Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia

1. Market

16 1 Market In the summer of 1963 the Seattle Art Museum hung a show by the painter Mark Tobey. A local art world hero, Tobey spent his formative years, during the 1940s and 1950s, as part of the “Northwest Mystic” school, a regional group of painters that included Kenneth Callahan and Morris Graves. By the 1960s his work had garnered national attention, and he had immense cultural cachet in the provincial upstart city. The museum show in 1963—entitled “Mark Tobey and the Seattle Public Market”—presented an artistic intervention in civic affairs, a painted argument about the city that had nurtured Tobey and that he now saw in peril. Tobey dedicated the show’s catalog to those “who live in awareness of man’s relationship to nature , and who cherish the values of the past as a vital part of the present.” Produced between 1939 and 1943, the exhibited paintings and sketches depicted the Pike Place Market as a fecund blend of nature, commerce, and earthy democracy. His canvases captured a built environment teeming with organic energy. In a 1942 painting titled E Pluribus Unum, the frame is packed with a sea of human faces, signs, and piles of fruits and vegetables —all the weltering diversity he saw at the market in the early 1940s. Tobey ’s market was a living organism, a breathing mass of humanity in an idealized civic space.1 Despite its recent vibrancy, though, Tobey and his allies in the Seattle arts community saw the market as part of an endangered species in 1963. 17 For Tobey and a group calling itself the “Friends of the Market,” the old market symbolized what was quickly being lost in the relentless drive toward modernization in Seattle and its immediate hinterland. For the exhibit catalog Tobey wrote, “There is a need to speak, today, when drastic changes are going on all around us. Our homes are in the path of freeways; old landmarks, many of rare beauty, are sacrificed to the urge to get somewhere in a hurry; and when it is all over Progress reigns, queen of hollow streets shadowed by monumental towers left behind by giants to whom the intimacy of living is of no importance. . . . And now this unique market is in danger of being modernized like so much processed cheese.”2 Ben Ehrlichman, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce president in the early 1960s and an advocate of downtown revitalization, epitomized those who would make processed cheese of the market. For him, modernization was not such a bad word. In fact, he had dedicated his life to building a E Pluribus Unum, Mark Tobey (American, 1890–1976), 1942. Tempera on paper mounted on paperboard, 19¾ x 271/4 in. (50.2 x 69.2 cm). Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Tomas D. Stimson, 43.33. © 2010 Estate of Mark Tobey/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. m a r k e t 18 modern Seattle and to the era’s urban renewal. In 1963 the Central Association of Seattle (CA), a group of downtown businesspeople, financiers, and developers, flush from the success of their space age–themed Century 21 World’s Fair a year earlier, turned their skills and attention to remodeling the downtown core of Seattle. They were artists too, of a sort. The entire city was their canvas. In 1963 Ehrlichman and his forward-looking comrades in the Central Association and the Seattle Planning Commission unveiled their own masterpiece, an image as sleek and streamlined as the Boeing jets that were then putting the city on the map. Their plan for downtown, as depicted by a meticulously constructed scale model, envisioned efficient paths for consumers in the downtown core, emphasizing “improved accessibility ,” “major parking garages,” and even escalators to ease tired shoppers up Seattle’s notoriously steep hills. They argued for mass-transit funding , ring highways, waterfront development, and the closure of downtown streets for a mall system and a downtown shopping center. But the Pike Place Plaza redevelopment project was the centerpiece of their plans. Unveiled to the public several months before Tobey’s art show and images of it widely disseminated in the local press, the scale model represented condominiums , expansive modern plazas, and new retail buildings.3 Members of the CA had their own ideas about urban sustainability, ones that pertained to business. The 1962 fair tested their vision for the region —efficient monorail transportation, soaring...