From the ACA newsletter
For an interesting view of the economic and political development of Seattle, I'd recommend a book titled "Sons of the Profits" (subtitled "or There's No Business Like Grow Business. The Seattle Story 1851- 1901") by Bill Speidel. Speidel was the founder of "Underground Seattle Tours", one of the attractions you might want to check out this summer while at the IUCr meeting. The original site of downtown Seattle was in the Pioneer District, 10-15 blocks southwest of the Sheraton Hotel. The sea level, mudflat site suffered from septic problems when the tide was in, so after the 1889 fire destroyed downtown Seattle, the street levels were raised so the second floors of the building became the ground floor. Covers were built over the sidewalks, and they provide the setting for the Underground Tours.
Speidel's book focuses on the economic activities of Seattle's founders as they tried to take advantage of all the trees, water and fish in the Pacific Northwest. These show up in all sorts of odd ways. In most of Seattle, the streets and avenues lie along a north-south/east-west grid with crystalline regularity. Both the streets and the avenues are numbered with the streets running east-west and the avenues running north- south. This is confusing along the diagonals of the grid where you can find NE 45th St. intersecting with 45th Ave. NE., but you eventually get used to it.
Another oddity is that in the downtown core area (around the hotels and convention center), the axes run northwest/southeast. This part of the city was originally Arthur Denny's. He was the official U.S. Surveyor for the area, and it was his job to ensure that developers aligned their streets on north-south axes. That was good for other developers, but Denny realized he could make more money if the streets on his land were parallel to the waterfront. So he did it. Consequently, at the north and south boundaries of his plat, there are jigs-and-jags in all the streets. (The southern boundary is Yesler Street, the original Skid Road. This was the route for skidding logs to Yesler's sawmill. The unofficial name stuck to the area and was the source of the term "skid row" when similar collections of taverns and hotels appeared in other cities.)
Another interesting item associated with Denny is what's called the "Denny Regrade". Seattle is a hilly city, but there used to be another one between the Sheraton Hotel and the Space Needle. Around 1920, the top of the hill was dumped into the bay to make more flat land and money. A lot of dirt moved. The developers must have had great energy and determination.
Similar efforts to promote Seattle continue, except they are somewhat less damaging to the geography of the city. One current idea is that Seattle can be the next "Geneva" of the world. Someone looked at a globe and realized Seattle was equidistant between Europe and the large cities of the Pacific Rim. If Boeing and Microsoft allow us to travel and communicate across the polar cap, then Seattle is at the center of a huge economic system (and someone can make a lot of money from it).
In response to this kind of hucksterism (including "Seattle is the best place to hold an international crystallography meeting!"), a local newspaper columnist organized "Lesser Seattle", a group with the aim of publicizing Seattle's rain and gray skies. Most of us here are somewhat schizophrenic on this point, but after thinking about it a little, most people simply go out and have an espresso. You'll find that coffee is very much a religion here. It's unclear why, but it probably has to do with an entrepreneur with an idea and energy. It's also possible that people here drink lots of coffee to cope with the gray skies and rain. An alternative is to simply remember that everything here is connected to the rain, including the green trees, the temperate weather, the blue water, and the sense of joy that August sunshine brings. See you then.
Ron Stenkamp
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This information last updated April 12, 1996