Paris carved Hausmann's boulevards through their city.

London tamed the Thames, and rebuilt the city after various disasters (fires, war).

New York built landfills on a scale much larger than ours, some on Manhattan and a lot more across the Hudson.

Boston build massive landfills too. Their central peninsula used to be dramatically smaller.

Venice has a bit of landfill too. I believe it was a little bit of offshore tidal flats or marsh orgiginally (hmm, now I'm curious!).

Hong Kong has a gigantic amount of landfill, upon which they build countless skyscrapers as well as parks, roads, the new airport, etc. They're still building it.

I think it was worth it in each of these cases! Great cities resulted (greater than ours so far), and environmentally it's better to concentrate people and activity in bigger cities rather than disperse us.

For people who commuted to downtown Seattle like I once did, by ferry, the Waterfront Streetcar was the most useful piece of mass transit I've ever experienced. That is, is was useful mostly by accident. The streetcar was carefully timed to be pulling away from its station right as ferry passengers from Bremerton were hitting the sidewalk in front of Colman Dock. But on those days when I had to work odd hours it was actually useful.

It's interesting that Knute mentions the Rainier commercials, some of the most inventive and entertaining advertising ever, in the context of "fake Seattle." An immense, beautiful oil painting of Mount Rainier used to hang in the brewery's Mountain Room, where visitors could sample Rainier's wares after the brewery tour. One time a friend and I were admiring the painting, and the tour guide remarked that "nobody knows where it was painted - we've never found a view of the mountain from that angle, with water in front of it." I told her I knew exactly what vantage point it was painted from; I'd been there countless times myself. "Where?! Where?!" she asked with enthusiasm, apparently hopeful that she'd win a bonus or something for telling her employer the location of the mystery view of the mountain. "It's painted from the middle of Commencement Bay in Tacoma" I told her. My friend concurred. Visibly disappointed that this piece of "Iconic Seattle" was actually a product of Tacoma, she slumped her shoulders and shuffled away dejected. Seattle's infamous inferiority complex towards Tacoma came into play again once again.

I wonder what ever happened to that painting of Mt. Tahoma?

Many of the current visions for the Seattle Waterfront revitalization project envision natural elements that never existed. If you see the Paul Dorpat slide show on the Seattle Waterfront back when you see a rough and tumble, ravine filled rugged coastline. To return the waterfront to its natural state is to re-create a publicly unusable shoreline. And it must be noted that the entire waterfront area is fill and refuse from the 1800's. This whole area including SODO became a giant railroad switching yard. SODO is recovered tide flats. To me it is illogical to pursue a deep bore tunnel in these areas. Or to invent and then build a fantasy shoreline that never existed. Thats why public elevated views from the Market and the Viaduct are so important to seeing and understanding the geography and topography of our city. From there one can see the natural beauty and truth that is the Pacific Northwest.

Knute,

What's your point? Is there some bubble you're trying to pop? Some truth you're trying to share with us?

I agree with jhuber, Knute--I don't see what your main point is in this rambling piece.

The subhead says: "Seattle embraces a fake history and fake future to create the city and heritage we love, even if it never happened."

Please give us an example of any place in America that has embraced a true history and that has a solid grasp on the future. I think it's in our American blood to create stories about the past and feed them to anyone willing to bite. That's especially true in Hollywood and politics.

the Deep Bore Tunnel diggings should be dumped into Elliott Bay to further extend downtown and our ongoing "earthworks" project called Seattle...

On the topic of myths...

People LOVE myths about their cities. They love to think that they have the biggest, or first, or whatever. The "skid road" thing is a great example, where several other cities think they started the term, which is obviously Seattle's by divine birthright.

Park acreage is another. In my days with the Seattle Commons organization, I did a lot of pre-interweb research into other cities' park systems so we could have good comparative statistics. Several cities claimed to be at or near the top of "biggest park" or "biggest park system". I ruined the day of someone from Tacoma Parks when I let her know that Point Defiance Park isn't even on the list of largest city parks in the US, let alone #3 as she thought.

Another example is theater districts. Houston and Denver are examples of cities that make grand claims about having the most theater seats in given areas. In truth their claims are about clustering rather than their overall cities being standouts in any way.

Houston trumpets the same thing with the Texas Medical Center. Apparently it's the largest medical campus, but that's due to clustering primarily, even if (so they say) Houston also happens to be one of the top medical cities in various comprehensive measures. Also, counts of the TMC's square footage are often put against the "size of downtown __", when hospitals count gross square feet, and the comparisons are vs. the net (not gross) square footage of the office space (not hotel, retail, housing, gov, arts) space in the downtowns.

While I'm complaining...

For all the talents of reporters and columnists, they tend to be generalists, and make the sorts of errors generalists make. This is the basis for a lot of false ideas about any city's bests/mosts, as generalists are prone to incorrectly rewording or taking statements out of context.

Semi-related but this sticks in my mind: Emmett Watson made a classic error once. He claimed that New York was 80x as dense as Seattle. This was based on comparing King County with New York County. He didn't get that while King County is primarily wilderness or semi-rural, New York County is Manhattan. A more similar comparison would have been to compare the "city of" for each, which would have been 4x.

Tourist bureaus and chambers of commerce are the source of a lot of errors. It seems that every time I page through their websites, they're full of non-parallel, out of context, or flat wrong information. Readers tend to misunderstand where the information comes from -- it's not the collected wisdom of a respected organization, but often just the result of an intern (perhaps a marketing major, not a stat nerd) trying to "find some good quotables" with minimal staff oversight.

The image of the Seattle area in 1850 as old growth evergreen forest reminds me that 100 ft tall trees are simply incompatible with a city. Even if the trees did not have economic value they would have had to be removed to make a livable city. People do build houses in the forest (not a particularly good idea) but it's inconceivable that a functioning city could have been built. Knute seems to be regretting the artificiality of our city but was there really any alternative? Seattle is not like other river or harbor based cities that only had to deal with deciduous trees of relatively modest size.

I have to agree with several of the other posters...I have no idea what point Mr. Berger is trying to make here. You could make the same argument he is making about Seattle about every other city in America or maybe even the world...it's always about people "taming" the wilderness and remaking the landscape to suit their needs. When I saw the headline, I assumed the article would be about the silly urban legends of our town's history, long peddled by the likes of the late Bill Speidel. I think such an article would have had more substance, and made more sense.

I think this a great article. Great articles do not always spoon feed their points down one's throat.

I was so upset when they only put up six smokestacks. There used to be seven.

From history link:

During the building's renovation, its seven decaying smokestacks were replaced with six smaller facsimiles, in compliance with federal standards which discourage exact replicas of lost historic features in landmark structures.

yes, Knute, what is this article about?

For example, was there ever a claim by anyone that the Waterfront Trolley was anything but a modern recreation? Pun intended.

We know you like to complain but this time it's just a bit opaque.

"federal standards which discourage exact replicas of lost historic features in landmark structures"

That's interesting. This "fake" business reminds me of the ruins I saw when visiting Italy, Greece, and Turkey. In Italy and Greece, they have mostly been left as they are. (In Pompeii, this apparently extends to letting them fall down.) In Turkey, however, some have been reconstructed. The Library of Celsus in Ephesus is beautiful, as are many of the other structures in that ancient city, but much of what one sees is rebuilt.

I think there's a place for both sorts of things. I'm glad the pergola was replaced. I'd be horrified if the Parthenon were rebuilt and painted in its original Technicolor palette. Perhaps it's because of the time scales involved. There's nothing inherently wrong with rebuilding. The Ise Grand Shrine in Japan is rebuilt every 20 years; the number of iterations is now in the 60s.

Yes, Seattle's landscape and history are constructions. Whose landscape and history isn't? I'm not sure Knute is saying there's anything wrong with this, mind you. Where there is civilization, landscape and history are constructed. Show me a group of people who do not leave a mark on the environment, and tell stories!

And even if one regards our history as artificial, let enough time pass and that becomes part of the history itself. We must make sure we remember, of course. That is what I fear… that it will be harder and harder to do so, as history, culture, and education land on the chopping block with more frequency.

For a few reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Seattle is essentially an amazing ice-made and man-made sculpture, 206ers might consider respectfully turning the page on the name "Seattle" and starting a new chapter entitled "Grade."

Grade, Washington: One Syllable, Numerous Pleasures

Nice muse, Knute. There's nothing particularly sacred about the lay of the land here, between glaciers and lahars from Mt *Rainier* (thumbs nose at those folks from the city of Commencement), or the next Big One with tsunami on the side we all live on a big canvas that's regularly redrawn by Mom Nature.
Seattle Parks had old growth trees cut down on the sly by persons unknown many years ago. There's no monument to the Seattle General Strike, not that this town remembers it was once friendly to labor. And is anyone writing the history of the Seattle coffee renaissance?
So, if people want a point, or if Knute decides on choosing one next time (but no hurry), how about this- establish a Bill Speidel School of Northwest History, underwritten by one or more of these quiet billionaires looking to make a legacy. Maybe they could put it in a new elite University while they're at it. Cascadia needs a Harvard. Maynard University, after our first scholar. A place where people can research and think before they come to a point. Walt Crowley would approve, but he's gone too.

I think the point of this article is that when we allowed our cities to spring forth as "fake" but interesting places that people created, we got cities that people wanted to live in and work in.

Today our codes and GMA directives over-regulate growth into a sort of Stepford Wives blandness that I find repulsive.

The bore tunnel and the homogenization of the downtown Seattle waterfront park is not the Pacific Northwest that nature created, nor do I want to pay for it. I like the idea of rebuilding the viaduct - above ground, so everyone who uses it can see the magnificence of Puget Sound, the Olympics, and our own quirky downtown.

Keep the quirk. Delete the homogenous.

For me Seattle has ceased to be interesting or desirable to live in. It lost its charm decades ago. Now it's just a large city with typical crap that one associates with large cities. It's current direction is as aimless as it's history and that history isn't as nearly interesting as the history of its large neighbors to the north, Vancouver, or to the south, Portland.