I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between Tacoma and Seattle, and yesterday it got me thinking about a different relationship: Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Manhattan is, without a doubt, a hub of commerce, art, and so many other things it would be hard to list them all here. But Brooklyn is known for being cool. A great place to live. It's know for different kinds of art, different kinds of people, a different kind of price-per-square foot on housing (at least in comparison to Manhattan).
And it made me think: what would it take for Tacoma to have national recognition as the cool place to live on the Puget Sound? For someone to say, "Yeah, Seattle's great, but I'd want to live in Tacoma." For us to be Brooklyn to Seattle's Manhattan.
I'm not sure what it would take exactly, but I would guess that we're closer to having that perception than a lot of people might think.
Erik, you’ve hit upon a very interesting comparison here. I also think of Minneapolis-St. Paul, but the one with which I have the most familiarity is the Chicago-Milwaukee relationship. When I first moved to Milwaukee in 1987, it still very much had the “cow town” Laverne & Shirley-beer-brats-n-cheese inferiority complex. Over the course of 15 years living there I saw this begin to change. How? They had a visionary mayor who pushed a new urbanist vision for the downtown. Under his watch they built a riverwalk, transformed the lakefront, built a new convention center, rebuilt their performing arts center, built an architecturally unique new art museum, and completely razed a freeway spur that had been compartmentalizing the downtown and preventing a sense of centrality and cohesion (sound familiar?). Today Milwaukee is a beautiful, impressive city in its own right and seems to have taken its final steps out of Chicago’s shadow.
This can happen in Tacoma too; and some impressive steps have already been taken. The big difference I see is I don’t get a sense of a single, cohesive vision being advanced by a leader or a group of leaders. Consequently it seems as if the steps that have been taken thus far are rather patchwork and don’t yet hang together… thus we haven’t reached a critical mass yet. What will it take for that to happen? Time, money and leadership.
Andrew, you make some very valid observations there. All the “Twin Cities” out there (SFO/Oakland, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Manhattan/Brooklyn) benefit from quite close proximity and/or doable transit options that we lack. If you work in Minneapolis for example, it’s really easy to choose to live in St. Paul. Here, it’s like, “can I REALLY stomach that commute.” To flourish, Tacoma has to stand relatively on its own, like Milwaukee.
We really need the visionary, focused vision as well to make right all the wrongs. Urban planning isn’t like religion…you can’t just send up a prayer and be forgiven and redeemed. You end up paying for your sins, financially as well as spiritually. And, those sins accrue interest making them more expensive to pay off the longer you wait. Interestingly, most of the positives that have happened here were a result of the heydays of the Executive Council, where the vision of a couple of businessmen, armed with a vision and unfettered by politics, rolled up their sleeves and got stuff done. Today, the Council is a shadow of itself and no one has stepped into the leadership vaccum.
Tacoma has tremendous assets and we have only taken advantage of a few of them. What we do have, as Andrew correctly points out, is patchwork. We have the best urban park in the U.S. probably, but you have to drive a car to get there. We have an inspiring mountain looming over us, but we obscure it with pulp mill smoke. We have a light-rail link…to nowhere. We have a world class city just 30 miles away…30 miles and 11 hours when we get 3 inches of snow. We have a public university designed for 10,000 students …that enrolls 2500.
So, who’s the leader on a mission from god? And will those opposed get out of her/his way?
“So, who’s the leader on a mission from god?” — John, are you suggesting we need the Blues Brothers are our leaders? 🙂
I added some more to this on Facebook, and may as well add it here too:
Good thoughts, everyone!
The more I think about it, the more I realize that our relationship with Seattle is not the question I was really trying to answer.
It’s that there are a few cities nationally know for being green, indie, hubs for design and art, walkable, and good for young families. In short: cool. The obvious ones are Portland, Austin, Madison, Brooklyn (a borough, I know) and Minneapolis. Of those, Brooklyn is the only one that is not the major metropolitan city in its region, which is why it was the one I thought of when thinking about Tacoma.
So maybe the real question is: “Could Tacoma ever be on that list of cities?”
It’s a question of perception and image probably more than reality–not just other people’s perception and self-image of us, but our own. To build on @Vania’s point, we have to start thinking of ourselves as being green, indie, a hub for design and art, walkable, and good for young families before other people will.