I’VE BEEN SPENDING as much time as I can down in Seattle’s great old Duwamish industrial district; partly because it might not last much longer.
Oh, the land (recovered tide flats of the Duwamish River) and the streets will be there for years to come.
But the businesses there now, and the “family wage” jobs they provide, are endangered.
Last month, the Seattle City Council approved a master development plan for the industrial district (called by some real estate developers “SoDo,” as in “South of the Kingdome,” even though there’s no longer a “Do” for anything to be “So” of).
The scheme allows developers, aching to build as many square feet of dot-com office space as they possibly can, to take over the northern part of the area, almost south to the former Sears warehouse now mainly occupied by Starbucks’ HQ offices. A little further south, the Seattle School District is going ahead with plans to turn part of a former Post Office facility into administrative offices.
These encroachments can be interpreted as a Phase One. Once all those blocks have been cleared of warehouses, steel fabricators, garment shops, etc. and planted with office, retail, and restaurant uses, the developers are sure to come back and ask for more; to the eventual gentrification of everything down to Boeing Field (which itself is facing a gentrification issue, as small “general aviation” companies are starting to lose hangar space in favor of hi-tech moguls’ private planes.)
Seattle’s civic establishment hadn’t really cared about the industrial district for years. The last time they tried to master-plan the place was in the early ’90s, when they envisioned a (thankfully scrapped) scheme to evict dozens of smaller businesses, assemble the real estate into larger parcels, and dole out those lots to big corporations.
Even then, the idea wasn’t to save working-class jobs but to make deals with the big boys. The local powers-that-be have long been uncomfortable with Seattle as an industrial city. (They even prefer to think of Boeing as a high-tech engineering firm, not as a manufacturer.)
Their official vision for Seattle has always been that of a financial, administrative, and transportation hub for the region. Seattle would be the island of “progressive” (i.e., WASP and clean-cut, cultured and polite) civilization amid the wilderness. The unsightly business of actually making tangible, physical items (not to mention the Joe Six-Packs employed making them) was to be left to the likes of Renton, Tacoma, and Everett.
So it’s a natural that sweatshop-clothing companies like Generra and Unionbay developed here (and spiritually influenced their Oregon neighbor Nike); and that Bill Gates and co. would have devised a scheme to control the personal-computer industry without making any hardware more elaborate than a replacement PC mouse.
The rest of the country caught onto this anti-industrial aesthetic too; back in the mid-’90s “downsizing” fad and before. (A character in an ’80s Doonesbury cartoon proclaimed, “America doesn’t have to make anything–except SUCCESS!”)
So I encourage all our local-area readers to visit the industrial district while the rust, the rail lines, the diners, and the semi rigs are still there.
Many of the buildings themselves (at least those considered salvageable) will likely stay. Lotsa folks love “industrial design;” even gentrifiers who have no use for industry itself.
After all, there’s nothing that says “hip” to a high-tech office like the post-industrial fantasy, the “art loft look.”
It’s just so nostalgic, so “real.”
TOMORROW: Whatever happened to dystopias?
ELSEWHERE:
