From Crosscut: “The media is full of stories bemoaning change in Seattle. Old cafes closing, landmarks demolished, efforts to save legacy businesses like that dive bar down the street. There are more construction cranes dotting the skyline than in any other city in America. Locals, the numbers suggest, have started leaving the city in droves. A group of artists has launched a new effort to generate discussion of the Seattle that was by embracing stories and places that are now the city’s “ghosts.” Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times wonders if response to the city’s unprecedented growth is a new boom in nostalgia.
“Folks have long snickered at the idea of nostalgia in Seattle. They tell those of us who worry about historic preservation that the city is too young, too new, too much a work-in-progress to evoke such emotions. Nostalgia is what holds us back. It’s an Old World attitude, not a frontier frame of mind. We have been told repeatedly that the past is mere baggage, the thing we came to escape by building anew on Puget Sound….”