I like San Francisco just fine, but as far as I can tell, nearly everything in Seattle is better than in its Bay Area counterpart (with the possible exception of Herb Caen’s sublime column in the San Francisco Chronicle).
We, too, have outstanding water views, but our water is clean and blue. We, too, have wicked hills to climb, but at the top you’ll find a damn good cup of coffee. We may not have Jerry Rice, but we’ve got Ken Griffey Jr. locked up for the next three seasons. San Francisco may have the Grateful Dead, but we’ve got Bill Gates.
In fact, we’ve got it all in Seattle, but we don’t go in for California-style self-promotion. Our Scandinavian heritage and dogged belief that self-effacement is a lifestyle decision preclude that. Take our wicked hills, for example. Seattle is built on seven of them, and we would put our Queen Anne and Fremont Avenues up against any Powell & Hyde pretenders to steepness. But do we have gaily-colored cable cars clanging their way up our hills? Not any more. Queen Anne once had a counterbalance trolley, but we gave it up years ago. We’d all just rather walk; it’s better for us.
If one of our city elders proposed building a Lombard-style “crooked street” on one of our hills, we’d send him straight to a sweatbox for a few hours to clear his head. Our wicked hills will continue to have straight streets, thank you. We’d miss the good, honest, burning feeling in our thighs if we couldn’t climb them vertically.
San Francisco Bay is gorgeous when the fog lifts, you say, and the views of and from the Golden Gate Bridge are unequaled. Obviously, you’ve never seen the Ballard Bridge go up on a spring afternoon when the halibut fishing fleet is returning from Alaska and the Olympic mountains are snowcapped.
We not only have water surrounding our city–and mountains surrounding the water–but our water teems with salmon returning upstream to spawn. Imagine eating anything that was pulled from San Francisco Bay, especially if it came from those swampy parts in Sausalito where the houseboats are moored.
OK, so we’ve had a minor problem with voracious seals camping out in front of the Ballard Locks and eating all the salmon in recent years. We’re working on it. In San Francisco they’d probably do something obvious like turning them into a tourist attraction, but we’re much more sensitive in Seattle and have spent the last two years forming committees to discuss the seal situation, the last recommendation from which was to drop huge speakers underwater and blast them with sound, preferably from a high-decibel grunge-rock band.
A ferry crossing Puget Sound is a perfectly delightful way to pass an afternoon, with little risk of being swept off the boat’s deck by gale-force winds into treacherous, swirling currents, as might happen on a San Francisco ferry from the Embarcadero.
That’s another thing: What exactly is an Embarcadero? When I went there, I expected to find mariachis and Steinbeckian types canning tuna. What I found was a street. In Seattle, the waterfront is a waterfront; an embarcadero is a street by the waterfront; a pier is a pier and not a wharf; and we actually shop for our groceries in the Pike Street market.
No, we don’t have a famous landmark like Alcatraz cluttering our Sound; instead, we have Blake Island, where you can eat a swell salmon dinner in an Indian longhouse. If Alcatraz were in Seattle, by now it would have been converted into a charming bed-and-breakfast where you could fish for your supper out the bedroom window. Its board of directors would be carefully representative of the gay, lesbian, arts, Asian and Native American communities, and it would run like clockwork.
As far as I can tell, San Francisco culture last achieved national prominence in the late-’60s with the flower children. Action today consists of the wind howling, Barry Bonds yapping, the ground shaking and the hucksters outside of the strip joints (exactly how old is Carol Doda now? 90?) barking. A nice way to spend an afternoon there is to search for (a) sourdough starter, (b) five aged beatniks who can recite Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” from memory and (c) just one magazine article that doesn’t refer to Sausalito as “charming.”
Today’s Haight-Ashbury scene is in Seattle, and we call it Starbucks. Coffee is the acid of the ’90s. Stop in for a cup someday, and we’ll discuss the weather. Don’t worry about earthquakes. We had a nice, polite, northwest-style tremor last year that caused no damage and didn’t hurt anyone. But we’re looking into it. Our committee should have a full report by this time next year.
