As Gnarled as Paris, as Disfigured as Manhattan, Grotesque like Copenhagen
This thing has been going around today that lumps Seattle in with New York, Boston, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Paris as members of the crappy waterfront club, and we're supposed to be shamed by it or something (it is the "Hall of Shame" anyway), but, for us, it's not really working. We kind of don't really mind getting lumped in with those other cities. Maybe none of us has the greatest waterfront, but so what? Show us a great waterfront, we'll show you a tourist town that's dead inside. These are world-class cities that Seattle is listed with here. These are all cities with proud port histories (except maybe Paris--at least we've never really thought of it as a port). They have waterfronts that reflect those histories. Sure, the business of shipping containers back and forth across the oceans has more or less been shuttled aside by now in all of these places, but once upon a time these cities floated boatloads of crap back and forth to each other's waterfronts. Receiving that crap and loading it onto trains was the reason the cities existed in the first place. And now they bear the scars of that past. Sometimes it isn't pretty in a "Let's go for a promenade in the park before tea" type of way, but it can be beautiful in a urban what-hath-man-wrought-upon-the-earth type of way. We're partial to voting No and Hell No for other reasons (although we haven't postmarked our ballet), but we want to make it clear that we're not going to be shamed into submission by The Project for Public Spaces and their Worst Waterfronts list.
Image courtesy of reverendkommisar.
