All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  As I am becoming ever more acutely aware, pedestrians inhabit the same world as drifters and hobos, a world middle-class Americans try to ignore, oblivious to any concept of interdependency. Nineteenth-century buildings – the sort that are being restored in Manchester or London’s Docklands – sit, separated by patches of tarmac half-populated by gigantic empty suvs, slowly going to seed. A few, dotted here and there, have been turned into flourishing bars or shops, but too few, and too far between.

  For a country with so relatively little historic fabric, and which purports to care so much for what it has, this is the tyranny of the ‘empty lot’, market capitalism taken to an extreme where it becomes synonymous with apathetic cynical vandalism. It is deemed more economical to raze a building than restore it, or even build in its place. Cheaper to hire an unskilled employee for a pittance and charge what you can to park on it.

  These are the rather gloomy thoughts going through my mind as I realise I have still nearly seven hours to spend in glorious downtown Spokane. The thing about endless empty parking lots, you see, is that they’re empty. This can only make logical sense – even in the world of dog-eat-dog, live-and-let-die capitalism – for so long. But how long can it be before the parking lots – already half empty in working hours – become unviable because there is simply not enough activity in the remaining buildings for anyone to drive to visit? The doughnut effect reaches its maximum: a ring of gated suburbs surrounding an empty, eviscerated, lifeless city centre, given over to office blocks and parking lots.

  Jeff, barman at the Onion, a bustling burger restaurant selling the northwest’s excellent microbrewery beers along a magnificent 1900 oak bar brought west in 1978 by train, says he has seen at least three popular downtown venues demolished and replaced by parking lots. That’s one reason why the Onion is bustling, he admits. There’s nowhere else much to go.

  So Jeff and I sit and chew the fat endlessly, putting the rotten world to rights. And the long slow hours tick by until midnight when he apologetically throws me out and I stumble across the empty tarmac to the echoing Amtrak station which is gradually filling up with my few fellow westbound travellers, hoping like I am that today’s Empire Builder will come trundling into town as close as possible to 1:15 a.m., 24 hours after its predecessor, the last train to pass this way. In the end it’s only 20 minutes later which is something of a cause for celebration, though there’s still another hour and a half to kill as it splits into two in the station before, in the wee small hours of the morning: one half heads to Portland, Oregon, while the other, mine, slides down the remaining slopes of the Rockies into Seattle, the ‘most happening city on the seaboard’, home to Bill Gates and Starbucks. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

  SPOKANE TO SEATTLE

  TRAIN: Empire Builder

  FREQUENCY: 1 a day

  DEPART SPOKANE, WASHINGTON: 2:15 a.m. (Pacific Time)

  via

  Ephrata, WA

  Wenatchee, WA

  Everett, WA

  Edmonds, WA

  ARRIVE SEATTLE, WASHINGTON: 10:20 a.m. (Pacific Time)

  DURATION: Approx 8 hours

  DISTANCE: 329 miles

  11

  Gates of America

  THE LITTLE COFFEE SHOP at 1912 Western just by Pike Place Market in Seattle’s West Edge district ought to be one of the least conspicuous in a city where a thousand temples to the cult of the brown bean clamour for attention. Except for the gaggle of gawping tourists outside.

  It is less heavily branded than most, the name written in an unfamiliar font on the glass panels above the door, one letter per pane. It takes me a moment to recognise it, which is a full 59.9 seconds longer than it takes to recognise any other of its 15,010 franchises across the world. But that doesn’t stop backpackers from as far afield as Melbourne and Tokyo grinning insanely as they photograph one another outside what was once the only branch of Starbucks on the face of the planet. An era that seems as far distant as when Rome was just a few mud huts on the banks of the Tiber.

  Starbucks No. 1, as it is wholly unofficially known, has acquired almost international monument status – on a par with the first McDonald’s. Americans might like to think their gift to the world has been the dream of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, but not one of those have the same international recognition as the Starbucks logo or the golden arches. This, of course, is probably a sadder comment on the rest of us. After the Boeing Aircraft Corporation and Microsoft – and I’m coming to that – Starbucks is what put Seattle on the map of the globe and helped give this damp, mostly grey city a reputation as America’s hippest city and turned its climate-conditioned anti-fashion grunge streetwear into an iconic style statement. Weird!

  To call Seattle grey and damp however is to do it a serious disservice – although it is indeed frequently both. It may only get 56 days of sunshine a year but its actual rainfall total is less than Atlanta, Georgia, or even New York City, if only because it is not prone to heavy tropical downpours. Its climate in fact is remarkably similar to British cities but its setting is spectacular: surrounded by mountains and squeezed between the beautiful waterscapes of Lake Washington and Puget Sound. Seattle is a city of surprising elegance. I had been aware of that ever since stepping off the overnighter from Spokane and making my way out of the dingy station concourse to find myself standing in front of a larger than life-size replica of the Campanile from St Mark’s Square in Venice. It’s one of those moments when you have to pinch yourself, walk back into the building you’ve just left, and then come out again to take a second look.

  Seattle’s King Street station is a splendid railway-era folly on a grand scale, built in 1905, and now – thankfully – in the middle of a long and expensive restoration process. The grimy tiles above my head as I emerged from the train were a false ceiling put in place while the original gleaming white moulded 45-foot-high vaulted canopy above is brought back to life. Unlike Buffalo, where the original building is all but doomed to decay, King Street will once again be not just a functional building but a landmark to be proud of.

  Meanwhile, back at that other landmark, Starbucks N0. 1, I’m trying to decide whether I should pay homage by indulging in a cup of coffee. The trouble is, middle-aged child that I am of a British generation that couldn’t tell a mocha from a mud pie – my biggest achievement in the coffee world was explaining to my mother that cappuccino was not a Venetian painter – I have still never really been able to get my head around a tall latte or a frosted frappuccino. Under the circumstances then, and given the fact that inside the hallowed portal, the corporate clones have been unable to resist transforming even this, the mother ship, into an identical replica of every branch from Belfast to Bogotá (and no, I haven’t been to either but how much do you want to bet?) that even the chance to try Pike Place Blend (‘uniquely on sale here’) fails to tempt me (though I suppose it gives them something to offer the pilgrims as a souvenir).

  It is one of those supreme accidental ironies that a brand that has come to symbolise the triumph of monocultural marketing over local individualism has its origins so firmly rooted in what miraculously remains one of the most exciting, individual, anti-corporate street markets in the whole of the United States. In a country that teems with plenty, but mostly displayed on the sterile shelves of supermarket giants, it is a rare delight to come across such a vibrant, natural, popular and flourishing urban market as Pike Place. The downstairs levels, on the underfloors descending to the waterfront, are full of quirky privately-owned shops that offer anything from Pacific seashell necklaces to useful bits of domestic hardware, but it is where the market meets the bustling street on the uppermost level with its fishmongers, florists and fruit and veg merchants that makes Pike an outstanding experience.

  It is immediately obvious that this is Pacific Rim America: the Asian racial influence stronger than anywhere I have been outside a Chinatown. And the mix has more in it of Japan than China. The first Japanese passenger steamer ever
to reach the United States docked here in Seattle in 1896 with 259 immigrants on board. Racial tensions that emerged during the Second World War, when born-and-bred Japanese-Americans were interned and often stripped of their property (something that never happened to the vastly more numerous but more racially homogeneous German-Americans), left a bad taste that lingered for many years. Poignantly addressed in the bestselling novel and movie Snow Falling on Cedars, the injustice has been forgiven, if not wholly forgotten. There are now some 56,000 Japanese-Americans living in Washington State, more than anywhere else except Hawaii and California, where they form a much smaller proportion of the population.

  The market’s showcase is the Pike Place Fish Co., with its jaw-dropping display of the great – remaining – wealth of the Pacific Ocean: whole albacore tuna, salmon from the coast and rivers of Alaska, Dungeness crabs of monstrous proportion, great legs – up to two feet long – from snow crabs caught in the Russian arctic.

  ‘Okay, watch yo’ heads. Flying fish,’ calls a portly grinning Japanese-American fishmonger, as an assistant in front of the glistening fish racks passes him an order.

  ‘Yo, got that boy!’ the assistant comes back as a huge salmon – at least 20 pounds of pink and silver glistening fish flies over the heads of customers into his hands.

  ‘Too big? Yo’ want another?’ and a second, then a third comes soaring over our heads to be caught in a gentle cradle of swooping arms until the perfect fish is selected and the others are sent spinning back through the air to be recouched in their cosy beds of crushed ice.

  The whole thing is as much choreographed theatre as sales pitch and the tourists cluster round, digital cameras extended as they try to follow the flying fish, and capture the busy banter between the grinning fishmongers hamming it up for their captive crowds.

  It’s hard to avoid the impression that 80 per cent of visitors spend more time taking photographs than making purchases; for many visiting Americans the fish, crabs, squid and octopus on sale here are just too far away from the food processing chain for them to be entirely comfortable. But Pike Place is one of the world’s great advertisements for commerce on a human, rather than pre-packed, supermarket scale. And yet it is a miracle that it is still here at all. Founded just over 100 years ago – which makes it a genuine antique by American standards – Pike Place began as a market for fishermen and farmers from the surrounding countryside, set up in answer to complaints by local housewives in what was still a relatively poor pioneer city that middlemen were hiking the prices.

  But by the late 1960s – with the recent success of a World’s Fair filling their tills – the narrow-minded commercially motivated businessmen and politicians – the parking lot tycoons of middle America – were casting their eyes lustfully over Pike Place. It was too old-fashioned, they argued, for a city on the cusp of the future – they were right, of course, just not remotely in the way they imagined – and the interests of the city and its citizens would be best served if it were simply pulled down. In its place they wanted to erect that joyless eye-catching waste-space of urban planners everywhere, a convention centre, which would also incorporate a hockey arena, thrown in to appeal to the plebs. Oh, and perhaps just as an afterthought: a 4,000-car parking lot.

  It took one man in particular, lifelong Seattle resident and, of all things – bless him – professor of architecture at Washington State University, Victor Steinbrueck, to see the crime that was about to be committed and rally public opposition. Against the odds, he succeeded not only in making it an issue rather than a rubber-stamp job, and forced a citywide referendum which in 1971 voted definitively to retain the city’s much-loved market. It is hard to imagine what single move – alongside founding Microsoft and maintaining Boeing – could have done more to boost and preserve Seattle’s character and reputation. Without the market, for example, would there ever have been such a groovy, laid-back, urban sophisticated place to hang out, and think, ‘Man, this would be a cool place to start a real chilled coffee shop?’ Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing after all.

  But if saving the fertile earth for the germination of a coffee shop crop that has wiped out little family businesses across most of the inhabited planet, could be regarded as a dubious achievement, at least the benign radiance generated by Pike Place ensured the growth and survival of other excellent enterprises, not least among them the Pacific Northwest’s home-grown renaissance of microbrewing. The microbrewery revolution which took off in Washington and neighbouring Oregon finally gave Americans – and grateful visitors – beers that have flavour and taste and eroded the monopolistic dominance of the corporate gnat’s piss producers: the men that ate Milwaukee.

  One of the Northwest’s finest micros is just on the edge of the market, though it’s not that easy to find, being as you have to go down an indoor staircase at 1415 1st Avenue to find it. But I have done my homework in advance and within minutes I am seated blissfully at the horseshoe-shaped bar of Pike’s Brewery waiting for Nancy, the bright-eyed effervescent barmaid, to pour me a second velvety glass of Seattle stout, pulled from an English-style hand pump and deliciously free of the otherwise omnipresent carbon dioxide.

  Coca-Cola and Pepsi may be two of the best-known brand names on earth and the planet’s bestselling soft drinks, but I have to blame them for the near-universal American insistence on pumping all drinks full of so much C02 that it is a wonder the population isn’t permanently belching. I don’t want to sound trivial on a major issue here but in a country perpetually dosed on bargain refills of fizzy drinks, it’s easy to imagine flatulence might be America’s biggest contribution to global warming.

  Yet bizarrely, the one thing it is all but impossible to find easily in America is carbonated mineral water. Posh places stock Perrier – and charge accordingly – as they should, given the air miles it has clocked up, being flown in from France. Ditto the mountains of Evian on display in every supermarket – a real testimony to the enduring reputation for ‘chic’ still exuded by the French. But where oh where, particularly in these northwestern states of gushing crystal clear mountain streams, are the domestic bottled waters? Surely a city like Seattle would soak up the ‘designer waters’ that do so well in Europe. When every French or Italian – or even nowadays Scottish or Welsh – hill region boasts its own varieties of ‘pure mineral waters’ – when you get the likes of ridiculous failed wine snobs holding ‘water tastings’ – I would be sorely tempted to say the Americans have held on to their sanity.

  Except of course that they haven’t. America has bottled water, and enough people drink it, but it is almost exclusively ‘purified’ drinking water from the local mains similar to the Dasani brand which Coca-Cola had to withdraw from sale in Britain when it was laughed off the shelves after the revelation that it was ‘treated’ tap water bottled in the London suburb of Sidcup. But will they be back? You bet!

  I digress. Here I am sitting on a bar stool with a pint of delicious stout, perusing another miraculous find picked up from the ubiquitous displays of tourist tat. It is, wait for it: a ‘Downtown Walking Map’ of Seattle! Okay Europeans, you need to think in context here. This is a ‘walking map’, geddit? A map to be used – while walking! Moving around on two feet, by putting one in front of the other. A map! An actual map, suggesting that bipedal locomotion is a concept that can be employed for greater distances than that between mall and car. The parking lot planners of Buffalo or Spokane wouldn’t even understand the concept. I can’t wait to experiment!

  Meanwhile, however, there is lunch. It remains true that you can – and many people do – eat very, very well in America: the French Laundry in the hills north of San Francisco is regularly listed as among the top 10 restaurants in the world (and has several times been top). There are first-class establishments in almost every big city. But by and large they are precisely that: first class. As in first class opposed to economy. First class in terms of table linen, genteel atmosphere, a respectful hush. Even silver salvers. And definitely price
. You can also – and sadly most people do – eat very badly indeed in America. Albeit for very little. The Americans may not have invented fast food – Japanese sushi and German sausages in a roll are just two of the many competing claimants – but they sure as hell industrialised it. Add the salt-and-saturates to the supersize sugar-and-C02 ‘soda’ and it is not hard to identify one obvious endemic cause for what is beginning to look like a national physical characteristic in a nation made up of so many others: the outsize rear end. Oh, all right, if I’m going to risk offending the entire American nation, I may as well do it in their own language: the fat ass!

  It’s not that we Europeans are immune. Far from it. Anyone who has been to the Munich beer festival will have seen some stupendous lederhosen rumps, while the amply endowed Italian ‘pasta mama’ is no more a spurious national stereotype than an archetypal English ‘lardy-arse’ overfed on fish’n’chips. Britain in particular these days is dangerously hooked on a love-hate affair with obesity. How else do you account for the fact that one of our most slender and internationally celebrated beauties, Princess Diana, and one of our most grotesque, fat-bottomed politicians, former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, were both confessed bulimics. If we’re not chugging it down, we’re choking it up. But the growing trend towards fatter kids in particular has undeniably gone hand in pudgy hand with our growing enthusiasm for the cheap, cheerful, instant gratification of mass-produced fast food. Where America leads, we blindly follow. I’m just amazed you guys are so far in front, given the weight you’re carrying.

  But – and it is a big but – there are places in America, and more than the casual tourist might think, where you can also eat astonishingly well for relatively little. Unsurprisingly they tend to be the places where you can drink reasonably well too. Like Pike’s Brewery. So spare me for a minute, if I offer up a sample. As a starter for $3.75 (under £2 at October 2008 exchange rates) Nancy has brought me a little bowl of chopped radishes with a Seattle speciality: a little dipping saucer of salt liberally flavoured with specks of black truffle. Now I am familiar with radishes as an accompaniment to beer – it is an old Bavarian speciality, the sharp tang of the radish piquing the thirst and contrasting with the sweetness of the beer – but add the salt and the hint of truffle! Inspired. Nothing less.