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Seattle: Then, and Now
I was born and raised in Seattle. Born in 1949, I spent my first years in a gray stucco house on a dead-end street in the Montlake neighborhood. In our little neighborhood, there were a bunch of kids my own age, and we went to preschool at the Montlake playfield, which was right on the “Montlake Cut”, a waterway connecting Lake Washington with Lake Union. I have fond memories of riding my tricycle around the playfield, attending fun classes in the community center, and getting dirty. At the end of our street was a vacant lot called “Dahlialand” where my friends and I played in the dirt, made forts, played hide-and-seek, and chased each other around. I was a bit of a tomboy, and loved playing with blocks and trains. We kicked our ball around in the street, and yelled at each other to avoid the home of the mean Mrs. Witt.
We all walked to Montlake Elementary School every day, which involved a long concrete staircase from our street up to the main arterial street. We walked in all weathers, and no one walked alone. We never worried about our safety, and no one ever threatened us. Our school was an older brick building, with about ten “portables” in the yard. The lunchroom was in a portable, and there was no hot lunch. Everyone brought their own lunch, and you could buy milk. There were no “free” lunches in those days, since everyone’s parents packed their lunch. The playground was concrete, and there was no padding under the swings or the monkey bars. One day, I fell off the monkey bars, right on my face. I broke a tooth, and to this day that tooth is dead, under its cap. No one sued the school for not having padding under the monkey bars, and we paid for my dental work.
In the fourth grade, we started music lessons at school, and everyone had to choose an instrument to play. I picked violin, and my best friend chose clarinet. I liked playing the violin, and got fairly good at it. My parents, who had Seattle Symphony season tickets for years, had me play for the concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony, to see if I should have private lessons. He said yes and suggested a teacher. I didn’t like her much, but I had lessons with her for three years.
Between fourth and fifth grade, my family moved to Northeast Seattle. We lived in a garden apartment while our new house was being built, and my sister and I went to a new school, View Ridge. We still walked to school, though it was farther and on a busier street. I could walk to my violin lessons too, since the teacher lived pretty close to us. I was unhappy at the new school, and was sometimes bullied by the other girls. However, I did quite well in the school orchestra, and traded first chair with another girl (we kept challenging each other). I auditioned, and got into the All-City Elementary School Orchestra in the sixth grade, which was quite an honor. I also remember playing with a string quartet at school, and going around to classrooms and playing for the other students.
I went to junior high school at Nathan Eckstein, where I still walked to school most days. At this time, we did have bus service, and I took the bus to school when it rained. I loved learning, and when given the chance, I took extra classes (7:40 a.m.). The big drawback to junior high school in the early 1960s was “New Math”. It was a total nightmare, because I was bad at math anyway, and SMSG (School Mathematics Study Group) math just destroyed me. I will always remember the yellow cover of the paperback books we used, with revulsion. Unfortunately, the bully girls from elementary school followed me to junior high, and they were hard to avoid.
All this time, Seattle was a pleasant place to live. The parks were well taken care of, and we liked going downtown shopping. My best friend and I liked to have lunch at the Frederick and Nelson basement cafe, where we could have a Frango Mint Sundae for dessert. We went on the bus by ourselves, and our parents didn’t worry about us at all. I went to high school at Roosevelt High, and even walked the four miles to school much of the time. I took the city bus when it rained. I did take driver’s education at school, and learned to drive in a mint green 1960 Chevy Impala. I didn’t get my own car, but I was allowed to drive my mother’s car sometimes on weekends.
The winds of change were blowing when I was in high school. Our part of Seattle was mostly white, and heavily populated by families of U of Washington professors. Our high school was well-known for all its National Merit Scholars, and many of my classmates went to Ivy League schools. But starting in my junior year, Seattle started their “voluntary busing” program, where students from my school volunteered to be bused to schools in the more-minority Central District; and some students from there transferred in. Roosevelt got its first group of black students in my senior year. I wanted to get to know them, but they mostly stuck together and didn’t seem very friendly. I did have good relations with the black students in my classes.
It was only after I graduated that Seattle went to its “forced busing” program, and that also started the deterioration of standards at all Seattle schools. I went to an all-class reunion at Roosevelt in the early 1980s, and was saddened to see the poor condition of my school, with its peeling paint and rundown furniture. The principal was a black woman, and I remember her apologizing to us about the few students who now got National Merit Scholarships.
That was then, and this is now.
Seattle Police: One killed in University District shooting. The University District around the U of W used to be a nice shopping district with all sorts of stores. Today, it is a wreck, with homeless tents everywhere, empty storefronts, and high crime.
Crown Hill encampment causing concern for neighbors. When I was married to my first husband in the 1970s and 1980s, we lived just south of the Crown Hill neighborhood in Ballard. Now, just a couple of blocks from the house where he still lives, there are homeless tents and rundown RVs with the resulting fires, drug use, and crime.
When I went to my 50th high school class reunion in 2017, it was held at a country club near my old house. That neighborhood still looks much the same as it did then. Most of my classmates had moved out of Seattle. The Seattle Public Schools are a disgrace, with their emphasis on critical race theory, low graduation rates, and rundown schools. The Leftist Teachers Unions who run Seattle schools haven’t had a new idea in decades, and still insist that the school system is underfunded. And the leftists who populate the Seattle City Council deplore the police, despise big business, and prefer the homeless street people to the law-abiding taxpayers of the city.
The last time I set foot in downtown Seattle, to get back to our car we passed a doorway where drug addicts were shooting up, and sleeping. Not my Seattle, not anymore.
Published in Group Writing
Leftist Motto: If it ain’t broke, fix it.
That’s so sad. It sounds like Seattle didn’t experience the urban decay of New York and the Rust Belt cities in the late 60’s and 70’s, but they are making up for it now. And they are doing it deliberately. I feel for you. I would wish for the residents to come to their senses, but I’m not sure that they are capable of that. Being ultra liberal is too important to the ones that I have met.
I would suggest that most of the west coast cities were well behind the DC to Boston corridor and Rust Belt cities in urbanization in the first place, so the decay was delayed as well. Perhaps it’s inevitable? We’ve often remarked that Tri-Met – the Portland light rail system – took so long to catch on because the city doesn’t have a centralized core. There is a downtown area, but it’s not as job dense as cities of similar size in the east. So the solution from the urban planners was to attempt to leverage light rail to build up the downtown core in order to more effectively use the light rail. Like most urban planner efforts, that has failed as the majority of the jobs remain in the distant suburbs, and the rail system remains heavily subsidized by the Feds (i.e. not many ride it).
One thing light rail did achieve – almost from the first day: It has served as a very effective conduit for gang members and other criminals. The corridor in which the east side light rail runs was a typical 70s-80s suburb until construction was complete. It is now one of the worst crime areas in the metro area. Same thing is happening along the west side line, but it was constructed much later so is a little behind.
A beautiful and tragic story, RB. Thanks for sharing it with us.
As soon as I read Frederick and Nelson I was thinking “Frango” before I even finished the sentence. It’s one thing to destroy a city through criminal neglect, another to destroy it through criminal mischief. But the real prize goes to combining neglect and mischief. Götterdämmerung.
Did you ever read J. A. Jance’s J. P. Beaumont series of mysteries? They were police procedurals set in Seattle. She started writing the series in 1985, and her Seattle of that time seemed a little wild, but attractive. She is still writing the series, but the main character, a Seattle native born in the mid-forties hates what the town has become.
At some point, one has to believe that if it isn’t fixed, it’s because they want it that way.
I am so saddened to read about the loss of a great city and how it has impacted you.
The last time I had anything much to do with Seattle it was quite wonderful.
I was born in 1945 in New York. I grew up in an area called Forest Hills Gardens. It sounds as though you and I had very similar childhoods. I went to private schools, but in those days I don’t think that Seattle Public Schools were inferior to the schools I attended.
I came out to Seattle in 1969 and was hired immediately by Roy Howard, then the director of Special Education services of Seattle Public Schools. I was offered two possible positions, I chose Asa Mercer Junior High School where at the time there was one other class for students classified as emotional disturbed. The kids were damaged, but essentially decent kids who just needed a little more time and attention. There weren’t any criminals or criminals to be in those first few years. Many grew up to be really fine adults who came by to see me in later years. The school itself was wonderful with great teachers, mature people with mature ideas of how schools should be run. The principal was superb.
Advance four or five years and things began to change. The old principal retired and was replaced, as were the vice principals. Through the remaining 13 or 14 years I was at Mercer the school underwent a serious decline. Some of it was due to an increase in the number of black students to more than 35% of the school population as a consequence of forced bussing. Another causitive factor in the decline was affirmative action hiring of school administrators. A third factor was the beginnings of the Human Relations Task Force which has since been replaced by commercial outfits like The Courageous Conversation and other race-baiting organizations.
During the 1970s I witnessed a steep decline in the academic achievements of the school. I also saw the make up of my classes from ones that were 80% white and 20% minority to some years when I had nothing but black students in the ten available positions in my class. With that also came the first of what I later learned to refer to as Conduct Disorder students. These are children whose behaviors are essentially criminal and whose behaviors are not amenable to remedial care. As a general rule, these young people, almost 100% male, go from schools to Juvenile Detention, and, ultimately, to prisons. For the rest of my years in teaching special education I would say that on average between 25% and 50% of my students fell into that category.
I don’t know why things changed so radically in Seattle over the years. When I first moved out here I joked about what they called “the Central Area” as though it was a dangerous area. Compared to where I had taught in New York it seemed a middle class paradise. However, over the years Seattle has continued its descent, and now the Central Area and other enclaves are as dangerous as any inner city area around the country.
It makes on wistful for a counterhistory. What if the response to Jim Crow was “just treat everyone the same”. Would we have kept intact nuclear families? Would the black middle class have expanded? Moving people from a physical to a psychological plantation was not a solution.
Here’s a major city street in Tokyo. Notice how there aren’t any homeless tents, piles of dirty needles, or human feces. Notice too how most people are dressed like grown-ups. This is what a civilized society looks like.
Here’s walking in Nairobi. More litter, dustier, but still seems cleaner than parts of San Francisco or Seattle.
Here is walking in Tegucigalpa, one of the poorest cities in the Western Hemisphere. But still fairly tidy.
Dar Es Salaam. Heck, I’ve seen streets in worse conditions in Philadelphia.
Urban decline is a choice.
The Left requires an underclass, and if none exists they will manufacture one. They will seem to want to help, but all their interventions will fail by design. They cannot allow social mobility to reduce the size of their underclass.
That is a very sad story and I think leads to a real loss to kids growing up these days. I am about your age (class of ’47) and we walked to school most of my life. When I was in the 6-7 grades in a Cincinnati suburb, the best way to spend a Saturday was to take the “City Bus” to the main library downtown. It had multiple floors and I would wander from topic to topic. Even better was to stop at the “Lapiro’s” surplus store with lots of electronics parts I would figure out how they worked when I got home.
These days, it seems like the only options for a kid are to live in a bubble or walk through the jungle.
We have lived here since 1976 and watched the slow degradation of the schools, despite the huge tax money they receive since their bond issues never get voted down. During all these years I’ve noticed that school administration dollars grow out of proportion to the amounts that actually wind up in the classroom. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out something is rotten in Denmark when driving around to observe the huge amount of space given over to various offices and buildings where school admin employees work compared to the teachers parking lot in the individual schools. Despite all this, the journalists in this town never write about where the money actually goes. Teachers are no longer the underpaid members of society they are portrayed in old movies, and they are represented by a national union rife with corruption and top heavy with highly paid administration people.
I have said it before, I loved my brief time in Seattle. I lived on top of Queen Anne where you had views of mountains and water in every direction. Even then (late 90’s-early 2000’s) you could see that drugs and homelessness were problems that the city government had no interest in fixing. 20 more years of “progressives” running the government has had the exact results one might have guessed. Sad, but not unexpected.
I no longer hold public school teachers in any esteem whatsoever. Are there still decent teachers? Sure. Maybe. Are they campaigning to have their union de-certified? No? Then they can go…
I can assure you there are still some wonderful teachers out there as I observed that my daughter’s friends who majored in education were enthusiastic about their chosen field. When her class graduated from the University of Washington in 1990, I noticed that the education majors immediately got jobs teaching while the rest of them were still in the hunt for a few weeks longer unless they took sales jobs with drug companies or media. Beginning salaries for the teachers were also a bit higher. Sales, of course, offered the potential of far greater pay, but the advantage of teaching included job security and more paid holidays. Unfortunately, most of these kids were not interested in politics and saw the world only from their own small sphere.
Automatic disqualification!!!!
In case my avatar doesn’t give it away, I’m kinda partial to the U of Oregon. :-D
It seems indisputable. The vote taken to defund the police department in August 2020 passed 7-1, the only reason it wasn’t unanimous was because the lone holdout said the plan didn’t go far enough. Teresa Mosqueda, a city council member prominent in the effort, was just reelected last year 58.8% to 40.8%.
As baffling as it may seem clearly this is what the citizens of Seattle want. The decay and dissolution of their city is a price they are willing to pay in order to be on the right side of history or whatever the visceral satisfaction is that this destruction is bringing them.
Hmmm. He who walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is most assuredly a duck!
Just Ducky!
No, it’s “If it isn’t broke, break it. Then offer to fix it, and make it worse in the process.”
Here is what Seattle’s kids are learning in school these days.
Students rally for SPS to reinstate school mask mandate. The kids are imbibing their teachers’ abject fear of the CCP Virus, and their love for medical tyranny. They “walked out” of school today for their little “rally”, with the approval of school administrators (who say they respect the kids’ free-speech “rights”). Just wait until these kids grow up and demand mask or whatever the latest public health mandate is, for everyone, not just the school kids. They will be the enforcers of the future.
Can you walk out of the rally? WWTBD? (What would the Boomers do?)
Were they singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”?
I truly don’t get it. Among the young people I know there has been an outspoken dislike of wearing masks. The kids who are involved in this effort to return to masks must have been carefully recruited by some organization with ulterior motives. This smells very fishy.
I am unsurprised. When I was teaching there were certain teachers on staff who exercised an inordinate amount of control over their students. I noted it most clearly during the period in which the Travon Martin situation was starting to gain acceptance. They had their kids make up posters which they hung in the halls stating the memes about Skittles and other nonsense that was current at the time. If a teacher is able to portray himself/herself in a certain way, they can easily influence the opinions of students who want acceptance from that teacher. Convincing kids that despite the obvious discomfort of wearing a mask, it has real value, isn’t rocket science. Convincing them to protest the removal of the mask mandate is a short step away. Keep in mind the complete idiocy of Mao’s Red Brigades and the self-destructive behavior they all displayed.
It is so sad to see the Emerald City go to ruin.
This post is part of the March Group Writing Theme: “Now and Then.”
There are two major monthly Group Writing projects. One is the Quote of the Day project, managed by @she. This is the other project, in which Ricochet members claim one day of the coming month to write on an announced theme. This is an easy way to expose your writing to a general audience, with a bit of accountability and topical guidance to encourage writing for its own sake.