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Hyperbole and Seattle. A fine combination. Read it and giggle. Maybe even guffaw. Just once .

The Surprisingly Scandalous Early History of Seattle:

When [Doc] Maynard left Cleveland in 1850, he was married to a woman named Lydia. She eventually filed for divorce on grounds of desertion, but she never completed the divorce. Before arriving in Seattle, the good doctor circulated amongst several wagon trains, helping to fight cholera. While serving as the leader on a small wagon train that brought him to Puget Sound, he fell in love with a widow, Catherine Troutman Broshears. At first, her brother refused her permission to remarry, but after Maynard made a good deal of money in Seattle, he relented and the couple was married.

Years later, Maynard’s first wife sold off her share of property and the man who purchased it then went after Maynard, claiming he was owed everything that was Lydia’s since the couple was never officially divorced. Lydia came to Seattle to help defend her husband and Catherine and the doctor became friends with her and let her live in their home. According to Speidel, Doc Maynard was the only resident that was commonly seen with one wife on each arm.

Not that surprising, really. Just people who didn’t quite “fit” anywhere else pushing north and west until they ran out of United States (Alaska excluded). In modern Bellingham we see this today in microcosm.

I’ve been enjoying browsing the Seattle Municipal Archives on Flickr.

I was particularly taken by this image of a proposed design for Waterfront Park near the Seattle Aquarium.

The basic structure of the park is very similar to what was built—the half-circle structure can be seen on Google Maps—although the specific details involving the neighboring buildings have been erased by numerous renovations. The semi-circular copse of trees remains

The 70s architecture is quite reminiscent of the Seattle Center’s 1962 World’s Fair in its angular, lily-pad-like walkways. These walkways are cute and stylish in the enclosed courtyard of the pavilions which were turned into the Seattle Science Center, but in a very public setting of an unsecured park the walkways must have been deemed to be too dangerous. In retrospect, this seems wise given the number of homeless people and drunks that populate the park.

I’m glad that the Seattle Municipal Archives are digging back into their past and sharing it with the world. Each picture can illuminate a great number of could-have-beens and almost-was’ which help to explain our present.

You should read Dave Winer’s excellent meditation on the meaning of parks, and how parks and back yards are not entirely fungible:

He said people need parks in NYC because they don’t have back yards.

This struck me as completely backwards!

I tried to explain how that was just one perspective, but I failed. Later I thought of the proper way of expressing it.

In Seattle they need back yards because they don’t have parks. (I know they have parks, but stay with me here…)

I’d have to concur. As someone who grew up with a back yard, and now has none—even though I live in the “green-country”—I find that a back yard is about isolation. The lack of an exclusionary outdoor space has led me to enjoy more variety in my explorations out-of-doors. Parks have the additional advantage for introverts that you can be among people without necessarily interacting with them.