TRAVELIt didn't take us long and we didn't have to go far to get from one world to another. ...
A few minutes paddling the rented canoe and we cross Lake Washington's Union Bay, out beyond the waterfront homes, coursing under the roar of the State Highway 520 freeway bridge, and, ahhhh, into the placid lagoon and narrow, bayou-like channel of the Washington Park Arboretum.A wide-eyed heron twitches as we slip past, but the small turtle basking on an old snag rests undisturbed. A family of geese swims away, carving little geese wakes in front of us. Two old men sit on buckets and look up from their fishing bobbers.
Put down the paddle and glide, time for a sudsy bottle of Ballard Bitter ale and slice of cold-smoked king salmon unwrapped from white butcher paper. At first rustle of lunch, the goose family swivels about in hope of begging an invitation.
Trees of significant dimensions and far-away Latin names hang over the banks; footpaths are overwhelmed with early summer's azaleas and rhododendrons. Here is one of America's major botanical gardens, enriched with sweet air that has been scrubbed by 3,000 miles of open ocean. Everywhere, rich hues of Northwest green fill the background.
This is the city of Seattle, I explain, although by now it has mostly explained itself - a metropolis still connected to its myth, never far from nature, and in the polite meaning of the word, exhibitionist. The scale and pace here is, to put it simply, pleasant. By no means exotic, but still a time zone ahead of sleepy. Big enough but not so dauntingly big. Far away but not so far. More cosmopolitan than complex.
And, at such prices as our $3.50 rental fee for the canoe at the University of Washington Waterfront Activities Center, its enticements are not necessarily expensive.
In the national imagination, the Northwest of the '90s has come to mean quality of life.
Too much so for some who reside here. These days, a good case can be made that Seattle's ballyhooed livability has declined after years of locust-like growth and sprawl and political vapor lock. Relentless traffic, congested suburbanization and the whole inventory of urban woes - drugs, gangs, indifferent schools, homelessness and inflated property values - should be enough to wipe the luster off Seattle ZIP codes.
But little of it spoils Seattle's visitability.
The best parts of the city are still here and still within reach. They do not require unlisted phone numbers, high-placed friends, secret code rings or credit checks. Although, to be honest, it helps to have a fondness for boats and water to fully appreciate a place with an hourglass figure - with freshwater Lake Washington forming its curves to the east, saltwater Puget Sound the curves to the west, and with a ship canal and small lakes laced through at the waist.
Take the ferry, for instance.
It's the No. 1 tourist attraction. Yet its function is not for tourism. Since the turn of the century, ferry boats have been used by island residents of Puget Sound to commute east to the city and by city dwellers to reach the islands and Olympic Peninsula to the west.
Today, thousands of residents rely on the ferry for daily transportation, and visitors ride along by the thousands more. Boats from the downtown dock connect to Bainbridge Island and the peninsula city of Bremerton. It's inexpensive. A round-trip due west to the bedroom community of Bainbridge Island, formerly known as the Winslow landing, costs $4.
There is no more dramatic view of the Seattle skyline than from the receding ferry, nothing that so captures the essence of this city. In the 10 p.m. summer sunsets, the silhouetted city can glow orange; in the fog of morning, it assumes a greenish-silver. The 20-knot ferries standing three stories tall throw cool salt air in your face, and the one-hour round-trip ride (no need for foot passengers to disembark) leaves you with a water-level tease of the alluring maze of deep green geography that is Puget Sound.
Now is the time for a caution: Seattle is a place to reacquaint yourself with your feet, rain or shine. Cars in the city can transform a pleasant excursion into a dispiriting snarl. Parking downtown is expensive, street routes confusing and poorly marked.
Most everything can be reached by walking, floating, an occasional taxi or via a clean and easy bus system. Buses downtown are free. Fares to outlying areas within the city are 75 cents, $1 at rush hour. Most bus stops are equipped with a schedule board. Check your return carefully; some routes discontinue in the evening hours.
Buses are as good a place as any to begin to appreciate Seattle's 19-year commitment to devote 1 percent of its projects budget to public art. The downtown core's new underground bus stations were designed as permanent galleries as well as commuter terminals.
The cavernous Westlake Station at Third and Pike streets, underneath the main department-store shopping corridor, features 10-by-35-foot enamel murals, whimsical stone bench carvings, a faux-city park in colored terra-cotta tile and more. Other stations have themes ranging from high-tech to historic.
They say that more than 1,000 pieces of public art now adorn the city, its parks, buildings and even its sidewalk person-hole covers. The Seattle Arts Commission publishes a free pamphlet on public art.
For residents as well as visitors, the turn in the road where Pike Street meets Pike Place remains the city's comfortable, loud, jostling, laughable and curious counterpoint to the nearby urban high-rises and to the cold tourist-commercial waterfront down the hill. Here, in a short 21/2 blocks, Seattle keeps alive the old tradition of a city-center public market. Here is a place everyone still goes. Again and again. The Space Needle may be the skyline landmark; the National Historic District along Pike Street and Pike Place is the mark of its distinction.
For residents as well as visitors, Pike Place Market - the turn in the road where Pike Street meets Pike Place - remains the city's comfortable, loud, jostling, laughable and curious counterpoint to the nearby urban high-rises and to the cold tourist-commercial waterfront down the hill. Here, in a short 21/2 blocks, Seattle keeps alive the old tradition of a city-center public market. Here is a place everyone still goes. Again and again. The Space Needle may be the skyline landmark; the National Historic District along Pike Street and Pike Place is the mark of its distinction.
The green-and-white 1907 wooden market building is open to the air along the west side of the worn brick street. It's a walking place, a daytime place, an old-time place.
It hangs over a steep hill, where you can wander down for three stories, with shops that sell everything from parrots to six-pound geoduck clams and all kinds of ticky-tacky in between.
A warren of market shops and cafes line the other side of the street.
Seattle's downtown waterfront has been stripped of its character to make way for a standard tourist haunt, full of generic trinkets and generic food. Few locals venture there except to reach the ferry terminal. But not so old Pioneer Square.
Back in 1853, two founding settlers set the stage for a sharp division that still splits the character of the city into two. The south area of town was laid out by raconteur David "Doc" Maynard, the north by business-minded Arthur Denny. Today, Denny's city is the downtown business core; Maynard's the bawdy, slightly frayed but atmospheric area known as Pioneer Square.
The avenues of the two areas meet at strange angles along one of the most famous streets in America. It's now called Yesler Way, but is known as the lane where lumbermen used to skid their logs to the waterfront from the hills above the city, the original Skid Road - eventually relabeled Skid Row in other cities.
Pioneer Square and the several blocks that run south to the Kingdome sports stadium comprise an old-town area of dogged integrity, with its 1890s brick architecture and its continuing equilibrium of work and play, of down-and-out'ers and out-to-have-fun'ers. The 1914, 35-story Smith Tower building was the West's original skyscraper.
The taverns and galleries, craft shops, rug merchants and booksellers of First and Second Avenues South offer some of the liveliest street-side action in the city.