Mental Rearranging

I have nothing against progress. Really, I don't. I don't, I don't, I don't. For instance, I like the Pacific Place Mall in downtown Seattle just fine, and sometimes it's a real struggle to get me out of the bar at the Hyatt. Yes, progress is A-OK in my book.

With that said, however, I do have a favorite mental past time, and that is rearranging buildings downtown.

Take the Seattle Westin. Adorable. Essential to the local tourism economy. Lovely big windows for the lovely big views. But if Seattle were my own personal building block city, I'd move that thing over a block - east or west, doesn't matter - so that we could still have the Orpheum Theatre and the Ben Franklin Hotel. These two fine, handsome structures were sacrificed for this buidling. The buildings on either side of the Westin, OTOH, are just nothing, and it would have been better to have gotten rid of those.

But the one place that just continues to irk me, mostly because if it could have held on just a few more years it would have been OK, is Westlake.

Westlake is the heart of the downtown retail district. It's a big open space with bland public art, a street running through it, and a horrible mall/office complex. It's just like something that Seattle would have come up with in the 80's, which - coincidentally enough - is when they did it.

Here's an uninspired photo of what it looks like today:



But HERE's what it looked like from the 60's until just about a year after I moved here.



This is, in my opinion, a much more interesting place. It had a gritty sort of feel, what with the monorail and all, that was kind of like Time Square in New York. (without the tranvestite prostitutes)

Let's take a closer look at that monorail plaza area, shall we?



The businesses were all those weird, independent, pre Cheescake Factory or TGIF's type places. Like the fabulous Ben Paris.....



Isn't that all fun and grown-up looking?

The city fathers, of course, couldn't have that sort of untidiness, and having the monorail not going into a food court was just killing them, so they tore all of that down, and put up that bland Westlake Park, and now it is basically just a place for the homeless to sit in and look slightly more attractive than they did when they used to sit under the old monorail station.

Ah, progres......