There used to be a theory around the old Seattle (c. 1985) that the weather, the then-eight months of dripping evergreens and grimly gray over-hanging clouds, had a cooling-out effect on outsiders. As the theory went, the seemingly constant dripping rain, combined with the negative-ion-charged air, took the wind out of a lot of human sails.
People would come here, hell-bent on changing Seattle and its environs, and within five or 10 years at the most these same folks were wearing flannel shirts and Levis and crowding into Elliott Bay to stock up on reading material for the long, dark winter.
But that was before more than 50 percent of our fellow Seattleites were born somewhere else.
We have become a city of outsiders.
Someone like me, who has been here, off and on, for 20 years, can sometimes not find a trace of the sorta phlegmatically liberal little forgotten city I loved.
Folks who were born here often tell me they think the city has changed more in 20 years than in the hundred years before 1980.
Seattle has become a destination place with all that that entails. Newcomers quoted in this very paper's Street Talk enthuse about all the cute little shops, as if store after store selling gilded nonessentials at high prices was a boon.
Seattle has become a big wet Palm Springs.
Neighborhood after neighborhood is becoming boutique-ified, Bellevue Square'd.
I performed at a rare (for me) fiction and poetry reading in Ballard 10 days ago. Since I hadn't spent any time in Ballard for years, I arrived early and walked around.
Store after store reminded me of a poor man's Fremont, or the row of new "fashion" stores atop Queen Anne Hill.
More and more, as I walk and bus around Seattle, staring out at a landscape more and more blighted by condo boxes and "dream" businesses that look exactly the same on Eastlake Avenue as they do on the lower slopes of Lynnwood, I feel like the parent of a beautiful teen-ager whose offspring has begun marring his or her natural good looks with cosmetics, tattoos, piercings and all the other extras many teens think for a time will make them unique or make them a rebel when what all their accesso-rizing really does is make them look like everybody else.
As I came back over the 520 floating bridge the other day after a rare trip to the Bellevue Municipal Golf Course, Lake Washington was a huge, beautiful blue shimmer.
The Seattle skyline baked in the palpitating distance. The temperature was hovering around 90, but a nice breeze, reminiscent of Hawaii, was blowing, and I felt more than thought how beautiful this place can be.
How beautiful it still is until you look a little bit more closely.
It is my opinion that Seattle is being, if not ruined, sadly altered by big money that is not allied with cultural and social taste.
Many of my younger friends have fled to Portland over the past 10 or 15 years, citing the "old" Northwest feeling there.
Older friends who have not sunk roots here have either moved on to Hawaii or back from whence they came.
All of this is sad to me, as someone who fell in love with Seattle way back in 1984 upon my arrival.
The physical beauty was important. But so was the feeling of tolerance for damn near everything on all sides of the political and social spectrum.
There seemed to be more cultural, if not ethnic, diversity.
"Well, then, Dennis, just move," you might be thinking, if you have read this far, and if you love a town full of stores selling overpriced accessories and unnecessary fashion gadgets.
At the aforementioned reading in Ballard 10 days ago, I checked back in with a lot of 40- and 50-year-old people who had driven the Seattle bohemian-bar literary scene, a movement that included - in its heyday - well-attended, free monthly readings at the Pioneer Square Saloon, the Two Bells and in too many coffee houses to mention.
Many of them seem to feel the same way I do, that the town we loved has changed, not for the better, and has lost a piece of its heart in the process.
I try to keep an open mind. Maybe some, if not most of what we fading bohemians are feeling is the melancholy sadness of the non-booster's middle period, when physical limits and the aging curve make themselves known, very known.
I actually hope that the changes are as much in me as in the city, because I would like to think that modern refugees from a racially divided, hypocritically self-satisfied boondock like the Cincinnati I fled in 1984 can still come here and feel the bracing air of some new (to them) type of social and cultural feeling.
I hope that is still possible and that I am just getting a little bit too old to notice.
But I wonder how bracing the air can be when many of those inhaling it seem to value money and stuff and gratuitous display (what else is a Hummer, for God's sake)? over the feeling of vibrancy the older, damper Seattle so obviously had.
Maybe you don't notice the changes if you are always either on your cellphone or your computer.
But day by day, places, neighborhoods that were very different from the place on the other side of the hill, look more and more the same.
Except for the University District, Georgetown and parts of Capitol Hill, there is less and less difference in our alleged urban village.
I miss the older Seattle that at least gave lip service to the idea of true diversity and real tolerance. The place where drivers stopped to let you cross the street, even against the light sometimes, instead of blowing through on the yellow, or increasingly on the red, cellphone in one hand, latte in the other.
The place that was not just beautiful on the outside.[[In-content Ad]]
