I disagree with a lot in this article.

We borrow ideas heavily from Vancouver, Portland, and San Francisco, among others.

We compare ourselves frequently to each of these cities as well.

Seattle seems moderate in how much we care what others think. Denver is an example of a city more self-conscious, if its newspapers are any indication -- articles don't stop with the news item, but continue to discuss how the news item enhances the city's profile.

We have more degrees of separation than some other cities. Since people have moved here from elsewhere (not me of course), those childhood friends are often back in Pittsburgh. It's places like Pittsburgh where everyone grew up in the area, because few people move there (though it's surprisingly nice).

Since I assume you're not talking about gazing at the military you may want to fix the subhead.

Seattle spent the late 19th century and early 20th century in the shadow of Tacoma, and the mid-20th century in the shadow of Portland. Seattle now looks down derisively at both cities in the way that only someone with a deep-seated inferiority complex can. Much like British comics who still crack jokes about the Nazis, Seattle culture seems obsessed with those they have beaten in the past.

I personally greatly admire comity, tolerance, and a certain indirectness. And I don't think an individual or city necessarily has to compare and contrast with other individuals or places to find clarity and identity. I actually find Seattle fresh and creative and not smug.

Oh my God so much drama.

Look, you have something called culture shock. Seattle is a foreign place to you; you don't get it yet. If you were living in Quito or Lagos or Kathmandu, you'd accept that you don't get the foreignness. Somehow living in Seattle you think you're not supposed to have culture shock; you're wrong. Unlike most transplants to Seattle, you can't yet read the subtlety or understatement of the imported Scandinavian and Asian cultural and social mores and introspection. Culture shock just takes time and patience. Maybe you're a slow bloomer, and it'll take you longer. Not sure. But you'll be over your culture shock when you can finally navigate Seattle-style social interactions more confidently and when you can look at the cultures of your childhood home and Seattle as equal but very different--and when you can translate between the two.

Seattle has almost always had an inferiority complex. Prior to the Gold rush, we were but a passing thought with open vice.

With the exception of iconoclastic self promotion by chamber types at various stages in our history, the rest of the time we seem to be apologizing that for the lack of something that newbie’s demand upon arrival. “You can’t get a good bagel in this town”. “No one here knows how to make real pizza / soul food / hoagies / pasta / snitzel / tacos”. “People here do not know how to drive in the Rain / Snow / Sun”. “No one here knows how to dress with fashion”.

Ever since we were called a cultural dust bin, we have been working to disprove it. Sometime we have that moment in the sun – Headlines that ask, “How does Nordstrom’s / Costco / Starbucks / Microsoft / Boeing do it?” But then some downturn happens or scandal occurs, something fails, and bam... we are right back to our usual self deprecating self loathing.

Proud moments are many The AYP, the Smith Tower, Electing Bertha Landis, Cleaning up Lake Washington, The first flights of the 707, Century 21, Electing Wing Luke, Getting the Pilots, The Sonics and later The Seahawks, Electing Norm Rice, Sonics winning the playoffs, Opening the Dome Stadium, The Hawks making the playoffs, Opening Safeco Field, Opening Qwest Field, and so on...

But then you get the down side of the roller coaster to bring you back reality... The anti Chinese riots, The Hoover Ville south of the train depots, the rum running and corruption, the quiet segregation and red lining, the labor unrest and mayors who used goons to quell them, the deaths of Wing Luke, and Edwin Pratt, the Pilots moving to Milwaukie, losing Rhodes and Fredrick and Nelsons, and the original Frango.

Will the last person leaving Seattle please leave some sense of self worth? The loss of Seafirst, Jay Jacobs, the Kalakala, Washington Mutual, NCAA scandals, and the ongoing bickering about light rail, monorail, and streetcars. Anytime there is bad news about greater Seattle based companies, we have our collective cringe, and then revert to “well, they were a better company before they expanded beyond…”

In short, we lust for Vancouver B.C. urban style and light rail. We wish we could be as willing to take risks as Portland. A tram for transportation? A mayor opening willing to be photographed flashing (not the current one…) We wish we could lusted after like wt thing San Francisco is. Even the most recent wave of visitors, the 800,000 plus coming to Seattle to board ships and leave the same day. If that would not send you as a city to therapy, then there are the comments as they disembark. “Nice place ya got here, maybe we should come back some time.

OK so Lisa,
1. Where are you from?
2. What drew you to Seattle?
3. If you're so unhappy, why are you still there?

I'm a Seattle native who was never particulary comfortable growing up there so I simply relocated and have been an East Coast girl for 20+ years.

Wherever I live (including Seattle), I enjoy the best of what is there, savor what is unique, use it to grow and when the negatives outweigh the positives, I move on.

No locale on the planet can satisfy everyone, nor should it. I don't know what you're whining about but hey, get over it or change zip codes, honey! It simply ain't that deep. Unless you just enjoy kvetching.

As for assessing Seattle' racism, I'm an expert. So shoot me an inquiry if you'd like to discuss that aspect of The Emerald City.

I'm writing to you from Da City--you know, the one where all natives and residents believe that it's the only civilized place on the planet. I love what I love, minimize or ignore what I don't and am totally enjoying the adventure of it all! Seattle's not my cup of tea and it sounds like it's not yours either. So exercise your options and have a great life.

Warmly (even in the snow)
TaRessa
Check out the hot new civil rights blog, www.thedefendersonline.com

"I'm writing to you from Da City--you know, the one where all natives and residents believe that it's the only civilized place on the planet."

I thought you said you moved out of Seattle.

Seattle seems moderate in how much we care what others think

Excuse me? No other city on this entire planet obsesses with its rankings on meaningless lists, and whether or not it is perceived as a world-class city (whatever the hell that means) than Seattle. You must not know what the local media print and broadcast...

It's A) not true at all that you won't hear hideous slurs of all kinds on a daily basis and B) Seattle still has major problems with institutionalized racism. The recent school closures and the problems with police brutality are just two glaring examples. There are infinitely more subtle and pervasive forms spread throughout this fine town. I love Seattle but boy oh boy is there a major deficit, especially among white people, when it comes to badass self-awareness and social justice analysis.

"Excuse me? No other city on this entire planet obsesses with its rankings on meaningless lists, and whether or not it is perceived as a world-class city (whatever the hell that means) than Seattle. You must not know what the local media print and broadcast..."

I read Sure I do.

But I also

Sorry, I must have hit the wrong button...1

"Excuse me? No other city on this entire planet obsesses with its rankings on meaningless lists, and whether or not it is perceived as a world-class city (whatever the hell that means) than Seattle. You must not know what the local media print and broadcast..."

Sure I do. The PI, Times, and DJC every day, and the PSBJ every week.

But I also read many out of town papers. Do you?

Places like Denver, Portland, Boise, Vancouver, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and others have their self-conscious streaks as well. Denver stands out as particularly obsessive.

Lisa, tell me more about me, and how I am viewed, and possibly how you do not see any subtext and just think people are not being direct with you.
This makes for good reading for others from other places that my be an accidental tourist.

(sic)That may be

Well, I enjoy kvetching. Why? Because it's a way of making observations. A world without complaining would be a quiet and stilted place. Give me a group of passionate kvetchers any day; I like people who would never be caught dead singing "Up With People."

Lisa, some of your observations fit my experience here. And I love Seattle very much. But when I moved here in 1984--from a whole lot of places, I'd lived in the Midwest, the Southwest, the Southeast, and Western Canada, mostly in big cities--I was struck by how warm people seemed on a surface level, and how hard it was to feel like I really got to know them, or to connect in more than a superficial way.

I feel like the good outweighs the bad by far, but Seattle's warts are part of its character--and a certain contact-averse covert judgmental quality is one of the warts I find here. Sometimes even in myself. Maybe it's contagious.

FWIW, it's kinda funny watching the most recent iteration of the Seattle Establishment trip all over itself as it crosses the Pierce County line.

The sad fact is that public, private, Seattle, Eastside, the public capital projects folks have way too many bumbling fools in their ranks supported only by the corruption of the Seattle Superior Court's extortionary interpretation of the US Constitution.

-Douglas Tooley
http://motleytools.com/blog

smacgry: Unlike most transplants to Seattle, you can't yet read the subtlety or understatement of the imported Scandinavian and Asian cultural and social mores and introspection...But you'll be over your culture shock when you can finally navigate Seattle-style social interactions more confidently and when you can look at the cultures of your childhood home and Seattle as equal but very different--and when you can translate between the two.

You seem to be implying that the Seattle Freeze is strictly a phenomenon that out-of-towners run into when they move here, but that is not the case. I was born here and get as frustrated with locals' attitudes as anyone else. As I wrote the Times back in 2005 (my letter is at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2005/0313/letters.html, which also links to their Pacific Northwest magazine piece on the phenomenon), "Thank you for your article on the cliquishness that prevails in Seattle. It's high time this phenomenon got exposed, admitted and discussed. But one thing you fail to mention is it's not just a matter of Seattleites versus outsiders. I was born and raised here and feel the same way as the people you interview, who hail from New Jersey, California, even Argentina. It's really a matter of those who belong to cliques versus those who don't — regardless of where they come from. In that sense, it's even more like high school than you suggest."

Maybe it's all about insecurity, when you get down to it. That is the root of cliquish behavior, after all.

The first thing to remember is that Seattle is an American city and that it will have the pluses and minuses of all of them, the first feature perhaps being self-absorption; the second being that if you live long enough in Manhattan you will realize that, as London, it too, is just one big village with lots of cliques which however interact a lot more with each other and smooth out each others rough edges. Culturally, Seattle is both less and a lot more provincial than larger metropolitan areas. Yet with nature intruding into so much of the city, it has that recompense to recommend it. Culturally, it is an importer, little of note except popular music leaves it, and the ways of Seattle, its ethos, militate against cultural productivity. Its scientific and technological firms and institutions are not indigenous, they could be placed anywhere.

I was born and raised in Seattle, left for a number of years, came back and chose to live in Tacoma. (I can hear you all gasp.)

I was disappointed by Seattle's overwhelming meh. By the fact that the viaduct, which was falling down when I was in high school in 1990, is still falling down today. By the inability of local leadership to actually lead, by the lack of vision, lack of personality, lack of much in the way of a defining principle. It's become a bunch of drab big box types pretending to be an edgy metropolis and it ain't fooling anybody.

That said, Portland, where I lived for five years before moving back here, has vaunted vision but similarly insular provincialism, and in spades.

Neither city seems able to take the good the newcomers offer while leaving the bad, because of that awful west coast attitude where everybody is wonderful and you all deserve a hug and a standing ovation even if your work sucks. Until we get over that collective delusion, we cannot create a city that is better than the sum of its parts.

It's wonderful to get so many comments. Thanks, all, for taking the time.

mhays:
The fact that "Seattle seems moderate in how much we care what others think" would seem to trump whatever gaze we cast toward Vancouver, San Fran, and Portland. Orino's gave you a better comeback than can I. You make a good point about transplants creating more degrees of separation, but I think because Seattle regards itself as a big city, it feels very surprising to brush up against small-town attributes such as so many people here knowing each other. In that way, compared to New York or Chicago, Seattle's six degrees of separation really do feel like four.

bigyaz:
Thanks for catching the error in the subhead (now corrected). The unintended typo of an underpaid and harried editor, no doubt, as I wrote neither the headline nor the subhead. It happens, and happened to me, too, when I was editing for Crosscut.

dbreneman:
"Seattle now looks down derisively at both cities in the way that only someone with a deep-seated inferiority complex can." Excellent point!

ammons:
I don't think Seattle is smug either (or do I? Must ponder.). While my intention was to question the unsavory consequences of the lid of tolerance, we're in agreement on tolerance's virtues, per this post: http://www.lisa-albers.com/lisa_albers_writer/2009/01/on-moving-to-seattle-part-2.html

smacgry:
I'm not sure what you mean by "drama," but I've lived in Seattle for three-and-a-half years. Tacoma for three years before that. My intention was to weigh in with the knowledge of someone who's observed the city for a few years, but with the view of an outsider. Still, I look forward to this period of perfect translation you promise will come to me eventually, maybe in five or ten more years.

hacknflack:
Interesting summation!

TaRessa:
I'm not unhappy with Seattle; it's the place for me, as I've mentioned in previous writings, on Crosscut (http://crosscut.com/account/lisa_albers/) and elsewhere. You don't have to be unhappy with a place to feel moved to critique it (especially if you do enjoy kvetching, which I suppose I do). I'm sorry Seattle lost you, but hurray for you and happiness on the East Coast. And thanks for the offer of your expertise.

citymaking:
Great point about Seattle's institutionalized racism. I didn't mean to paint the town rainbow perfect. But I do think it's less overt here than any other place I've lived: http://www.lisa-albers.com/lisa_albers_writer/2009/01/on-moving-to-seattle-part-2.html

Mr Baker:
I have, and am: http://www.lisa-albers.com/lisa_albers_writer/seattle/

Yarrow:
I couldn't agree with you more. Thank you.

Benjamin Lukoff:
You rock.

mikerol:
As always, great food for thought there.

GL219:
Tacoma is lucky to get you.

Lest bigyaz beat me to it, that line above should read "Orino gave you a better...." not "Orino's gave you a better...."

all together now: seattle sucks! a content spokanite.

I completely disagree with the premise. Seattle compared itself unfavorably with San Francisco throughout most of the 20th century. "We're too isolated, too small, not sophisticated enough" compared to the informal capital of the West Coast where everything was happening, was a common refrain growing up in the 1970s and 80s.

Then in the 1990s we got discovered and things started growing and gentrifying, and we realized that wasn't what we really wanted after all. That San Francisco's coolness comes with San Francisco's housing prices and traffic and pollution.

The Cascadia movement brought a recognition of Portland-Seattle-Vancouver as being a single northwest unit, which has brought comparisons closer to home. California is a basket case now; we know we don't want to be like them. But Vancouver and Portland have surpassed Seattle in several important livability areas: rail transit, parks, dense housing, etc. This has surprised people since those cities are both smaller and less rich than Pugetopolis, but it has also inspired Seattlites to try to catch up.

Another factor is the concept of Ecotopia. The Pacific Northwest and northwestern California are the only part of the country with mild temperatures and lots of water. That's why the environmental movement started here because nature seems to be our friend, whereas in the freezing Midwest and hot Southwest it seems more like an enemy). This has caused a common attitude in the Northwest of celebrating the natural world, which is shared to a lesser extent with northern California.

Seattle may seem a little restrained at times, but as someone who moved from a more typical East Coast city over 30 years ago, I actually appreciate the civility very much. At this point, though, you are right, there are plenty of transplants. I am actually finding that Seattle's vaunted civility and tolerance appears to be wearing a bit. I could use a little more liveliness perhaps, but I do not think that getting rid of civility is really the answer.

Overall, I have never had the impression that an overt racist would make a go of it here and yet, since 1977, I have, in fact, dealt with at least a few racists and one who was really overt. This person made frequent racist comments. He definitely made a go of it, where I worked, and, in the end, he made it both impossible and upsetting to work there.

I should add that aside from these experiences, which were very unpleasant, that overall Seattle has not treated me too shabily; still, I am not as convinced that Seattle is the liberal and completely civil bubble that is often portrayed.

Though I was the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun (among the best alternative newspapers ever published, second only to the original Village Voice in quality) -- I was openly despised by Seattle’s natives, more hated in the Emerald City c. 1972-1976 than even during my Civil Rights Movement years in the South.

In the South the Ku Klux Klan made three attempts on my life, but I also had indigenous friends whose companionship eased my tensions and whose professional supportiveness enabled me to earn an entirely satisfactory living in journalism.

By contrast Native Seattleites were not just unanimously hostile but violently so: my tires were slashed; the left-front-wheel lug nuts were murderously loosened on three successive automobiles; I was physically assaulted by a local “artist” enraged by my “Jew York attitude” (this at the party following the opening of a 1975 group show that included a dozen of my photographs); and -- the dénouement of my Seattle experience -- I caught a Seattle-spawned “colleague” stealing the notes I had made for an important newspaper story.

The Chicago-born editor who recruited me for The Sun months before its first issue knew Seattle‘s xenophobia firsthand, but even he was astonished by the magnitude of back-stabbing and general venomousness my presence at the paper evoked from its native-Seattle contingent.

And my work for The Sun -- undoubtedly among the best photographs I ever made -- opened no doors at all.

Which illustrates the pivotal difference not just between Seattle and New York but between Seattle and every other city I’ve known, including Knoxville (Tennessee), Grand Rapids (Michigan), Baltimore and -- yes -- Tacoma.

Assuming a reasonable degree of talent, everything you do professionally in these other places matters to your career -- the pictures you shoot for the neighborhood weekly get you hired as the photographer on a major community action project; the stories you write about a local school-funding crisis become the basis of a Supreme Court case; a chance encounter in an elevator turns into a prestigious editorship.

But in Seattle -- unless you are among the native-born -- absolutely nothing you do matters: you could be Walker Evans and James Agee combined and if you were not a Seattle native you’d be damned and jeered.

How was I entrapped in this “adult” version of the High School from Hell?

I was stranded here by disaster: the spectacular mental breakdown of a seemingly sane and responsible civil engineer to whom I had leased my much beloved Chelsea apartment. I had spent the summer and early autumn shooting a story on Washington’s rural communes -- the Back-to-the-Land Movement. My sublease tenant was to resolve an impasse with his lover and either move in with her again or find a more permanent dwelling when I returned to Manhattan in late fall.

But only a week after I left the City he went nuts. He tried to ride my three-speed Raleigh bicycle a thousand miles home to mama and landed in a funny farm instead. My parquet-floored high-ceilinged apartment and all its contents, now seemingly abandoned, reverted to the landlord.

Save for the cameras and clothing I brought with me, I lost everything -- a well-equipped darkroom, a world-class stereo with 18-inch Jensen speakers, four feet of record albums, an entire wall of books, a bourgeoning art collection, a home eclectically furnished with the valuable antique furniture we bohemians routinely scavenged from the streets of Manhattan’s Ruling Class neighborhoods, most of all the space itself -- all gone.

Because I didn’t discover this loss until I had spent my cash reserves down to little more than airfare back to JFK, I did not have the kind of money it would take to re-establish myself. As a dear friend puts it -- explaining why she has lived at the same Manhattan address for more than half a century -- “men come and go, but apartments are forever.”

Having encountered the outspoken “we don’t like your kind here” bigotry of Bellingham’s potential employers, I tried to make the best of a frighteningly bad situation by moving to Seattle, trusting it would offer at least the advantages of Grand Rapids or Knoxville, probably -- given Seattle’s comparable size and seaport function -- those of Baltimore.

Instead from my first hours in Seattle I ran afoul of its anti-intellectuality, finding myself condemned for the very attributes others elsewhere had found valuable.

The late W. Eugene Smith encountered the same malevolence. Visiting here on a 1976 lecture tour, he attempted to discuss the socioeconomics of photography -- the fact that by the mid-’70s, the sharply escalating cost of equipment and supplies was reducing photography to a bourgeois medium ever more predictably devoid of meaning.

But Smith was shouted down, rudely denounced for “intellectualizing” and “mixing politics and art.” He said afterward he was stunned and hurt -- that he had never before been so rebuked.

Obviously, given the nasty response to Ann Bauer’s excellent writing, nothing has changed.

Not that I would ever contemplate returning to Seattle. Socially I found it as desolate as it was professionally crippling. Indeed in the social sense Seattle is the most lonely barren I have ever endured, its women ruled by a reflexive aversion not just to the intellectually open-souled discussion that is the mainstay amongst artists and writers but a rejection of sensuality and sensual sexuality that bespeaks a reproachful puritanism unequaled even in the bible-thump South.

Predictably I returned to Manhattan. Eventually -- my professional prospects forever terminated by the fire that destroyed nearly all my work -- I came back to Washington state not for its sociology but for its environment, especially its opportunities for trout fishing, grouse hunting and organic gardening.

Now denied such activities by physical disability, I live again in Tacoma, where I resided c. 1978-1982. Then as now Tacoma is a real city, a seaport infinitely more urbane and cosmopolitan than xenophobic Seattle will ever be.

Mhays, you make me laugh: We borrow ideas heavily from Vancouver, Portland, and San Francisco, among others.

Those aren't different from Seattle, they are our kissing cousins.