Occidental Tourist

Occidental Square has always been kind of awesome and uniquely Seattle, to this writer at least. It's walled in yet open, yet cluttered, yet ordered. There's a distinctive sense of wood, but the predominant building material is stone or brick. There are no people, but there are trees! Have you ever been to a square in Europe? They're great in their own quaint little way, but they're somewhat of a celebration of treelessness. "Hell yeah there was a forest here when we showed up - We fucking hacked it down and replaced it with all these cobble stones and scary churches and shit." That kind of thing was cool a few centuries ago.

European squares have one thing, though, that we'd splinter all the trees in Pioneer Square into toothpicks for. People. You can go and sit in a European square and have a coffee or (moral corruption alert) a beer or a glass of wine and watch all kinds of people go by. Some of those people will be tourists, yes, but most of those will be tourists that are native to the city. They go to the city center for no other reason than to be around other people and interact with them and, you know, be a society. Alright, that's kind of grandiose. They go there because there's a Gap and a McDonalds nearby, but the fact remains that a lot of different types of people go there for one reason or another.

Seattle, on the other hand, has a definite lack of public spaces. There's Westlake Center, the Ave, Broadway, a few parks...the waterfront.... We're really reaching already. Yeah, we're cafe culture and that's where we mix and mingle, but take a look around your cafe - It's a dozen or so different versions of you. Seattleites enjoy their privacy and that's cool, but when it's difficult to think of any place at all to go and even look at people that might be a little richer or poorer or darker or lighter or older or younger than you we've got a problem. We want it. We'll even brave Seattle Center if we think there will be a bunch of different people there. We say "density" but we really mean "push us together."

Yesterday, at least, there were a lot of different types of people mingling with each other at Occidental Park. There was some kind of violin concert going on that was exactly the kind of entertainment that plays Marymoor Park in Redmond in our interior mental version of that place, although we've never been there. Collectors, macaroni gluers and artists were setting up shop for First Thursday. Office people were having lunch and walking through. There were a bunch of people hanging around that seemed to have a whole lot of crap with them like backpacks and blankets and shit and no one was stabbed or spontaneously addicted to crack against their will. They talked with each other and watched the violin guy and interacted with little old ladies. If they cowered from the light allowed by the absence of 17 trees it wasn't noticeable. Actually, the only noticeable difference to Occidental Square Park yesterday when it reopened after months of renovation and the years before its renovation was people. Hope it continues.