Seattlest Interview: Jonathan Raban

From time to time we residents of this unique/Northwestern/American city develop blindspots into which it's difficult to see. Jonathan Raban has made a good go of assisting us in these situations --sometimes just by nudging the mirror a little-- so we contacted him hoping he could help with a little perspective on our viaduct dilemma. He doesn't disappoint. Discussed are the Viaduct, the waterfront, South Lake Union, Aurora Ave North, the Tube, traffic, money, legacies, neuroses, wagers against the future, Seattle's misconceptions, Seattlest's misconceptions and, finally, Jonathan's upcoming books.

If Seattle's port had been included in the list of ports to be secured by DP World would the city have proved its enlightenment or stuck it to Bush?

Hard to tell. The people who protested the ports deal with DPW were an odd assortment of terror warriors, anti-globalists, and political opportunists (like Hillary Clinton). I think Seattle could have come up with its share of turtle-costumed anti-globalists... The whole issue bothers me, because I woke up one morning to find myself agreeing with both David Brooks and George W. Bush, as if I'd moved far to the right in my sleep--not a good feeling.

And would it have been different if instead of a Dubai company being in charge of port security it had been, say, an Indonesian company?

Well, P. & O., the company bought out by DPW, was British, and, as we know, Britain is a nest of al-Qa'idists. In any case, DPW was never going to be, as you say, "in charge of port security"--that's always been the business of the US Coast Guard and the Customs division of the Dept of Homeland Security.

Whatever form the Viaduct replacement takes (tunnel, Viaduct 2.0, or surface road) it will mark a move away from industry at the waterfront and towards a recreational waterfront. Agree, disagree or "industry died at the waterfront years ago?

There's a lot of allure in the slogan about reconnecting Seattle with its waterfront, because "waterfront" is a magically evocative word: it suggests fishing boats accompanied by clouds of honking gulls, exotic cargoes being unladen on picturesque wharfs by picturesque people and so forth. But of course Seattle's cargo business--and containers rather lack the je-ne-sais-quoi of picturesqueness--has all gone south to Harbor Island, once accessible, now fenced off and guarded. The fishing boats have long been stationed to the north, at Fishermen's Terminal, which still remains a real working waterfront and a great place to wander around.

If the mayor gets his tunnel, the waterfront to which the city will be reconnected won't be all that interesting: there's a limited romantic appeal in the sight of tourists getting on and off cruise ships, commuters embarking for Bainbridge, and yachtsmen casting off on a voyage to Blake Island. I have few memories more bleak than those of windy English seaside promenades--Bournemouth, Brighton, Hove, Frinton... And what Seattle will get is less a waterfront than a promenade. For this reason, I think I'm at present lukewarmly on the side of the surface road rather than the tunnel or the rebuilt viaduct, but I could convert to the tunnel if somebody comes up with a convincing picture of what would happen in the space between existing structures and the water. But just getting the city closer to the water seems an inadequate reason for spending a ton of money on a scheme that will do nothing to ease our present traffic difficulties. Also, the tunnel smells to me a lot like the monorail did. Seattle seems to have an awful weakness for monumentally expensive toys--I guess it's that "world-class city" neurosis, as if the toys would somehow validate Seattle's new standing in the world. But then I'm a cheapskate: if I had my way, I'd just add an extra pillar or two to the viaduct, slap a coat of paint on it, and leave it at that and hope for the best.

Another reason to query the tunnel--along with Mayor Nickels's other plans for automobile-related transportation fixes--is that this is a bad time to be predicting the future. We still don't know what the impact of telecommuting is likely to have on the urban-suburban commute. It's not impossible to imagine I-5, I-90 and 520 becoming increasingly unclogged at rush-hours during the next few years as more and more people stay home to work. Plus, we have no idea about what's going to happen to oil supplies. Projects like the tunnel, which won't be usable for ten or a dozen years from now, assume a future that's going to be much like today only more so--a dumb assumption in these peculiar and unstable times.

Long-term transportation projects nearly always misread the future. The London Tube, for instances, fossilizes a pattern of city-traveling that was typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but has become ever more quaint and irrelevant since. The hub-and-spoke system just doesn't correspond to the way people now move around in Greater London, and if we go with Nickels's plans for Seattle I think we're likely to be saddling the Seattle of the future with our own quaintly Y2K version of city life and work. By the time these projects open they'll be impossibly outdated if gas is ten or fifteen or twenty bucks a gallon and half the people now working in offices are spending all day at computer terminals in their homes.

Maybe I'm just rationalizing my cheapskate instincts, but it seems to me that, facing a future so uncertain, we ought to be concentrating, for the time being at least, on cheap temporary fixes rather than whoring after grandiose transportation projects that take for granted the idea that we'll be using our cars in 2020 in exactly the same way as we're using them now. I bet we won't.

Also, I tend to be a bit blind to Seattle's traffic problems. After living in London for more than twenty years, I haven't yet been caught here in a traffic jam worthy of the name. In England, I got used to taking an hour to travel two or three miles, and by that standard Seattle traffic moves like greased lightning. I have sat in traffic on I-5 and heard the KUOW lady describe my patch of freeway as "a parking lot." Parking lot? Not to me--I think of it as moving along at a fine clip.

What I'd like to do is send Greg Nickels to live in Streatham in south London for a week, and commute at rush hour back and forth between Streatham and Central London on the A20. By Tuesday afternoon at 5pm, it would dawn on him that Seattle is a traffic paradise by comparison.

In any case, nothing promotes telecommuting, car-sharing, bus riding, bicycling so well as being stuck in real traffic jams, so perhaps we need more of them--and I write as an unreconstructed sports car driver with a weakness for mashing the gas pedal, so I'm voting against my own self-interest here. If I were mayor (god help us all), I wouldn't put much of a priority on making life easier for automobiles, much as I happen to like them. The trouble is that mayors love to leave "legacies," and I'm afraid that Greg Nickels has set his heart on living to see his name emblazoned on that tunnel. Maybe someone could tell him that Abe Lincoln did not build the Lincoln Tunnel...

Downtown and the waterfront have been very high profile lately, but the areas surrounding Lake Union and Salmon Bay are steadily and quietly being re-purposed for recreational and residential uses. What developments should we be paying attention to in these areas and what do we stand to lose?

I love unregulated, unplanned, low-rent quarters of cities, which is why I like (but do not love) the untamed reaches of Aurora Avenue. South Lake Union always seemed to me an interesting urban nomansland, full of odd businesses drawn there by the area's relative cheapness and centrality. You want an old photograph restored: there is--or was--a shop in South Lake Union that would do it, just as there's a place that specializes in the repair of tops on convertibles. If you poke around among those streets, you can find all sorts of Dickensianly eccentric pursuits going on--it's where Seattle thrives at its quietest and most unflashy.

I hated the proposal for what amounted to the Norm Rice Memorial Park, stretching from Lake Union to the Westlake Center, and was glad to see it defeated. Then Paul Allen got his hands on South Lake Union, and I fear for its future. At present, it's still--just--a scruffy, flexible city space where interesting things happen precisely because it hasn't been closely supervized by planners and developers. Alas, the clock's ticking down on it. But there's always Aurora.

I'm anticipating your next Seattle novel to the point of going through your trash for discarded galleys - What's the time line on that? Are you working on anything else you can let us know about?

The novel's called Surveillance: it comes out in September in the UK and next January in the U.S.. It's set in Seattle and on Whidbey Island in the immediate future--by which I mean more like next Wednesday than next year.

And yes (thank you for asking!) I have started on another novel, set in Seattle, the East Side, and the landscape between here and Montana, seen from a Harley. It's about Brits in America, sort of. And murder.