I Knew Brooklyn. Brooklyn Was a Friend of Mine. And Bellevue, You're No Brooklyn

We at Seattlest have considered the question of "What is Bellevue" before.

What we didn't consider is what the Times' Danny Westneat does today. Is Bellevue a "New Brooklyn"?

Westneat's riffing off of a new book called Boomburbs: The Rise of America's Accidental Cities. The book's author, Robert Lang, "argues that our quintessential whitebread suburb is now so packed with immigrants it actually looks more like New York's famed borough."

...He doesn't mean Bellevue feels urban like Brooklyn ... Lang says he means that Bellevue is a "cosmoburb" — a place tagged as a white suburb that is no longer either white or suburban. Bellevue now is less white than Seattle and has nearly as high a share of foreign-born residents (32 percent) as Brooklyn (38 percent).

We can speak with some authority on Brooklyn, having lived there for five years. And here's the thing. Brooklyn, once, was a metropolis unto its own. It had its own baseball team, its own transit system, its own dialect, its own culture.

Bellevue has never, and will never, have any of those things. Meet someone from Bellevue in Brooklyn, they'll tell you they are from Seattle. Meet someone from Brooklyn in Bellevue, they'll tell you they're from Brooklyn. Proudly.

There's no Bellevue pride, there's no Bellevue culture, there's nothing that makes Bellevue different than any of the other "cosmoburgs" Lang's anointing. Like their "cosmoburg" peers, Bellevue residents eat at The Keg, shop at Abercrombie and Fitch or the Gap, talk like newscasters. Bellevue may get more dense, it may get more diverse, it may get the Sonics. But it will always be, in practice and in spirit, a suburb of Seattle.