Seattle's tunnel viaduct debate -- cue the videos

A decade after an earthquake revealed a highway that had to go in downtown Seattle, voices arise via video to make the case over a Seattle ballot measure.

Should Seattle replace an elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct highway with a deep-bore tunnel, a "surface option," or just keep talking?

Who decides the fate of one of the world's most fabulous waterfronts, while also resolving conflicting priorities over freight mobility, sustainability, transit and the car in the city of my birth? Dare we vote in a manner that further degrades our standing as the coolest city in the Northwest?

I so miss Emmet Watson.

It's a a huge civic debate, submitted to voters in mid August, when most of us are thinking of swimming and hiking in a region where the clouds have lifted after an 11 month wait.

Roll the tapes.

David Brewster, long one of Seattle's finest journalists, analyzes the long civic toothache. With his usual combination of wit and stylish mastery of detail, he sees a debate about the soul of our city.

An earlier post, containing Matt Smith's hilarious satire on the argument to keep the Viaduct is here.

In Seattle, a blinding orb appears. We're asking, Is this the Second Coming?

The sky turns blue. Are we doomed?

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

--Lifted in total from W. B. Yeats' 1919 masterpiece. Some think it's about World War I. In Seattle, more than 6 hours of sunshine gets us thinking of the Apocalypse.

Bill Cosby: "In Seattle, they think the sun is evil."

Hearst, Please Save the Seattle P-I Globe

I worked at the Seattle P-I, first as a reviewer who dashed from the theater and raced to the P-I building, then on Wall Street, as the first edition presses were rumbling. Anyone entering the building passed under the spinning P-I Globe, an Earth ball topped by a giant eagle aglow with neon and the spinning words, "It's in the P-I." Entering that place on deadline, I felt like Jimmy Olson about to see a guy in a cape fly skyward. The globe wasn't fine art but it was a visual treat, especially then when it faced the giant pink creature of the Elephant Car Wash.

When the P-I gave up its Sunday edition, then its building, and move to rented waterfront offices as part of a doomed marriage with the Seattle Times, the globe move too, placed atop the rental offices.

Today, the Times reports Hearst's lease at its offices is about to expire and the fate of the globe is uncertain. Three former city council members are moving to grant landmark status to the fixture so it remains on public view. I prefer the present location, though it could go to South Lake Union and the Museum of History and Industry, run by the capable Leonard Garfield.

In the pantheon of Seattle icons, the globe is not the Space Needle. It occupies a second rank. But it is a magnificent work of neon and always fun to see. It deserves an elevated location where it can be seen from afar, which is why the waterfront is my preferred spot, perfect at night as your ride a ferry into downtown Seattle.

You don't need to know its history or even read a newspaper to appreciate a fixture that gives a jolt of fun to a city's landscape.

Amazing night in Seattle politics

Huge progressive vote in Seattle tonight. Mayor's race is a toss up. Mike McGinn, with very little money but with an electrically-assisted bike, virtually tied with Joe Mallahan. Licata holds on. O'Brien beats Rosencrantz. Yes to a big levy for low-income housing. Looking farther, King County picks the self-described progressive who called his opponent a Republican. Gay rights gain in statewide election, one of the more significant votes in the nation. Tim Eyman hammered.

Whatever may have happened elsewhere, Washington State stayed blue.