Those Movers Who Shake Seattle

Seattle has almost none of the hassles and almost all of the amenities of many bigger American cities. As Post-Intelligencer Columnist Emmett Watson remarks, "The people of Seattle, like every place else, are into punk rock, tofu, lifespring, frozen yogurt, est and diet beer. People here are using words like parenting, ambience, trendy and psycho- babble." They also, quite often, are using words like symphony, museum and pro football.

The city of 496,000 has a thriving cultural center that includes the Seattle Art Museum's Modern Art Pavilion, the symphony and a repertory theater that counts 25,000 subscribers. The opera company, nearly as good as it is bold, puts on the complete Wagnerian Ring cycle in German and English every summer. In a burst of civic pride, voters last month approved a $19 million bond issue to build a second theater, a rehearsal wing for the opera and symphony and another art center that will house the Tutankhamun exhibition of Egyptian art in 1978. Now about the urban problems:

>Crime. The city's crime rate dropped 13% last year, the sharpest decline of any major American community.

> Blight. Seattle has rebuilt half of its city center since 1970 and renovated two previously downtrodden downtown districts, turning them into fashionable areas for restaurants, boutiques and offices.

> Urban Flight. Young couples are moving back into the city, reversing a decline in population that started in 1975. The Brookings Institution declared last year that Seattle and Omaha were the two cities outside the Sunbelt that provide better education, greater employment opportunities, higher-paying jobs and less crowded housing than their suburbs.

> Debt. The First Boston Corp., a top investment banking firm, reports that Seattle has the soundest budget and financial status of any of the 50 largest cities. The National Urban Coalition rates Seattle's bond issues tops on its own list of 25 big municipalities.

Seattle is a city that works--rand works very well --largely because it has a cadre of civic-minded businessmen who have become a kind of separate branch of government, willing to devote time and talent to improving the culture and commonweal. When one of these leaders has an idea, he has little trouble rounding up a dozen others and hammering out a plan of action.

The city's first citizen is probably Edward E. Carlson, 66, who rose from bellboy to president and chairman of Western International Hotels and then became head of United Air Lines when it acquired the hotel chain. Though United's headquarters is in Chicago, Carlson lives in Seattle and commutes between the two cities. He was the driving force and idea man behind the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, a turning point in the city's development. Not only did the $100 million bash turn a profit of $500,000, but it endowed the city with many permanent buildings, including the Cultural Center and the Space Needle, a spidery, 607-ft. structure that is Seattle's Eiffel Tower.

Another prime mover is Taul Watanabe, 57, who was briefly interned during World War II because of his Japanese ancestry but won his release, after petitioning President Roosevelt, to accept a law-school scholarship. Now a vice president of the Burlington Northern Railroad, he persuaded the presidents of six Japanese shipping companies -- all of whom he knows -- to use Seattle as their U.S. port. That move created 3,100 jobs, $50 million in annual direct benefits for the region and helped make Seattle one of the nation's leading containership ports. Watanabe was among the first to urge Dixy Lee Ray to run for Governor, and is chairman of her board of economic advisers.

James Ellis, 56, a softspoken, cerebral lawyer, has been offering urban solutions since the 1950s, when he headed the citizens' group that conceived Metro, a regional agency that has city-county jurisdiction. Long before the Federal Government started spending money for such projects, Metro mounted a campaign in the 1950s to clean up Puget Sound and Lake Washington, one of the city's aquatic play grounds. Metro later took over and revived the countywide transportation network, creating a park-ride system to bring in suburbanites, a weekend bus service to ski areas and free fares to the downtown areas.

Seattle is now enjoying the benefits of another of Ellis' grand plans, known as Forward Thrust. Voters in 1968 approved $334 million in bonds to finance 615 civic improvement projects in Ellis' package. Freeway Park, for instance, a five-acre area of greenery and waterfalls, was built on a great lid placed over a downtown thoroughfare. The program, which scattered parks and swimming pools all over town, also financed the $59.8 million stadium that Kingdome, a covered stadium that literally made Seattle a big-league city. It is the home of the Seahawks (football), the Sounders (soccer) and the Mariners (base ball). Already 3.7 million fans have crowded into the Kingdome, though it has been open only 21 months.

With all this, more is coming. Jim Ellis has proposed a plan for the Puget Sound area all the way from Vancouver, 143 miles to the north, to Olympia, 60 miles south. He envisions public financing of open spaces around urban centers, state aid to restore housing in the cities and lure back still more suburbanites, and the strengthening of downtown Seattle as the area's commercial center. Says Ellis, exuding the optimism of the frontier, "American communities can be places of beauty, civility and fulfillment -- but they happen only when people make them happen."

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