Once Again They're Sleepless in Seattle

Insight on the News, May 14, 2001 by James P. Lucier

If anyone is sleepless in Seattle, it is because the Emerald City is the most overcaffeinated in the country. No doubt it is the result of a special municipal ordinance that requires the construction of a coffeehouse on every block. When there is a Starbucks on one corner, there must be a Tully's on the next and Seattle's Best on the third. Then, just in case a visitor can't stagger down the street from one to the other, custom provides a stand-up kiosk or a serving cart where a man can belly up to a double espresso or a creamy latte en route.

All of this suggests that what really irritated those people inside and outside of the World Trade Organization brouhaha in 1999 was a breakdown in the caffeine drip for both sides. For Seattle is a lovely city that has spread its laid-back lifestyle across America, profoundly changing the way we interact with one another and do business. It is not just the Starbucks cup on every desk; next to that cuppa java is the personal computer running Microsoft Windows and Office. We buy our books at Amazon.com, our upscale clothes at Nordstrom's and our downscale gear for the great outdoors at Eddie Bauer's or in front of the rock-climbing. wall at REI. And where would we be if Boeing hadn't pioneered the giant passenger jet?

America has taken to these products because there is a certain direct honesty about them -- substantial, but lacking the glitzy pizzazz of New York City or Los Angeles. Seattle's downtown has the same well-scrubbed look. The original Skid Row (where timber was sent down the chutes and bums found shelter at night) is gone, but the modern port is part of the downtown cityscape. Now the town is full of elegant renovated buildings -- a full complement of old-fashioned department stores, no less -- and office buildings turned into hotels and condominiums.

The venerable Hotel Olympia has been restored to its Georgian grandeur by the Four Seasons group, and across the street the upscale high-tech chic of the Seattle W awaits with its lobby swathed in black and gray and votive lamps flickering in the gloom. Its black-clad attendants stand ready to help guests, as they say, with "whatever/whenever."

Seattle's rebirth started in 1963 when proposals to tear down its ramshackle Pike Place Market buildings just back of the docks raised the hackles of the city's typically anarchist politics. In 1971, the market was saved in all its funky glory, on display for 9 million visitors a year, not to speak of a prime outlet for lavish displays of Alaska halibut, Dungeness crabs, purple asparagus, green eggs and thousands of flowers grown lovingly by market gardeners of Dutch, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese descent.

With the future of the market assured, a small storefront opened, selling packages of tea, spices and coffee. They still pour brewed coffee in that same first shop, named after Starbucks, the coffee-loving seaman in Moby Dick. Around the corner in this hotbed of entrepreneurs is another perennial Seattle favorite, Left Bank Books, specializing in communist/anarchist wares and posters that warn the rich scum that their time is coming. Ironically, it probably was the coffee that induced Bill Gates to bring Microsoft to his hometown in 1977.

But the news is not all good. The airy office towers that shape the skyline are filled with dot-coms, and many are not doing well. Realnetworks has been forced to face reality, a circumstance putting the squeeze on former Realnetworks executive Maria Cantwell, a Democrat who raised twice as much money as Republican Sen. Slade Gorton to defeat him in the November election. Unfortunately, most of that money was raised from herself, using highly leveraged bank loans backed up by her Realnetworks stock. Now that the stock has slipped from $59 a share last July to $9 recently, Cantwell is bankrupt and in technical violation of the campaign-finance regulations.

Gorton has just announced that he is joining the Seattle law firm Preston Gates, run by Bill's father. However, Seattleites seem more concerned about the demise of Kozmo.com, whose orange-suited bicyclists were pledged to bring videotapes or Chinese-takeout to your door within an hour.

Meanwhile, the town still is reeling over Boeing's decision to move its 500 top executives out of Seattle, wherever/whenever, after 85 years of headquartering there. The vast aircraft-manufacturing plants will remain, at least for now, but the blow to Seattle's psyche, if it has one, is unfathomable. "How could they do this to us?" they ask. Wiser Seattleites point to the extraordinarily high local taxes, a complex regulatory regime with each little community imposing its own regs and costs on the Boeing cash cow, and long-standing environmental hostility toward construction that would alleviate endemic traffic congestion.

Oh, and on top of that, the Bonneville Power Administration, forced by Clinton directives to divert power to the energy sluggards in California, has called for the two-year shutdown of 10 regional aluminum plants -- accounting for 38 percent of U.S. national capacity. So if the logic of the airframe factories is based on the availability of cheap local aluminum, is it Boeing, going, gone? Perhaps a grande caramel machiatta espresso would help.