Allen Ginsberg visited Seattle in February of 1956, the year he would publish Howl. In true Beat fashion, he apparently hitchhiked up here from SF with Gary Snyder to backpack around.
Afternoon Seattle
Busride along waterfront down Yessler under street bridge to the old red Wobbly Hall–
One Big Union, posters of the Great Mandala of Labor, bleareyed dusty cardplayers dreaming behind the counter...'but these young fellers can't see ahead and we nothing to offer'–
After Snyder his little red bear and bristling Buddha mind I weeping crossed Skid Road to 10c. beer.
Labyrinth wood stairways and Greek movies under Farmers Market second hand city, Indian smoked salmon old overcoats and dry red shoes,
Green Parrot Theater, Maytime, and down to the harbor side the ships, walked on Alaska silent together–ferryboat coming faraway in mist from Bremerton Island dreamlike small on the waters of Holland to me
–and entered me head the seagull, a shriek, sentinels standing over rusty harbor iron dock work, rocks dripping under rotten wharves slime on the walls–
the seagull's small cry–inhuman not of the city, lone sentinels of God, animal birds among us indifferent, their bleak lone cries representing our souls.
A rowboat docked and chained floating in the tide by a wharf. Basho's frog. Someone left it there, it drifts.
Sailor's curio shop hung with shells and skulls a whalebone mask, Indian seas. The cities rot from oldest parts. Little red mummy from Idaho Frank H. Little your big hat high cheekbones crosseyes and song.
The cities rot from the center, the suburbs fall apart a slow apocalypse of rot the special trolleys fade
the cities rot the fires escapes hang and rust the brick turns black dust falls uncollected garbage heaps the wall
the birds invade with their cries the skid row alley creeps downtown the ancient jailhouse groans bums snore under the pavement a dark Turkish bath the cornice gapes at midnight
Seattle!–department stores full of fur coats and camping equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talking on streetcorners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds cry,
Salvation Army offers soup on rotting block, six thousand beggars groan at a meal of hopeful beans.
(Note: he mistakenly refers to Bainbridge Island as Bremerton. No harm, no foul)
In this article from Seattle Met, this particular segment stood out to me:
It’s striking to read these lines while living in the relentless newness of today’s Seattle. Ginsberg’s vision of a decrepit pre–Space Needle port town captures a candid city that does not try to conceal its age. The sites Ginsberg watched succumbing to urban decay were visual reminders that this was once a place where Yukon-bound adventurers stopped to load up on pickaxes and kill a few hours at a brothel.
And yet as the poem saunters into its closing lines, about department stores stocked with fur coats and camping equipment, we glimpse something else about the spirit of this place: an uneasy detente between ostentatious consumption and reverence for the surrounding landscape, a city bent on re-inventing itself via commerce and the conversations of “mad noontime businessmen.”
This hits hard now, as the city and its people wrangle with the incoming newness involved in the building of lots of new condos and huge high-rises that serve the new and slightly-less-new tech workers that have become a new class here. (We have always been a tech hub, but this condo creep, as I like to call it, is getting a life of its own). Nor do we want a rotting city center that doesn't try to cover its age, like the one Ginsberg saw.
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