Results tagged “publicspaces”

Then head on down to Westlake Park, where Toyota has set up "Solar Flowers" to promote their new Prius. The flowers, which are powered by solar panels on the back of their petals and on their stems, provide wi-fi (free) and power to charge cell phones and laptops. They look as if Dr. Seuss had been given an engineering budget. They'll be available August 29 to September 7 from 8 a.m.-10 p.m. daily (this coincides nicely with the Seattle Public Library's weeklong closure). If you're a Luddite or prefer to pay for your power, you can still enjoy the sight of six-foot tall dandelions looming in Westlake Park.

Yesterday Seattlest broke out of the office at noon, grabbed a Tats'trami and headed to Occidental Square. There's nothing like passing a short hour with a book and a gut bomb in a square... Actually, had a book along, but it was only cover for our real mission which was to watch all the little people go about their little lives and they happily obliged by showing up and staring back at us. What? Just eating a sandwich and reading over here. Nosy freak.

MOVIES: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are attracted to a film program called Monument Recall: Public Memory and Public Spaces, and those who are repelled. If you're the former? Tonight's your night.

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.

We aggressively agree when they come after the EMP, sometimes to the point of inspiring an uncomfortable silence in the wake of our diatribe. Rarely do we have to defend the Needle, which is not to say that we actually want to go there. Can't we locals and tourists alike admire it from afar? And generally we beam in the steady glow of praise piled onto the Central Library, as if we drew it up ourselves one night over drinks with Rem.