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Ultimately, the Weekly wrote extensively against the plan—an editorial position that Seattle Commons promoters, who tended toward righteousness, viewed as outright betrayal. Project director Joel Horn Who would go on to further blacken his reputation by leading the effort to build a citywide monorail system. repeatedly called Brewster, me, and anyone else who questioned the Commons project and excoriated us for our shortsightedness. He always sounded baffled and hurt, it being a given in his mind that the Weekly , with its moneyed, baby-boom readership and love of “progressive” initiatives, would line up along with the rest of nouveau-genteel Seattle behind a project with such a clear vision and glamorous demographic. The Weekly all but owned the new-restaurant and high-culture franchises, after all, and nothing seemed to fit more into that Seattle dimension than the moderne, civilized Commons, with its Harvard Yard-esque name, its carefully planned gentility, and its embrace of the city’s tech-industry future.

But Seattle had always grudgingly allowed rather than enthusiastically embraced progress, permitting industrialists and other overly ambitious people to locate on the fringes here and use the region’s charms as a recruiting tool. When an industrialist’s visions of grandeur spilled over into the city itself, Seattle tended to react in horror, wanting the jobs and money that ambition brought without having to take on any of the airs that came with it. It was one thing to have professional aspirations—it was another to take on the look and feel of people who had them, and far worse to take on the look and feel of people who had achieved them.

When the Commons came up for vote in 1995, with the full support of City Hall, the downtown establishment, the Seattle Times , and Paul Schell—who always was connected in one way or another with grand Seattle development visions—it was narrowly voted down. Commons boosters reacted in stunned disbelief, turning around and putting it on the ballot again, this time spending more than $500,000 promoting it. The campaign backfired—news stories about the budget disparities between promoters and opponents, who were able to raise only $91,000 in opposition, highlighted the elitist nature of the Commons campaign, and many voters were outraged that their No votes were condescendingly ignored. In May 1996, the Commons went down to defeat again, and this time Allen accepted the results, taking control of the 11.5 acres of prime real estate he had secured with his $20 million, and settling down to wait for more ambition-friendly times.

A different battle between the same forces was taking place on the other side of downtown, where the Seattle Mariners ownership was once again threatening to sell the team to owners who would move it elsewhere unless the city built them a new stadium. By 1994, the vaunted 1992 salvation of the Mariners franchise by local high-tech millionaires and billionaires had turned into the same shakedown Seattle politicians and taxpayers had been enduring since 1977. The Mariners had persistently failed to field competitive major-league teams and just as persistently blamed city and county politicians for not investing enough taxpayer money in the franchise to enable it to compete for talent. The argument from Mariner owners had always been that they could not afford to field a competitive team at a financial loss, and that only heavily taxpayer-subsidized teams had a chance to compete for the World Series championship; the rejoinder from skeptical Seattleites held that baseball owners always recouped their “losses” and more when they resold their franchises. No major-league owner anywhere—including Seattle—had ever sold a franchise at a loss. Why, sensible Seattleites reasoned, should taxpayers subsidize a business owned by obscenely wealthy men when the subsidy only helps make them even more obscenely wealthy?