Seattle Bicycle Tour

Yesterday, Andrew, a buddy from Denver who lives in Seattle, took me on a bicycle tour of Seattle.

We started at his place on Capitol Hill and rode down to breakfast at a coffee shop named Glo’s. The pastel brick pattern on the outside really set the tone for this eccentric restaurant.

From there we visited a few key buildings downtown including the Koolhaas designed Main Public Library and the Venturi Scott Brown designed Seattle Museum of Art (SAM). Both were closed given it was Memorial Day, but just seeing the exteriors was great.

Even though SAM was closed, the sculpture garden along the waterfront was not. Under a blue sky dotted with cottony cumulus clouds, Andrew and I walked amongst sculptures by the best and the brightest sculptors, including Calder and Serra. I’d like to learn more about the landscape architect who created this park. It zig-zags through several levels in a very fluid fashion which gives all of the works enough space to express themselves, while at the same time occupying a narrow swath of earth in between downtown and the Puget Sound. The use of concrete was fantastic, looking at the detailing along the paths, the whole park itself had the feeling of a large earthwork. Because yesterday was a holiday, Memorial day, not Father’s Day like the man outside the closed library suspected, families gathered all over the hill to sit in the grass, walk on the paths, ride in the bike lanes, and all-in-all enjoy a beautiful summer day.

Seattle is famous for the Pike Place Market where at one of the stalls whole fish are thrown. It’s certainly a sight to see a whole salmon hurling through the air. In an interesting organic growth of small restaurants, market stalls, and knick-nack shops, this building couldn’t be replicated be design. It is one of those structures that gets its identity not from the grand plan of a designer, but instead from the countless modifications all done for necessity’s sake.

After riding around downtown, we rode to the Elliot Bay Marina where we hopped on the sailboat that Andrew’s splitting 4 ways with a couple of friends. Thanks to some good connections and perceptive friends, they got the deal of the century on this yacht which was oceanworthy and fully stocked. We went for a leisurely cruise (the boat is called the Slow Belle, after all) out into the Sound and after our rum and cokes were dry, we turned around and headed back to shore. With downtown Seattle including the iconic Space Needle I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon.

From the boat yard, we rode to the Wooden Boat Center to visit Zach who went to CC. Because of the holiday, he was super busy, so we decided to catch up over dinner.

Seattle has a piece of history I found quite interesting on the Seattle Underground Tour. The original city was built on a very large tidal flat that flooded twice a day when the tides came in. So it was routine for the city to have ocean water visit the streets when tides were high. In an amazing feat of engineering and reconfiguring of the surrounding hills, walls were built around the buildings downtown making little islands. Then the streets were filled with dirt and debris wash down from the hills above. So the second storeys became the new ground floor. I heard that more earth was moved here with the water canons than in the Panama Canal. The tour took us under the sidewalk in Pioneer square to see the walls and what remains of the original first floor. There wasn’t much to see, but the idea of raising the ground 10 feet is a big thought.