Victor Steinbrueck Park

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Here's a slideshow from downtown Seattle's Victor Steinbrueck Park, a little viewpoint area next to Pike Place Market and perched over the doomed Alaskan Way Viaduct. It seems like this is the edge of a steep bluff, but in fact the park forms the roof of a vast municipal parking garage.

Victor Steinbrueck, the park's namesake, was a local architect who was instrumental in saving Pike Place Market from one of Seattle's many ill-conceived urban renewal schemes. Now it's the park itself that's occasionally threatened by redevelopment schemes.

Unfortunately the park has had a reputation as a dangerous corner of downtown. In recent years there have been shootings and stabbings in the vicinity, and the the park's long been known as an open air drug market at all hours, day and night. Some would see this as a need for more police and harsher laws, but I tend to see it as a sign that prohibition breeds crime. I haven't been back to Seattle since Washington passed Initiative 502, the marijuana legalization measure, and I don't know if anything's changed since then. The "recreational industry" has had supply and price problems and it's probably just too new to have had an impact yet, but it'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.

Alaskan Way Viaduct

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Here are a couple of photos of Seattle's fugly Alaskan Way Viaduct, which carries Alaskan Way (State Route 99) right along the downtown waterfront. This structure is not long for the world; the viaduct is of the same basic design as the Cypress Street Viaduct that collapsed during San Francisco's Loma Prieta quake in 1989, which was a clue that the Seattle edition wouldn't do well in a quake either. When it sustained damage in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, the city finally decided they maybe ought to do something or other about it.

Even after realizing the viaduct needed to be replaced, Seattle spent close to a decade agonizing about what to do. For much of the time, the city and state wanted to replace it with a new viaduct, in the same place but even bigger and uglier than the current one. A more expensive proposal suggested building a tunnel. There was a precedent for this with the city's 1980s-era bus tunnel through downtown. A third suggestion, favored by some activists, would have torn it down and replaced it with nothing, the idea being that the downtown core would adapt to become less car-oriented than it is now.

They eventually settled on the tunnel option, in part because the lure of all that freed-up real estate along the waterfront was too shiny to ignore. That and the fact that the thing's incredibly ugly, and mars any photo you take of the city from a boat, and the proposed new viaduct would've been even worse. So at long last they planned it out, and contracted for the world's largest tunnel boring machine to dig it. Unfortunately, "Big Bertha" (as it was named) stalled out not long after construction began, and tunneling has yet to resume. The viaduct here will still go the way of the Embarcadero Freeway at some point, but exactly when is anyone's guess. So I still get to make fun of Seattle's transportation woes for a few more years.

The sole saving grace of the viaduct is that it does a decent job of keeping rain off the parking spaces beneath it, which is nice if you're playing tourist and going to the Seattle Aquarium, or having lunch at the original Ivar's on the waterfront (instead of an unscenic one in the 'burbs).

King County Administration Building, Seattle

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Here are a couple of photos of Seattle's bizarro King County Administration Building. It's the box with the hexagonal patterns all over the outside, right down to the windows, and a high windowless skybridge. I vaguely remember calling it the "beehive building" when I was a kid, and wondering about the people who work there. I'm not claiming King County is an outpost of Hellstrom's Hive, but sometimes I think it would explain a lot.

It's an ugly building, but I suppose at least it's ugly in a unique way. I imagine the architects genuinely believed they were creating something cool and innovative, thinking outside the usual cookie-cutter International Style box, which is really quite sad considering the result. Back in 2006 there was a proposal to demolish it and put in an enormous 42 story office/condo complex, but the global economy imploded before the idea got off the ground. That may be just as well; an abandoned half-built skyscraper would be about the only thing that could be uglier than the current building.

Fremont Rocket

So here's a photo of Seattle's "Fremont Rocket", in the Fremont neighborhood not far from the Troll, the Lenin Statue, and Seattle's little Fremont Bridge (which is positively puny compared to ours). Fremont as a whole kind of grabs you by the lapel and demands you acknowledge its infinite quirkiness. There are even signs from the neighborhood chamber of commerce, explaining just how awesomely quirky and alternative everyone and everything is:

I will allow that Fremont (and Seattle as a whole) has an excellent marketing operation, way more slick than anything Portland could ever dream of. It's enough to make you forget this is the same city that gave the world Clippy and Kenny G.

As the story goes, this is supposedly a real, live government-surplus rocket, rescued from the facade of a defunct government surplus store. That's not quite true; it's actually a tail boom from a Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar, a twin-tailed USAF cargo plane of the 1950s, which the old surplus store had fashioned into a sort of cartoon rocketship. It would obviously be cooler if it was a real rocket, but it's not. If you want to see an actual real rocket, there are various places around the country with rockets on display. I think Seattle's Museum of Flight may have a few, but I haven't been there in many years. Rocket launches are fun too, if you ever get a chance to watch one in person.

In any case, there is sort of a space connection here. The C-119 aircraft was used for many years for midair recovery of film capsules ejected by Corona spy satellites. Seriously, that's what they used to do. Electronic camera sensors weren't advanced enough at the time, so a spy satellite would take a batch of film photos, and return them by dropping a recovery capsule with the film inside. A plane would snag the capsule's parachute in midair and reel it in, instead of having it land or splashdown somewhere where the Rooskies might find it first. The early spy satellites were publicly called "Discoverer", which was supposedly just an Air Force engineering test and research program. "Discoverer 14" was the first successful recovery, which resulted in some fun vintage newsreel footage:

Pi, Harbor Steps

Several years ago, Seattle's Harbor Steps temporarily hosted a giant sculpture of the letter/number pi. I think it was connected to the nearby Seattle Art Museum somehow, but I haven't been able to figure out much of anything else about it: Who created it, what it was officially called, where it went, etc. Anyway, I was going to post this on March 14th (3/14, in the US date format) for Pi Day, but I was on a tough work deadline & totally forgot about Pi Day. So then I figured, hey, I can use it for April Fool's Day instead and say it's because pi actually equals 4. I can't seem to figure out how to make the joke work, though, probably because it's a dumb joke. It's barely a joke at all, to be honest. Besides, "pi equals 4" is a longstanding cheesy internet gag, and there's a nice VIHart video that explains how it works:

Carkeek Park expedition

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When I was in Seattle back in November, I said something about not being in a very scenic part of town. That was certainly true of the area around my hotel, which (other than the Ivar's restaurant) was the usual could-be-anywhere jumble of strip malls and chain stores. A short drive west of there, though, was Seattle's Carkeek Park, a large nature area on Puget Sound. Much of the park is a forested ravine with a large network of trails, with a small gravelly beach on the sound. I'd just driven up from Portland and needed to stretch my legs a bit, and kind of wanted to do at least one thing that wasn't funeral-related, so I drove over and headed for the beach. A busy rail line runs right along the shoreline, so you have to use a somewhat rickety-looking skybridge to get from the parking lot to the beach. It was bitterly cold and windy that day, and the forecast included an off-chance of snow, so I didn't stay long. It was still a nice break from everything else, though.

I lived in Seattle until around age six, mumble-mumble years ago, so on the rare occasions I'm up there I inevitably try to figure out whether such-and-such a place looks familiar at all. This does actually work sometimes; on a previous trip I managed to find the house I moved away from in 1976, and hadn't been to since then, starting with a couple of cursory looks at Google Maps and after that it was all about recognizing the neighborhood. That was way down in Federal Way, though, and I don't think we spent a lot of time north of downtown Seattle unless it was to visit the zoo. The name "Carkeek Park" sounded vaguely familiar, because it's the sort of Dr. Seuss name that sticks in a five year old brain easily, but the park itself didn't look familiar. I mean, I guess it's technically possible that they've changed something here since Gerald Ford was President. Although I'm prepared to argue that 1976 really wasn't that long ago, all things considered. Ask any geologist, they'll tell you it was practically yesterday.

semi-scenic seattle

A few Instagram photos from a quick trip to Seattle last weekend. I ended up staying at a chain hotel on Aurora Avenue, a few miles north of the big bridge over Lake Union, vaguely near where the funeral was at. As you can see in the top photo, it's not exactly the most scenic part of town.

The hotel offered a strange ironing board with the iron permanently attached, I suppose to prevent people from stealing the iron or something. I'd never seen this before. Is this new, or have I been staying in the right sort of hotel all this time?

These quibbles aside, it's a fantastic location, because there's an Ivar's just two blocks south, on the far side of a giant Sam's Club. It would've been easily walkable if the weather hadn't been so terrible. It's not the one on the Seattle waterfront, of course, but the fish and chowder are the same, which is the main thing.

Pike Place Market

Photos of Seattle's Pike Place Market from the last time I was there, several years ago (same as the previous two posts). It's surprising how rarely I go to Seattle; it's not only the closest big city outside Portland, but I was actually born there and most of my relatives still live there. Come to think of it, that may be why I go there so rarely. I average about one trip every five years or so, usually for someone's birthday or a wedding or something.

When I lived there as a kid, I don't recall going to Pike Place Market at all. It could be that I just don't remember it, since we moved away when I was 6. But I suspect my parents felt the place was old and disreputable, nothing like the nice new suburban malls we usually shopped at. As an adult, it's one of the very few things I actually envy Seattle for having, even though it's full of tourists and trinket stands.

Portland tried its hand at a public market back in 1933, and although it had a very cool Art Deco building, it was a financial debacle and closed in less than a decade. The now-defunct Oregon Journal newspaper owned it for a while after WWII, and the building was finally demolished in 1969, and the site is now part of Waterfront Park. You'd never know there was once an eleven story building there.

So for a long time I thought Seattle had a unique thing here that you couldn't find anywhere else in the country. And it's true that many cities either lost or never had an equivalent. But there are a few here and there, like the West Side Market in Cleveland. which I was rather dazzled by when I visited in March of this year.

There's a proposal floating around Portland that would build a shiny new public market at the west end of the Morrison Bridge, near the site of our fair city's previous debacle. This has been going around in circles for close to a decade now, and they haven't started construction yet, and to be honest I'm not entirely convinced the new one would fare better than the original. It's not as if we have a lack of options for upscale meat and produce here. I'd be much more impressed if they were working to bring affordable fresh produce to Lents or Rockwood instead of building another fancy creative class amenity for downtown. But hey, that's just me being a voice in the wilderness again. Still, if they build it, I'll probably show up and take some photos of it at some point.

Seattle Central Library

A few old photos of Seattle's Central Library. I usually roll my eyes when cities bring in Big Name Architects to design civic institutions for them, especially when said architects spend a great deal of time theorizing and conceptualizing and talking about their unbuilt projects. I do like the building, though, so all's well that ends well. And Wikipedia insists Mr. Koolhaas once wrote a screenplay for Russ Meyer. Which, speaking in my capacity as a fan of bad movies, wins him a few points.

Space Needle

A few nighttime photos of the Space Needle in Seattle from a few years back. I don't have any daytime photos of it, nor do I have any from the top. The last time I was at the top, I had lunch at the revolving restaurant and caught a bug from a plate of potato skins. Oh, the indignity. This was back in the late 1980s when people thought potato skins were fancy for some reason; it was a dark and primitive time. I'm told everything's under new management and so forth now.

Fremont Bridge, Seattle

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The bridge project takes us north again, to Seattle's historic Fremont Bridge, not to be confused with Portland's own vastly larger (but less historic) Fremont Bridge. As with the nearby Aurora Bridge, this one photo was taken way back in 2006, well before I ever thought of this bridge project. So I didn't take a lot of photos, and I didn't walk across the thing.

For something that's apparently quite the quirky and beloved symbol of a quirky part of town, I haven't come across a lot of interesting stuff to share (and, coincidentally, to pad this post out to a more respectable length). It has a Structurae page if you're interested in the engineering side of things. If you're more up for the artsy-quirky stuff, it turns out that in the summer of 2009 the bridge hosted its own artist in residence. Residence, in this case, meaning hanging out in one of the drawbridge towers, watching the world go by and gathering artistic thoughts. Which sounds like a great job, although I expect the living-in-Seattle part would quickly become annoying. Still, if this software thing doesn't work out, maybe the sorta-new bridge in Charleston needs a blogger in residence, or if not, maybe the shiny new one next to Hoover Dam does, or possibly one of the Ala Wai Canal bridges, or the Millau Viaduct, or, or, or....

Aurora Bridge

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The ongoing bridge project heads north this time, to Seattle's Aurora Bridge. This is the first Seattle bridge I've done; it's not a topic I'm overly familiar with, despite having lived in Seattle until age 6, which really ought to make me an expert. And I'm only managing it now because I had some pictures floating around in the archives from back in 2006, the same trip that took me to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. I wasn't actually doing a bridge project yet, at least not that I was aware of, so I didn't try walking across or anything exciting like that. I was actually in the area to track down the Fremont neighborhood's infamous Lenin statue, and the enormous Volkswagen-eating troll who lives under the north end of the Aurora bridge:



My relatives in Seattle always point to the troll to illustrate just how quirky and alternative their city is, even if they themselves are a rather non-quirky bunch of engineers and accountants. So the troll has civic aspirational value, if nothing else.



The Aurora Bridge has made a cameo here once before, in a post about Portland's Vista Bridge, since unfortunately this is Seattle's favorite suicide bridge. A recent WSDOT project put up a nine foot fence to deter jumpers, at the cost of (I'm told) uglifying the bridge and messing up the view. I haven't been back to Seattle in a few years and haven't seen it for myself. And with that I'm going to stop talking about that particular topic, because (as I've learned with the Vista Bridge) jumpers result in a flood of page hits, and it creeps me out. That's not really the kind of web traffic I'm looking for, thanks.



The bridge does bear an obvious family resemblance to Portland's Ross Island Bridge, as they're both cantilever truss bridges. The Ross Island is significantly longer (3649.1 feet vs. 2945 feet) and slightly older (1926 vs. 1932) and the Aurora is wider (70 feet vs. 43 feet), higher (163 feet vs 123 feet), and has more trolls (1 vs. 0). More exciting vital statistics can be had at the bridge's Structurae page, if you're so inclined.



The last photo also shows a bit of the Fremont neighborhood's Sunday Market. Which, as you might imagine, was aggressively quirky. I took a walk through out of curiosity, but I don't recall actually buying anything, now that I think about it.

From the Briny Deep

A couple of photos from the Seattle Aquarium, taken way back in April. These photos didn't turn out well at first, and what you see here is the result of a great deal of GIMP-fu, erasing bits of glare from the flash, fingerprints, weird reflections. I don't claim to be a photography guru; I'm just happy I could salvage something from the original mess.

Sadly, I've forgotten what kind of fish these are. Likewise, I know the next photo is of a salmonid of some kind, but it's been so long I don't recall if it's a steelhead, or a chinook salmon, or a rainbow trout, or whatever. And I'm sure it was taken at the Bonneville fish hatchery, again way back in April, prior to this year's backyard cookout season. So this particular fish may still be there, or it may not.



I'm probably losing native Northwesterner points by admitting this, but if I go fishing (very rarely) I don't catch anything, and the fish sure don't look like this (anymore) down at the grocery store. So I have to admit I can't tell salmonids apart by sight, generally speaking. Now, I can say with confidence it isn't a shark, or an angelfish, or a seahorse, or a stingray. The lack of whiskers suggests it isn't a catfish either. And it doesn't really look like an eel or a lamprey, either. The fact that it's in this pond suggests it isn't one of those freakish deep-sea fish with the huge teeth. And it's not a jellyfish or a starfish since those aren't actually fish. So I guess I can swing a bit of basic taxonomy, but only up to a point.



The octopus mascot outside the Greek Cuisina restaurant in downtown Portland. Yes, I realize it looks like an escapee from a small town parade float. People (myself included) roll their eyes at it, and at the restaurant, a little. Although that doesn't mean I'll say no to a couple rounds of ouzo and a plate of garlicky stuff I can't pronounce, and after the ouzo I might be willing to break a plate or two, you know, just to keep it real and all. Besides, it's bad for business if your restaurant's mascot is actually scary.

Speaking of cephalopods from the deep, here is the absolute coolest vanity license plate in the entire universe. Ever. Mostly because of the little red handprints...

[Okay, okay, I admit it. I'd started to think the previous "mildly nsfw" post was maybe a little crass and juvenile, and I wanted to scroll the thing down the page a little, just so it's not the first thing people see when they come here. And I had a few vaguely maritime but otherwise unrelated photos lying about, and its true that I'd been playing around with GIMP, trying to clean up the top photo a bit, primarily just to get more of a feel for the program. So anyway, I had the photos handy, and came across the links about that license plate -- go click on them now, if you haven't already -- and I thought I could get a cheap filler post out of 'em. And here it is, apparently.]

A Taco for Lenin

Another picture from Seattle, this time of the Lenin statue that graces the Fremont neighborhood, right in front of the local Taco del Mar. The statue's presence inspires frothing-at-the-mouth rage from the usual quarters, naturally. Do conservatives just have no sense of irony at all? Yes, we all realize he was a bad guy, ok? You'd think that just living here in the irony-soaked, angst-ridden Northwest, at least a very teentsy amount would've rubbed off on them, but apparently not. I mean, the local merchants (capitalist running dogs that they are) decorate Vladimir Ilich for Christmas. In that Christmas article, a local gelato shop owner remarks that she first thought it was a statue of Ivar, the local clam chowder baron. Which, quite honestly, is what I thought at first too. A giant bronze Lenin statue is not exactly the sort of thing you go around expecting to see every day. At least in this country, and in this day and age.

In Budapest, there's an entire outdoor museum devoted to old Socialist Realist sculptures discarded after 1989. I have to admit I rather like some of the statues done in this style. Your art history professor will scoff, of course. I personally think the art world's scorn for all things Soviet is primarily due to aesthetic trendiness, not ideology. While the outside art world had moved on to increasingly abstract and esoteric works, comprehensible only to an elect few, the Soviets stuck with their own brand of romanticized neoclassicism, in art, architecture, music, and literature. In the Western art world, being seen as stodgy and outdated is far worse than being ideologically suspect, so the entire creative output of a very large country was lumped in with the likes of Norman Rockwell, Rogers & Hammerstein, and Thomas Kinkade. It seems to me this is a rather harsh and unfair judgement. Sooner or later a major museum will do a "groundbreaking" show, and there'll be a critical reevaluation, and prices of old Soviet statues will go through the roof. Mark my words. Not next year, and probably not in the next five or ten, but sometime within our lifetimes, I think we'll see it.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times has a great article about the ambivalent legacy of 20th century modernism, in response to a new show at the V&A Museum in London. It'd be interesting to go travel a couple of centuries into the future and see what stuff from the 20th century turned out to have staying power in the long term and what didn't. I think the results would be surprising, although I wouldn't dare to guess about the particulars.

It's not like most of the art created in the West during the last hundred years or so has been all that fantastic. The last 50 or so, in particular, have produced some great works, and literally tons of absolute crap. I'm not one of those people who freak out about abstract art and sculpture, and I think some of it can be quite nice. There's even a small amount of modern classical music out there that I'd consider to be "nice". But it's rare for a modern artwork to elicit a stronger reaction than that, and quite a few simply get dismissed without evoking any sort of feeling or response at all. This is fine in an art museum; different works will strike different people in different ways, and all that. However, if you're going to plunk a sculpture down in a park or public square, I'd argue that you have additional obligations toward the general (i.e. non-art-major) public. Presumably it's supposed to be there for everyone, not just an in-crowd elite, so you should at least try to make the work appealing to a broader cross-section of society. There's a limit to how much aggressively ugly modernism the public should be asked to put up with. I don't care what the experts say, Rusting Chunks #5 is not a real improvement over a grouping of heroic steelworkers and peasants striding into the glorious future. Yes, a world of nothing but endless worker-and-peasant statues would be monotonous, to say the least, but an occasional one here and there would be nice, just to spice things up.

You'd have to adapt the style to local conditions, of course. No Lenins (Fremont notwithstanding), and most likely no hammers-and-sickles. I mean, nobody actually wants to live in a totalitarian society with a broken Leninist command economy, except perhaps the president of Belarus, and he's a complete lunatic. You could possibly get away with a statue of John Reed, since he was originally from Portland and all. (I've heard there's a park bench dedicated to him somewhere around town, but I don't know where it is, if it exists.) For the most part, though, you'd have a lot of burly, square-jawed loggers, cowboys, and fishermen. I recall having seen at least one example of a Soviet statue of heroic engineers, and I'd obviously be ok with that. Heck, I'd even model for one, if I was asked nicely.

Not Very Strong Swimmers

Here are a couple of fun photos of freakish fish, taken at the Seattle Aquarium the other day. You can probably tell why I don't take photos for a living. Neither of these fish are very strong swimmers, so at least they held still for the camera, more or less.



The first is a cowfish, and the second is the Northwest's very own Pacific spiny lumpsucker. No, seriously, that's its real name. Honest. Oregon Magazine has a bit more about the spiny lumpsucker here, and there's a good Wikipedia article as well. Also, here's a WP article about Tetraodontiformes, an entire order of smallish and very droll fishes including cowfishes, pufferfishes (=fugu), and much, much more.



While we're on the subject, the third image is a drawing of the recently discovered Tiktaalik roseae, which looks an awful lot like a transitional form between fish and land animals. (I'm guessing it wasn't a very strong swimmer either.) You've heard of transitional forms, right? You know, the thing the creationists keep insisting doesn't exist. D'oh! If you're a hardcore Tiktaalik fan, CafePress already has a line of T. roseae casualwear.

The image links to a good story over at Pharyngula, and The Lancelet also has a good story. If you're a Nature subscriber, you can find the researchers' original articles here.

The creationists beg to differ about Tiktaalik, of course, and they'd like to offer a bit of lame and ignorant criticism of the new beastie. Another fine example of their usual faith-based "reasoning".

A good post over at HinesSight proclaims this to have been a bad week for creationism, with Tiktaalik just the tip of the iceberg. The Panda's Thumb also suggests this has not been a good week for the ID camp. Not to be outdone, a couple of posts at Scientific American's science blog call it a lousy week for creationism, giving even more reasons why this is so. The biggest reason, of course, is the new molecular evolution study, which in the end is probably a bigger (though less accessible) story than Tiktaalik, even. It may be worth noting that the lead researcher on the study is a professor at the University of Oregon.

I'd like to take things a step further and label this a truly crappy week for creationism, and more generally for the notion there are things that only religion can explain and science can't touch. Today comes a new report indicating that near-death experiences may have a purely biological basis. So much for the whole "move towards the light" thing.

Oh, and fundies in Kentucky are freaking out over efforts to replace "A.D." ("Anno Domini") with "C.E." ("Common Era") in general usage, which also seems to have some sort of murky connection with evolution, as well. At least they seem to think so. I was at the Portland Art Museum last week, and noticed that they've begun using C.E. in their exhibits. There's a sign explaining C.E. vs. A.D. in their current exhibit of Han dynasty objects. Not really the best explanation I've seen, since I think they were trying to be overly tactful and avoid criticizing the religious basis of "A.D.". Instead they just argued that "C.E." is newer, and it's the trend these days.

Also, here's a good article arguing that if you're a genuine ID true believer, you ought to witness for your faith by not getting a flu shot ever again, and most definitely not for the bird flu, since in order to pose a threat to humans, the H5N1 virus will need to evolve a bit more, which is "impossible", according to the usual ID wingnuts.

But not all the news is bad in Jesustan this week. Remember that one-eyed "cyclops" kitten that was in the news a few months back? Apparently the creationists have gotten their grubby hands on the remains, and the poor thing will soon be a new attraction at a roadside fundie freakshow in Syracuse, NY. (Don't worry, the link does not have a picture of the kitten, which you probably really don't want to see.) Either the fundies don't understand the difference between a genetic mutation and a birth defect, or they're deliberately trying to confuse the issue, or quite probably a bit of both.

Updated: Creationism is near the top of the list of things You Must Believe to be a Republican.

Also, you might enjoy Jane Smiley's recent posting titled "Tolerance", or Social Control?, about the larger secular vs. fundie conflict. I'll probably link to this story again, since placing it as an addendum near the end of an existing mostly-unrelated post doesn't do it justice.

And here's an interesting, rambling blog post speculating about the progressive/conservative divide and related matters. This is a great line: "This was going to be a post about something else. My posts never do what i want them to do.". I know the feeling. I really do.

More: A couple more related items worth reading: Tangled Bank #51: the Seattle Tour! and Does gravity explain why basketballs fall down?.



tagz: cowfish spiny lumpsucker tiktaalik evolution creationism intelligent design oregon