City Hikes

Rethinking infrastructure, transportation, and urban spaces one walk at a time

Sauntering In Seattle

Last weekend, I spent another weekend in Seattle. We made the trip up with plans to see a concert (which annoyingly got postponed day-of), but of course I got a lot of steps in while I was there as well. The walks were as lovely as ever, but it wasn’t all good news.

The Good

For starters, Seattle is beautiful. Especially on a clear day, the views and vibes are hard to beat. Tahoma sits on one horizon, with the Olympics on the other. The skyline is beautiful. The architecture is varied, eclectic, and mostly pretty interesting. The foliage is as just as picturesque as any other part of the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle skyline from Gasworks

There are some great neighborhoods too. I find Fremont to be one of my favorites, and my long Sunday walk took me there from Mark and Shelby’s place in Central District. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and my route through Fremont (and Wallingford) showed me some of the best parts of the city. I stopped at a lovely record store on 45th (I bought Let’s Get It On), I poked around the Fremont Vintage Mall with Olivia, and I even found a public bathroom in a pinch (San Francisco could never).

Earlier on the trip, Shelby and I walked Bodhi around the ship canal and through Fremont too. The Fremont Bridge is easily my favorite Fremont Bridge in the Pacific Northwest (sorry Portland, I can’t get behind our massive freeway bridge). We stumbled on the statue of Lenin, which was equal parts unexpected and strange. I still can’t believe some guy thought it would be a good centerpiece to a Slovakian restaurant.

Scenes from Fremont

And if you need to go a medium distance, let me talk to you about King County Metro. The bus service is to die for. It seems to me that the base frequency is about 15 minutes for the lowest-service buses in town. In other words, the worst buses in Seattle are about as frequent as the best buses in Portland. And man people ride the hell out of them too. I’ve never been on a bus even close to empty in Seattle. It’s almost like people use bus service when it’s convenient for them. They also have trolleybuses! Which you all should know I am a huge fan of.

Shoutout to King County Metro

Good bus service complements city exploring very well though. It’s easy to walk further when you can be confident that a bus will show up to whisk you back home if you’ve had enough. Or if you underestimated how hilly Seattle is and need a lift up to the top. Sure, you could U*er home. But knowing the bus network of a city lets you understand its internal logic in a way riding in a cab just can’t. Plus it’s cheaper, and I love a good deal.

The Bad

It is not fun to get between neighborhoods in Seattle. There are huge physical barriers – man-made or otherwise. On my long Sunday walk, I had to scurry down a very steep hill, navigate a very hostile street, cross under a sickeningly large freeway, cross a freeway on-ramp, and then scurry down another very steep hill just to get between the central areas of Capitol Hill and Eastlake – which are ostensibly next to each other. Not for the faint of heart, but interesting in its own right. I-5 is a huge barrier for foot travel just like in Portland, but it’s got to be twice as wide as it is in Portland. Not ideal.

Looks cool, but a bit of a hostile place to be

But even without questionable urban freeways, there is something that always feels a bit hostile about walking between neighborhoods in Seattle. They are far away from each other, at least to me. I can chalk some of this up to unfamiliarity, distances always feel a bit longer when you haven’t walked them before. But I do think the sprawly nature of Seattle plays a role as well. Fremont was an 8 mile walk away. Similar one-way walk distances in Portland would be like walking from Brooklyn (where I live) to Kenton. When I did that walk, I passed through at least a dozen distinct neighborhoods. On my Central District to Fremont walk I went through maybe four.

This “larger neighborhoods but fewer” model that Seattle seems to have isn’t worse than Portland’s “so many that it can be hard to tell them apart” model. I mean not many people really can tell the difference between Buckman and Kerns (I off course can, but this is a pro-Buckman blog). But it does make for a different sort of walking between many neighborhoods experience. And I’ve grown accustomed to the Portland model – so Seattle is a bit of a shock in that regards.

The view down Yesler is nice, but it’s a steep walk

The topography also can make for some challenges for the unaware. You have to choose your roads carefully or you may wind up feeling a bit of vertigo from the sheer climbs. Or you may foolishly scurry down a washed out trail to connect with the one road going under I-5 (because you didn’t see the staircases marked on any maps).

It’s Still Fun Though

Despite the challenges walking in Seattle can pose, it’s a good way to get around. All the usual pedestrian perks abound. Stopping for pizza, records, books, or a farmers market is an obvious choice on foot. There is no real need to research places to go ahead of time, you can think on your feet and with your nose.

In Seattle, you are always rewarded with a view. The walking can be difficult, annoying, or even a bit scary – but it is always worth it. Every vista is sweeter after getting there on your own two feet. And every slice of pizza tastes better with a few miles in the legs. Those are simple facts of life, and Seattle makes it easy to enjoy them.

Bookstore selfies are better after a long walk

Seattle is a city we visit a lot, and may one day move to. I feel like I know it a little better every time I get the chance to wander around it. It’s been a very rewarding experience getting to know it better, and I’m thankful to have a couple of dear friends who moved there (even if I miss them down in Portland). My friends keep pulling me back, but so do the neighborhoods, sights, smells, and the unknown places just waiting to be explored. Til next time!

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3 responses to “Sauntering In Seattle”

  1. adventurepdx Avatar
    adventurepdx

    I’ve grown to appreciate Seattle in the 20+ years I’ve been visiting. I first visited The Emerald City in 2001, right after moving to Portland. I got weird vibes from people when I told them where I was from. Many people would either get defensive (“Well, I still like Seattle!”) and/or put down PDX (“It’s so dirty and boring.”) I think it was due to Seattle being the “it” city in the 90’s, then losing the crown, then realizing that Portland was probably going to get the crown next. That attitude has mostly dissipated, thankfully. But it definitely put a damper on my enjoyment for a bit.

    And I hear you on the space between things in Seattle. It’s weird, as Seattle’s footprint is about two-thirds the size of Portland (84 square miles vs. 133, and this is land-only area). But it’s basically a long isthmus and all that water, hills, highways, and major streets definitely divide things up and create distance. Biking has gotten easier (thank you, bike infrastructure and the Capitol Hill Bike Elevator, aka light rail) but getting over hills and across bodies of water or busy arteries still makes bicycling to some places a chore.

    The difficulty in getting around and natural barriers most likely aided the creation of bigger, more distinct neighborhoods. It was natural for people to want to travel a short distance for things rather than even a couple miles away. That is one thing I think Seattle does better than Portland. Portland’s relatively flat east side has few natural barriers (Alameda Ridge, Sullivans Gulch, Mt. Tabor, the riverside terrace from south of Brooklyn to Sellwood) so neighborhoods aren’t especially distinct unless they were planned to be (Laurelhurst, Ladd’s) or they were once separate towns from Portland (St. Johns, Sellwood).

    I’ve lived in North Tabor for the last four years and one thing that I don’t like is its lack of identity. There’s really no “business district” like along Stark in Montavilla or Fremont in Beaumont Village, just stuff scattered along Burnside and Glisan, with a few streetcar nodes like 60th and Glisan. And the last few years has seen that node slide even further into irrelevancy with the loss of the tacqueria (once good), pizzeria (not that good), breakfast joint (never good, but oh-so-cheap), and Irish pub (once the best in the city.) Now I’m left with my barber, the coffee shop that I hardly go to, and the sports bar that I doubt I’d ever set foot in. Hopefully a corner will be turned–soon.

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    1. cityhikes Avatar
      cityhikes

      I agree that natural barriers played a larger role in neighborhood creation in Seattle than Portland, though I am less familiar with the particulars of Seattle’s civic history so I’m not entirely sure. I do think that Portland’s lack of local districts for city council has directly led to a sort of patchwork NA quilt – since they were the only option for some sort of local representation. The small size and arbitrariness of the boundaries I think arose from this, along with the city insisting on (mostly) clean and distinct boundaries.

      I’d hazard a guess that North Tabor coalesced more around being “not Laurelhurst or Mount Tabor” more than anything else. Kerns also gives me that vibe – just a real hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated parts of the central east side.

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      1. adventurepdx Avatar
        adventurepdx

        Yeah, I also think North Tabor’s identity is built more around what it’s not, than what it is. This is the case with many neighborhoods that weren’t created as distinct enclaves or had a prominent feature. Laurelhurst was built as Laurelhurst, Mount Tabor has the volcano and the views, which brings exclusivity. Montavilla developed around the node at 80th and SE Stark, the end of the Glisan streetcar, at the time the “furthest out” you can live in Portland while still having easy, direct access to downtown.

        What’s more interesting about North Tabor is its old name, Center. From the NA’s website:

        ” In the early 1970′s local residents formed CENTER Neighborhood Association, an acronym for Citizens Engaged Now Toward Ecological Review…In November of 2008, the neighborhood association voted to change the name of the neighborhood to North Tabor.”

        I remember looking at neighborhood maps in the early aughts, seeing CENTER (sometimes shown as C.E.N.T.E.R.) and wondering what the name meant. I mean, it is pretty much centrally located within Portland, so that makes sense, though in the 70’s when Portland’s eastern boundary was between 82nd and about 100th, it was more east than center. So I got a kick from finding out about the acronym. It seemed very early 70’s, in the environment where we were fighting against the Mount Hood Freeway and even the middle class got a wee bit radical. Of course, a few decades will elapse, no one will remember the acronym, and the association will change the name to North Tabor since it “sounds nicer” because of the association with the volcano. But now there’s FOUR neighborhoods with “Tabor” in its name somewhere. At least C.E.N.T.E.R. was unique…

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