The Sad Waterfront

Many years ago, on a bitterly cold day with snow squalls, I stood on the Seattle waterfront, looking down on the Wawona. In fact, I got on board and walked around in history, slowly bobbing in the snow, in slow keeping with purse seiners unloading fish at adjacent wharves. The waterfront was cold and lonely but not dead yet, with ship chandlers still supplying fish boats and ships, the Olde Curiousity Shoppe a door to a musty past, and sailors from Bremerton in blues looking for tattoos and burlesque on First Avenue where the Shore Patrol still walked in pairs. It didn’t feel cold and lonely, it felt like hot clam chowder from Ivar’s and the romance of the sea.

Today, not so much. The Aquarium survives, but barely. The ship chandlers are gone, as is the Wawona. The Ferry Terminal is more parking lot than terminal, and even the Russian submarine has sought more lively circumstances. A thousand units of single room occupancy on First Avenue have been replaced by makeshift homes of cardboard under the Viaduct.

Who cares? Apparently, nobody. None of our prosperous citizens have any interest in making our central waterfront a civic jewel, and, in a sense, who can blame them? Why stick your neck out like Paul Allen or Bill Gates to become the object of a dozen wacky conspiracy theories?

And that’s where we need the public investment to make the waterfront accessible to the public for the public benefit- or, not to put too fine a point on it, we need a streetcar running the length of the waterfront, so children of all ages can enjoy the park at the north end and the historical outlook at the south end, without dragging a car down there with them to park among the homeless.

The First Avenue Streetcar won’t do this job. The Aquarium, the restaurants, the harbor tours, the goofy shops, the ferry terminal that can give a visitor a short cruise every hour, the parks- they all need public transit. Bring that back and people will make their own magic.