0.6 From out of the shadows

The 1980s saw Seattle seem to wake from a long slumber, look at itself in the mirror, turn away in disgust, and resolve to clean up and lose some weight. The city went on a self-improvement binge driven more by vanity than desire for better civic health. While Seattle fell prey to occasional irresolution and argument over whether it really was all that necessary to do that much cleaning up, it was clearly determined to make itself more attractive. Slob appeal was giving way to snob appeal.

The city was in the middle of another boom, this one a function of Microsoft’s growing economic impact and the dollar’s weakness against foreign currencies—particularly the yen. Washington had always been a big exporter to Asia—of agricultural products, fish, airplanes, other state-produced goods, and now software—and the dollar’s decline, while not particularly good news for most of the country, was great news for Washington. Moreover, Seattle’s was the closest American port to Asia—a day’s sailing closer than Los Angeles’—and goods flowing between Asia and elsewhere in the U.S. came through Seattle in ever-larger volumes. By 1980, Boeing employment had inched back up to 75,000; 1982 saw airport traffic up ten percent, with the city bringing in $900 million in tourist dollars; and in 1983, the Port of Seattle handled 800,000 shipping containers, 13 percent more than the previous year. The ripple effects of all this were noticeable: Downtown saw construction of 15 million new square feet of office space between the 1971 Boeing crash and 1985, and experts expected to see that much new space built again between 1985 and 2000. In 1984, the 76-story Columbia Tower was completed—26 stories taller than the next tallest Seattle building, the Seafirst Bank tower, it was a grotesquely spectacular structure that could be seen from points on the far side of Lake Washington—and office towers ranging from 27 to 42 stories tall were sprouting up all over town. The Seattle Times counted nine new skyscrapers under construction, along with plans for a new state convention center, a $100 million renovation of historic Pioneer Square, plans for a new Seattle Art Museum…all of it adding up to one million new square feet of office space created downtown in that year alone.

As late as 1980, the Seattle skyline had been that of a midsize western city—a commercial cluster set low against the horizon, unremarkable from a distance—with only two exceptions: the Space Needle, north of downtown, and the Seafirst building, which stood out so dramatically from the rest of downtown that it was dubbed “the box the Space Needle came in.”

No more. Now, a forest of phalluses was springing up—and people all over the city were excitedly giving in to the sense that Seattle was becoming a legitimate Great American City.

Even so, not everyone was happy about the boom, and it seemed as if Seattle might be resolved to fight off the self-improvement binge of its indefatigable boosters. In 1983, the city wrote a new downtown plan—described in a Weekly editorial as a product of “the usual Seattle process of seeking consensus through exhaustion”—that divided downtown into three zones: A retail core, an office core between the retail zone and Pioneer Square, and a mixed residential and retail zone north of the retail core. Faced with the opportunity to make over a faded downtown with gleaming new skyscrapers, the Seattle City Council passed an ordinance confining them to the office core, and limiting the height of new buildings to 240 feet in the retail core and 400 feet in north downtown. The moves seemed a clear victory for Lesser Seattle tradition, a declaration that the city would not give in completely to the quest for money and status. “For every Columbia Tower that goes up,” Emmett Watson would perorate a few years later, “there is a price to be paid on the street.” A good number of his fellow citizens were determined to pay as little of that price as possible.