IT’S SUPER BOWL WEEK, and any day now we’re supposed to find out when the Kingdome’s going to finally get it.
That big concrete multi-purpose room, with a face only a structural engineer could love, built in a town ruled at the time by structural engineers, has been deemed obsolete. It will be imploded, probably just before baseball season begins at the new Safeco Field two blocks away.
The 24-year-old Dome’s not just an anachronism in today’s sports industry (with its quest for luxury boxes and costly amenities). It’s an anachronism in today’s Seattle.
The Dome, as I wrote in this online space last year, is as quintessential an icon of old Seattle as the more beloved Space Needle and its adjacent Seattle Center (built a mere 14 years before). Like the reused armory building, ice arena, Shrine temple, and other gathering spaces incorporated into the Center, the Dome was made to do many things cheaply, none of them extremely well.
It was an attempt by a town torn between ambition and repression to become “world class” without breaking the budget or going too outlandish about it.
Seattle’s always been a city in search of a new identity. Indeed, this civic dissatisfaction with its identity is a key component of its identity.
The first permanent white settlement at present-day West Seattle (which we’ll discuss more fully next week) was called “New York-Alki” (“New York By and By” in Chinook jargon).
The city’s early leaders pushd and pushed for Seattle to become the regional railroad hub, despite the old Northern Pacific’s plan to promote its own company town of Tacoma.
In 1897, Seattle firmly became the region’s commercial capital (outpacing the older Portland) when it was successfully promoted as the place for Yukon gold-rushers to get bilked on pans and provisions.
Seven decades later, the ex-frontier shipping post had become Jet City, home of Boeing and the ’62 World’s Fair, a leader in public arts funding and medical research. But to our civic establishment, it still wasn’t enough. Seattle was told it had to become a Big League City; which meant a full complement of pro sports teams and a dome to put them into.
But even that still wasn’t enough. Now, Seattle’s told it has to be “world class.” To really become New York by-and-by (with atttitudes and housing prices to match).
So the relentless destruction of every structure or institution of the ’60s-’80s Seattle is perfectly in keeping with the town’s overall heritage of constant re-creation. So is the ’00s Seattle’s obsession with building architectural monuments to its own “Emerald City” self-image; including the two new gorgeous, luxury-box-festooned stadia replacing the Dome.
I hated a lot about the old Seattle. I used to call it “City Light;” comparing the name of the municipally-owned power company to an official aesthetic of mandatory mellowness, in which laid-back, comfortably affluent baby boomers were considered the only people who mattered.
But the new urban zeitgeist, in which relentless dot-com tycoons are the new more-equal-than-others, disturbs me in other, more serious, ways.
The Seattle I’d called “City Light” at least had some interstitial spaces–low-rent districts, cheapo apartments, punk houses, art studios, fringe theaters, dive bars, no-nonsense retail strips–in which other sociocultural constructs could be imagined. But all those are now either gone or threatened.
It’s not City Light anymore. It’s something harsher, faster, more abrasive.
It’s City Extra Light.
TOMORROW: Some more of this, in the form of oversimplified comparisons.
ELSEWHERE:
