, well-appointed, impersonal Intercontinental hotel. On good days, though, the view is rather different. Not only are the Seattle-born returning home, but the richest of the new rich are showing an encouraging tendency to stay on into their (ridiculously youthful) retirement years. The compulsive fly-by-nights are the kids who make a quick million and then vamoose, but people who can count their millions in the tens and hundreds are inclined to dig in here for life. The appeal of the city as a flower of geography is a large factor, for them as for me. In what other major U.S. conurbation can one keep a boat at the bottom of the street and be within comfortable sailing distance of anchorages shared only with bald eagles and black bears?
Also, Seattle is small enough to be a pond in which a single multimillionaire can still make a big splash. With their new businesses and foundations, the retired cybercrats (most of them from Microsoft) are now pumping a lot of their money back into the city to which they came as poor strangers just ten or fifteen years ago. They build sports arenas and museums, put computers into local schools, rehabilitate old theatres, donate baby blankets to Seattle newborns, and fund a spreading galaxy of social and educational nonprofits. Downtown Seattle is littered, or decorated, with the hobbyhorse projects of the new rich, from Ida Cole’s Paramount Theatre to Paul Allen’s silver, gold, scarlet, and blue temple of rock and roll, which is now beginning to emerge from its chrysalis of tarps and scaffolding beside the Space Needle. Only completion of this gigantist project, designed by Frank Gehry, will reveal whether it more resembles a pile of electric guitars (its ostensible inspiration), a vast human torso gruesomely dismembered, or four collapsing barrage balloons. At present it’s a splendid puzzle and affords high entertainment to motorists stuck in the gridlock at Fifth, Broad, and Thomas.
Meanwhile the impoverished filmmakers, festival organizers, arts groups, and other professional mendicants run around Seattle with their begging bowls, in search of dollops of software-or-Internet money. This has become a city where it’s easy to think of $100,000 as a sum that you might very likely find with the fluff at the bottom of a rich man’s pocket, and which he’d be only too glad to get rid of.
Last week, two friends and I spent a day cruising around the shores of Lake Washington in a small motorboat—a trip I hadn’t made in five years. More had changed since my last visit than I could possibly have anticipated. Then, the modest summer cabins of the old Seattle families were still dotted along the eastern shore between the rising French chateaux, Elizabethan English manor houses, and Roman palazzi. You now can count the surviving cabins on the fingers of one hand. Shoehorned into their small lots, all house and no garden, are the lavishly balconied, squillion-bedroomed, multi-roofed waterfront homes of the cybercrats. Where rickety staircases used to zigzag down the wooded cliff between Kirkland and Medina, twin funicular elevators (one for goods, one for people) now connect each house with the road on the summit of the bluff.
The houses come in every style, from retro-Euro (designed, it would seem, from vacation postcards or the picturesque labels on Grand Cru wine bottles) to exoskeleton postmodern. Though most of them do share a common taste for the muted, rainy colors of the Pacific Northwest—shades of gray, brown, buff, and stone, with trimmings of inky conifer-green. From their front decks extend long private floats, in expectation of a busy waterborne social life. Broward and Chris-Craft motor cruisers hang aloft in hydraulic boat hoists; Beaver seaplanes sit on the water, tethered to the docks by their floats.
This is how 1990s money looks—and by the standards of earlier generations of new wealth these houses are not half as immodest as one might expect. They have a certain shrugging cool. Some even appear bashful about their own windfall affluence. I thought of Henry James on Newport in 1906, where “monuments of pecuniary power rise thick and close,” great villas and palaces along Ocean Avenue that he called “white elephants”:
They look queer and conscious and lumpish—some of them, as with an air of the brandished proboscis, really grotesque—while their averted owners, roused from a witless dream, wonder what in the world is to become of them. The answer to which, I think, can only be that there is nothing to be done; nothing but to let them stand there always, vast and blank, for reminder to those concerned of the prohibited degrees of witlessness, and of the peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion.
The white elephants of Newport were, of course, put up before building codes and height restrictions curbed the Pharaonic ambitions of the very rich. No one can build a Great Pyramid on Lake Washington now. Yet even within the terms imposed by the city, the new waterfront houses seem possessed of a degree of conscience unknown to the old commercial barons. The biggest houses evade the charge of vainglory by artfully distributing their space on an unpretentious human scale, in cottage-sized portions.
The biggest surprise of our little voyage was the public face of the Bill Gates compound. When I last passed by, it was a gargantuan muddy eyesore, comical in its resemblance to a sprawling, half-built truckers’ motel. It has since grown into an unexpectedly cohesive hill village, camouflage-colored in sky-gray and timber-brown. Its stone is local, its wood, “green-certified,” comes from demolished warehouses and river-recovered lumber. Its modular components have a distinct ancestral connection to the summer cabins that Gates, as a local boy, must have visited in his childhood. Much of the place is discreetly hidden underground. The terraces leading down to the water have been thickly planted, and soon the whole intricate assembly of conservative building forms will shrink, foliage-enshrouded, from view. This was a structure that I had never expected to admire; I am confounded by its tact, its respect for the small-scale, its subtle, unassuming conformity with the colors and character of lake and bluff.
A couple of years ago, singing for my supper at a literary fund-raiser, I found myself dining in a newly built house on the lake with a dozen or so retired Microsoft millionaires. I listened to the drift of the talk, feeling like a codfish stranded in the Arizona desert, and picked out a single recurrent theme. It was about the distances traveled by the materials that had gone into the making of the guests’ houses. Though the Pacific Northwest is hardly short of native rock, someone had found the perfect quarry in Maine and trucked their stone out to Seattle, coast to coast. Someone else swore that only English glass, imported from the Pilkington factory, would do for their windows. Another person slyly boasted about their discovery of a brilliant landscape architect in—as I remember—Romania, whom they had flown out to supervise the construction of their garden. Admired by everybody was the very senior Microsoft executive, not present at the dinner, who was getting his stone excavated in India and sending it to Italy to be cut by the best masons before shipping it to a site just across the lake from where we were sitting.
This was magnificently inconspicuous conspicuous consumption—tales of vast expense that would be visible only to a handful of similarly rich consumers. Neither the mailman nor I would ever notice, but the seventeen Seattleites who really counted would gaze on this Indian stone cut by Italian stonecutters and be able to compute the beauty of it against its stunning price. Until I sat in on this curious conversation I hadn’t realized that money could be spent with such secretive irony, for the benefit of two audiences, one in the know and the other out of it. The great pleasure of irony lies in the sense of privilege that comes with the awareness that one belongs to the first audience; and just for a moment, hearing of those dusty-faced Italian masons, I felt the glow of being privy to a brilliant, and otherwise incomprehensible, Seattle joke.
Out on the lake, I was back in the second audience, looking but not seeing, because I don’t have nearly enough money to really see what’s going on here. Lawn grass transplanted in moist sods from the banks of the Danube? Roof slates from Wales? Chimney pots, of a unique design, from old Uppsala? The point is that someone will know.
Its new money has profoundly unsettled Seattle, and, I suspect, made it a more interesting place to live than it has ever been before. It has become an ambiguous, mercurial city, gratifyingly hard to decode.
From the subtle to its reverse. While I was writing this piece, a couple I know put their resources together to make the down-payment on an elderly fixer-upper in a viewless and not especially sought-after quarter of north Seattle. They had agreed to the asking price of $380,000. On the afternoon when they were due to sign the contract, they were gazumped by two people in their early twenties who put in a bid for $550,000. To secure the house, $450,000 would have been more than enough; the extra $100,000 was pure gesture, designed to rob the property (and the street in which it stands) of specific value, and to announce the arrival of the cybercrats, with their gas-bubble economy, in the neighborhood.
The two buyers were lowly employees, barely visible to the sort of people who build houses on Lake Washington, but even their relatively threadbare style of money-theatre is being conducted far beyond the means of the teachers, journalists, university professors, shipyard workers, and Boeing engineers whose fluctuating fortunes once governed the city’s economy. If all of Seattle’s hundred and sixty-one bridges were laid end to end, they wouldn’t span the ever-increasing gap between the traditional middle class and the emergent e-millionaires.
All this has led to a new credulousness. Giddy affluence now looks like a twenty-five-year-old, wearing a grubby T-shirt and nose ring, stepping out of a new BMW or Lexus. The car isn’t mandatory, since the punkish youth may well have been working too many hours to spare the time for a trip to the dealership. This person has become a central figure in the city’s mythology, familiar to everyone. He just paid $1.2 million in cash for a bachelor pad a couple of streets away from where you live. She just bought an island, or a ranch in Montana, or a Gulfstream jet, or a resort in Hawaii, or a telecommunications company.
It’s now widely assumed that every suitably attired twenty-five-year-old is rich beyond the dreams of avarice until proved otherwise. If he/she lets drop the magic initials IPO, Seattle now wonders how many commas will be needed to punctuate the string of zeroes. Such ready belief in other people’s money has opened a promising new field of phantom house purchases, phantom takeovers, phantom philanthropy. Deals are being confidently struck all over the city, and it will take months, and maybe years, for the gulls to discover that the true assets of their tame Internet entrepreneur amounted to little more than the value of his or her nose ring. A city whose old establishment has been marginalized, and most of whose citizens are strangers both to the city and to one another, is wonderfully fertile territory for the poseur and the confidence man.
I wonder what Balzac, Dickens, Trollope would have made of this extraordinary moment in the life of Seattle. Certainly Augustus Melmotte, Trollope’s man from nowhere in The Way We Live Now, dazzling all of London from within his vast iridescent bubble of bogus wealth, would have been perfectly at home here, though he would have to lop thirty years from his age to pass as a credible Seattleite. I know exactly which spot on the lake that Melmotte would choose to site his house, and from where he would juggle his chimerical millions.
Seattle now feels like a novel just beginning, and it’s off to a good start. The money is here—most of it virtual, some of it bound (but when?) to prove illusory. The titanic ambitions of the characters are already on display, in the orgy of building and speculation. The all-day, all-night tango involving venture capitalists (known here simply as “vee-cees”), software engineers, and babyfaced nerds with killer website ideas goes on at full tilt. Yet, though rumors of imminent collapse are Seattle’s meat and drink—Microsoft will be carved into little pieces by the government; Amazon will tumble into the colossal pit of its annual losses—there is so far no obvious sign of an impending climax or denouement. But things move fast in the digital city, and it’s likely that we shall not have to wait very long.
We have already been treated to the sight of one spectacular implosion. Late in March 2000, the still-unpaid-for Kingdome (built in 1976, and a major classic of New Brutalism, in my view) came down after being strategically wired with 4,500 pounds of dynamite. When the detonating switch was turned, on a still and sunny Sunday morning, the great landmark building took just under seventeen seconds to crumple elegantly from the inside out, sink to its knees, and grovel in the dirt, enveloping the city in a storm of concrete dust.
Watching the event on TV, I thought that here was an image, an emblem, to be stored away for future use. When the next implosion happens and the shock wave reverberates through downtown Seattle, we can be sure of one thing. There’ll be just as much blinding dust next time, but it won’t be concrete that comes falling from the sky.
Architectural Digest, November 2000
