MY RECENT RETURN to a certain weekly tabloid started me to thinking about the last time I was a major part of that operation.
It was September 1998. A far different time, for me and for the town.
You could even say, as they always say in nostalgia pieces, that it was A Simpler Time.
We still had the Kingdome, that beautifully homey/homely feat of structural engineering, built back when engineers still ruled Seattle. Randy Johnson had just bugged out of the Mariners, but Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez were still around and knocking plenty of cheap Dome homers. (Not that it would’ve mattered that year, as the damn Yankees had no less than 107 regular-season wins.)
But the Kingdome was doomed, as the Bigger and Better was going up all over town. Either going up or already done were a new ball park (or two!), a mostly-new basketball arena, a new art museum, a new music museum, a new symphony hall, a new library, a new city hall, new big downtown chain stores, new bright-‘n’-clean techno dance clubs, and lotsa new offices, condos, mixed-use projects, and bix boxy view houses presenting blank white walls to the street.
Everywhere you turned, there was the look of Prosperity. It was an illusion, we now know, built on stock-option speculation and investment confidence schemes and stock-option madness. But it sure seemed real enough, to enough people.
And it wasn’t just the usual prosperity that always seemed to gravitate just to the old upper-crust. No, this was a prosperity anybody could presumably get into with just a small money and/or education stake. Just take out a second mortgage and schlep it into one of those high-tech mutual funds; or be a real player and start day-trading.
Or, even better, you could latch on to one of them New New New Economy companies, preferably pre-IPO. They were seemingly taking everybody–non-programmers, non-techies, even (gasp!) liberal arts graduates! Amazon.com, for one, was known for asking temp agencies to “send them their freaks,” according to ex-employees’ accounts.
Why, there were even jobs in the New Economy for alternative-creative types to do alternative-creative things (and you didn’t have to move to N.Y. or Calif. to do them)! Design Flash-y, Java-y web pages and banner ads. Produce MSN “shows.” Compose video-game soundtracks. Run deep-house Net-radio stations. Show yourself off at your own “amateur” adult site. Write “content” pages for Go.com or RealNetworks. Devise short videos or animations for Atom Films or Honkworm. Supply paintings and small sculptures to the Microsoft office art collection.
And if you weren’t working directly for a Tech-Boom outfit, you could tap into the spillover wealth by selling stuff to the tech-wealthy (houses, yachts, jewelry, cars, car alarms, Dania home furniture, Herman Miller office chairs, B&O stereos, helicopter rides, funky vintage doodads, rare books, pool-cleaning, house-painting, investment advice, etc. etc.).
Just don’t try to sell local, contemporary artworks to the techies. (One gallery owner at the time confided, “The richer Microsoft people get, the more they want to only buy from New York.”) And don’t hope to be an architect on one of those big new buildings. The whole premise of “becoming a world class city” was that we supposedly weren’t one already; therefore only out-of-staters deserved to create our new constructed image. (The exception: NBBJ’s designs for Safeco Field.)
NEXT: Some more of this, including the boom’s dark side and the hints of its transitory status.
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