Seattle For The Wary Traveler (April 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 2)

Seattle For The Wary Traveler

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April 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 2


Travelers to Seattle would be well advised to begin their visit where the Dennys started out, on the shore at Alki Point. There is a long, lovely sandy beach, occasional surf when the freighters pass, and across Elliott Bay the skyline looms, as stubborn and implausible as Doc Maynard’s own dotty dream.

A small commemorative obelisk bears the names of the Denny party—the men’s and children’s, anyway; each of the desolate women who drooped ashore in their drenched bonnets is memorialized merely as “wife.” In 1926 the American Automobile Association added a chunk of Plymouth Rock to the monument for good measure at the close of the first transcontinental automobile caravan.

Nearby, in the ravine at Schmitz Park, which contains the city’s last surviving stand of virgin forest, you can also get at least a miniature notion of the natural world Seattle displaced. Only a few of the great trees still stand, leaning precariously against the tops of their lesser descendants. But you can walk almost fifty yards along one toppled trunk that measures some seven feet in diameter above its tangled, upended roots.

Another vestige of wilderness that hints at the topographical challenge Denny’s city posed is Discovery Park, northwest of downtown, with its 534 acres of steep meadows tilting down toward the water. But in fact, just about anywhere you look in Seattle there is the suggestion of the loss entailed by every municipal gain. Within view of the city are landscapes reminiscent of the primeval world the Dennys discovered and doomed.

Directly across the sound are the semirural islands of Vashon and Bainbridge (and Blake, where local tribes entertain visitors with salmon feeds and raven dances). They appear deceptively unspoiled from Seattle’s vantage, and north of Bainbridge at distant Point Jefferson are clay cliffs like those that once obstructed the city’s greedy growth. The bay itself is visited by dolphins, seals, and sea lions; a lone gray whale or a pod of orcas will sometimes dodge the container ships and ferries; and some evenings a bold bald eagle will venture close enough to catch the reflected sunlight off the city’s spires on its snowwhite head and tail.

There is nothing left of the original Seattle that sprawled so haphazardly along the harbor; the fire and the regrades saw to that. But many of the post-fire blocks whose grand first floors were turned subterranean by the raising of the city streets still surround the totem pole at Pioneer Square. The Underground Tour takes you in and out of various cellars and sidewalk tunnels, occasionally startling the vagrants sleeping above, and though little remains of the box houses and casinos that once occupied these furtive interstices there is no better introduction to the city’s oddball grandiosity than an afternoon’s guided stroll through the dank rubble of its inadvertent basements.

A local legend