William Faulkner, arguably America's best 20th-century novelist, once said: "The past isn't even the past."
Among other things, Faulkner seems to be implying in this brief and often quoted soundbite that yesterday is still a strong presence in today's world, and that the social and cultural past shapes the present and the future.
Of course Faulkner lived in a small college town in deepest Mississippi, before said town - Oxford - became the hip home of John Grisham. He was talking about the Old South, not Seattle.
But I think his idea might still apply to those of us up here in this once-hidden, far-left corner of America.
It seems telling to me, concerning where the modern world is going, when your town's most famous living writer changes from Faulkner to the author of "The Firm."
But Oxford's slide from being the home of a Nobel Prize winner to the home of a guy who writes ostensible thrillers about the sufferings of lawyers does prove, for better or worse, that the world is always changing, past be damned
Who knows what Faulkner would think about his hometown in 2004, not to mention today's Seattle?
What sent my scattered mind scurrying back to Faulkner was the article by Russ Zabel (and a letter on the same subject) in the Jan. 28 Queen Anne News, about the razing of the old J.C. Black mansion, formerly located at 222 W. Highland Drive.
The article claimed that "history buffs and neighbors alike" were "outraged" that the house was torn down.
The Black mansion, designed by Andrew Willatsen, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, was built around 1914. The house was not a protected historical landmark, so legally the people who razed the structure had every right.
But legalities, those same manmade strictures that allowed O.J. and Richard Nixon to walk, don't interest me that much in this instance.
I'm much more concerned about whether the destruction of an old, albeit beautiful, house really matters much in the day-to-day life we're all sharing right now.
By Faulkner's lights, a mistake was made.
Personally, although I don't remember the Black house specifically, I've always enjoyed strolling around Queen Anne Hill looking at the oddly attractive hodgepodge of architecture from back in the day, when everyone who made a little money wanted everyone else to know about their good fortune.
But is one fewer beautiful old dwelling such a big deal?
Cincinnati has some inner-city neighborhoods full of huge mansions that were built by 19th-century brewery barons for their families; these 20- and 30-room "homes" now afford housing to four to 12 separate groups of poorer, less ostentatious folk. Cincinnati is a German town; they don't tear down much of anything ("Paint over the rot, Hans, and put out poison for the rats... we'll rent to folks newly arrived from Kentucky").
But newish cities, especially cities on the edge of things, are always changing. New people arrive, old people flee or die, and entire neighborhoods are altered.
I interviewed Suzie Burke for this same newspaper a couple of years ago, and she was more than willing to talk about her influence on the changes that have taken place in Fremont over the past 20 years. It is a simple fact that the working-class, biker-bar Fremont I enjoyed hanging out in 20 years ago, when I first arrived here, is deader than Al Sharpton's presidential bid. Much of that change took place on Burke's watch.
Is that a good change, or a bad change?
I don't like the boutique-filled, new Fremont, which to my jaundiced eye looks like a lot of other parts of the new Seattle: strolling grounds for consumers with more money than taste.
But I understand why my Fremont was destroyed.
Much closer to home, the recent closure of Sorry Charlie's, a Lower Queen Anne piano bar without glitz but with that rapidly disappearing thing called urban character, brought home to me even more painfully than old Fremont's demise that no business (or structure) in this city is exempt from destruction.
In the same Jan. 28 News, publisher Mike Dillon reviewed the 50-year-old book "Skid Road," about the old Seattle waterfront, and also talked about how the downtown waterfront has changed.
Like it or not, Seattle - and Queen Anne - unlike a more backward place like Cincinnati, is not invested in the past the way Faulkner would have us believe it is important to be.
Here, the past is only still present in a few books and newspapers, once that past isn't deemed profitable enough to be allowed to live.
In just the two decades I've lived here, Seattle has changed from an earthy, friendly city - a hearty place where the food was filling and the people were sparky and feisty, but tolerant in a deeply real way - to a city more and more like a decorously bad copy of the supposedly hated Los Angeles to the south. Others ridiculously claim the "new" Seattle is a more civil, polite version of New York.
These claims would be laughable if they weren't so sad.
Seattle, not that long ago, had a soul and a character all its own.
Nowadays, one can argue, the soul has left the urban body, and the Seattle character has altered from a liberal longshoreman of a place to an overgrown town full of poseurs, sightlessly driving four-wheel vehicles that have never seen a mountain, roughshod over a very good (not great) provincial city's collapse into a place like so many other places.
Compared to that wholesale destruction, one big old house fewer on Queen Anne Hill doesn't seem as important to me as it evidently does to some others.
But then maybe those folks decrying the razing of the Black mansion would say, every action that destroys a piece of the old Seattle adds to the overall loss of a once good place.
I guess I couldn't argue with that.
Dennis Wilken is a columnist for the Magnolia News. He can be reached for further verbal abuse at mptimes@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
