One Man’s Lexus Is Another Man’s Handbasket
There’s an interesting comment thread going on at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It results from an article a few days ago about a venerable coffee shop in the Pike Place Market that was closing. The paper asked people to list what other defunct businesses that they missed. I think the P-I is sort of taken aback by the lengthy outpouring that builds a patchwork history, not of what Seattle was, necessarily, but what folks remember it was.
One funny thing to me (and I’ve lived here continuously since 1974) is a generational layering effect in the comments, where the artifacts of one group’s lost shining city is the scourge of dreck and commercialism that destroyed the previous group’s lost shining city, and so on.
While there are definitely things I miss, and I regret intensely the land-gobbling suburban growth in western Washington, but for the most part I’m having a great time living in the city.
