Dreaming the City
by guest columnist Matthew Stadler
(NOTE: Today and tomorrow, we’re running excerpts from a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)
EMMETT WAHLMAN proposed a salmon stream in 1977.
The stream would leave Volunteer Park, traverse south across Capitol Hill to Denny Way where it would turn west and cross the freeway into downtown, then run along Pine, forming a half-dozen pools between Fourth and Sixth on Pine, before turning north and running along Westlake to empty into Lake Union.
Emmett was a city engineer in Seattle in the ’60s and ’70s. Reached by phone in Hawaii, he told me he couldn’t recall exactly when the idea occurred to him.
He said, “These things pop into your mind, all sorts of things are just popping and popping all the time, they keep bombarding you like Nissans. There’s just no shortage of them, is there? But I wanted my idea to have validity.”
Emmett talked about his idea. He sketched plans. He asked his friend, city engineer Paul Wiatrik, to asses its viability. He sought support from the city’s Department of Community Development.
“Working as a field engineer gave me some insight into what we are disrupting with these suggestions; you’re tearing right into the heartbeat of the city.”
This movement from ‘ideas popping and popping’ to engagement with civic discourse and its matrix of “validity” seems to me a fundamental challenge, even duty, of every city dweller.
It is in fact the founding act of our city—this projection of a private vision into civic space.
Faced with this:
SLIDE: TREES
Settlers saw this:
SLIDE: 1850s DOWNTOWN PLAT
And they drew it. Astonishing! Heroic!
SLIDE: SEATTLE PLAN, 1855
Already the purity of vision has been diluted by the demands of the civic space. Notice how competing [street] grids are made to co-habitate. The city grew, events continued apace.
SLIDE 6: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF 1890 SEATTLE
A truly fabulous metropolis.
By the 1890s, fabulation and projection insinuated themselves into the built environment. Where before, faced with trees men saw grids, now presenting a city, they sketched fantasies.
The cityscape itself had now become the ground for fantasies such as Sullivan’s Opera House, and a courthouse.
SLIDE 7: SULLIVAN OPERA HOUSE
The Seattle Opera House, as Louis Sullivan designed it in 1890, to be built at Second and University, the current site of a different concert hall entirely. This plan shocked me because I had once imagined so grand an opera house, years ago—as an indispensible part of my fictional Seattle—I had written it [in the novel The Sex Offender], never knowing the plan of this grand opera house had been real (and a failure) rather than made up (and a great success).
I was further astonished (while reading the self-published memoirs of Henry Broderick, real estate giant) to find a photograph of this fantasy, Seattle’s Grand Opera House (with the attendant throngs that I had thought were simply my outlandish fiction) built and standing in our city at the corner of Second and Cherry (admittedly less grand than Sullivan’s or my conception, but still).
SLIDE: CORT’S OPERA HOUSE
Such a scene had been caught on film featuring throngs of men pressing against the doors.
So the city and its exaggerated throngs had been real! But then, what’s this, the photo itself was a sham, the throngs, indeed great swaths of the very faÂade, had been painted in by amateur hands!
This real opera house was itself the wishful fantasy of some past booster imagining a more glorious city than the one he truly occupied.
And this dizzying vertigo was typical of my encounter with the intersection of the private imagination and our civic realities.
SLIDE: SULLIVAN OPERA HOUSE FLOOR PLAN
Back to Louis Sullivan. The proposed building had a 1,200-seat auditorium, apartments and offices, and was budgeted at $325,000 (with the land costing an additional $300,000). By November 1890 the site had been cleared and construction was about to begin when a bank in England failed, and the money for the opera house dried up, but not soon enough to keep it off the attractive Bird’s Eye View maps city leaders distributed alongside brochures advertising this future metropolis to target markets in the Midwest and East.
As archivist and historian Dennis Andersen remarked, “What’s the difference between real and projected? The city was nine-parts plans and intentions, and these are what they advertised.”
The legal obligation of homesteaders in the American West was to clear and work the land—one did not own it until one worked upon it.
One thing the West promised was malleability. So there was an abundance of ideas and not much shyness about visions. The city’s evolution was powered by this promiscuous engine. On to every hill and valley, slide and swamp, private visions were projected, and sometimes realized.
Which made for conflicting visions.
SLIDE : WASHINGTON HOTEL ON DENNY DEGRADE
I find these competing visions equally beguiling: the fantasy of a grand European-style hotel and that of a port city of gently sloping hills.
What a delight to see the one fantasy trapped in the embrace of the other! James Moore, who owned the hotel, would not accede to the plan of R.H. Thomson, city engineer in charge of regarding, until after a long battle of wills.
SLIDE: WASTELAND OF REGRADE
Thomson was a very focused man with little room left between vision and action. His memoir is a straightforward, common-sense read, revealing a practical man whose field of action was unusually large.
Maybe Thomson’s greatest strength was his imperviousness to questions of scale. Judging from his archive and memoir, he doesn’t seem to have seen much of a difference between a hangnail and a 300-foot hill. He saw obstacles and removed them.
In the Denny Regrade the results look a little like the founding fantasy, though now the abstract geometry was real, while the fantasy to be projected on it was more hodge-podge.
SLIDE 18: BIRD’S-EYE REGRADE DRAWING
The cleared “real” land–now an abstract geometry–made a fresh canvas for the painting of visions and fantasies.
The abstract grid had been drawn with real dirt and earth; while the rich future “ecology” of the city became a pencil-drawn fantasy.
It was, thus, impossible to locate a “real” Seattle landscape separate from the projection of fantasy.
SLIDE: BOGUE’S PLAN VIEW
Despite the founding fantasy of the American grid, planners including Thomson and Virgil Bogue (of the 1910 Bogue Plan) studied European cities with their broad boulevards and plazas, to shape visions of our future city.
Thomson also imagined a subway and rail system for the city. Like most Seattle subway plans (Luther Griffith’s in 1907, A.H. Dimock’s in 1920, Carl Revves’s in 1926, D.W. Henderson’s and the DeLeuw Cather designs for Forward Thrust in the 60s and 70s) Thomson ran his main downtown line under Third Avenue. The central station was to be built at Riverside. Thomson’s plan, which included a region-wide rail system and the downtown subways, was budgeted at $1.3 million.
The Washington State Arts Association was going to build this state-of-the-art convention center to establish Seattle’s supremacy once and for all, in 1911. I am reminded of the dire promise, just a few years later, that the machine gun, recently developed, would be the unmatchable weapon that would end all wars.
Just last Friday, I watched an army of welders work on our Star Wars-scale convention center, which will surely establish Seattle’s supremacy, at least over San Diego.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
