Civic face-offs, interurban smackdowns — comparing Seattle to Portland is an armchair sport and journalistic fallback as old as the towns themselves. These days, the comparisons tend to be drawn in Portland’s favor: It’s friendlier, mellower, quirkier, more authentic, more Northwest and of course cheaper — more like Seattle twenty or thirty years ago, when people drew the same comparisons between it and San Francisco.
Seattle is too big, too rich, too fast, too stressed, too expensive, too urban. It’s Microsoft, Amazon, Sonny Liston, the New York Yankees — the big bully everyone loves to hate. Pugetopolis vs. Portlandia. Starbucks vs. Stumptown. Where young people don’t go to retire.
This little sign, in Portland’s Pearl District, upends those prevailing paradigms.
