Nickels tries satire to drum up interest in waterfront tunnel

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Thursday, May 25, 2006 · Last updated 11:35 a.m. PT

Nickels tries satire to drum up interest in waterfront tunnel

By LARRY LANGE
P-I REPORTER

Seattle's mayor is trying a new way to get a point across in his campaign to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel: satire.

SATIRE ALERT!

Watch the video (QuickTime required)

Mayor Greg Nickels, in a speech Wednesday touting the tunnel to the Rotary Club of Seattle, played a two-minute video spoofing the viaduct controversy by quoting an imaginary "Committee to Save Big Ugly Things," whose spokesman uttered tongue-in-cheek warnings about removing the viaduct from the waterfront.

The spokesman lamented the tearing down of other less-than-attractive structures in recent years, such as the Kingdome and the Queen Anne blob.

The video warned that by removing the viaduct, the improved waterfront view would so distract downtown office workers that their productivity would plummet. Picnickers attracted to an open space without the viaduct would simply increase the ant and fly population, the announcer intoned, while couples' romantic strolls to enjoy the new view would result in unwanted pregnancies that "are preceded by romantic activity."

"We say stop the madness," the announcer pleaded with a straight face.

"And consider this -- if the mayor does get rid of the viaduct, you know what's next," the announcer said, just before a picture of the controversial Experience Music Project at the Seattle Center appeared on the screen. "Please help."

There's no contact information for the Committee to Save Big Ugly Things on the video. The committee is a figment of Nickels' staff's collective imaginations and doesn't exist. Nickels' spokeswoman, Marianne Bichsel, said the video was meant to show that "rebuilding the big, ugly viaduct would be a huge mistake, and to show in a humorous way just how bad it would be to rebuild it."

The video, played for the first time at the Rotary meeting, "was a group effort," Bichsel said. The decision about what to do with the viaduct is a serious one, "but sometimes using humor to get your point across is the best way to do it," she said.

More to the point, the mayor's staff was trying to make sure it got heard amid the recent flurry of media stories about other options -- such as retrofitting the existing viaduct, replacing the old viaduct with a new one, or tearing down the viaduct and dispersing the traffic on surface streets and into buses (the subject of a long story in Tuesday's Seattle P-I).

Bichsel said no public money was directly spent on the video, though the mayor's staff did dream it up. It was produced at the Seattle Channel. A tunnel-advocacy group, Citizens for a Better Waterfront, will pay the expense of making the video, which amounted to about $1,000, Bichsel said.

She also said the city isn't advocating that the Experience Music Project be torn down, but used it as a metaphor in the video for an unusually shaped structure -- like the viaduct -- that evokes a variety of reactions.

A spokesman for the Experience Music Project, Christian-Felipe Quilici, said he didn't take offense at the video when he saw it. The EMP building "inspires very strong opinions," he said. "You can love it or not love it."

Like the viaduct?

"I suppose. But I don't know how many people love the viaduct. I actually do know people who love the (EMP) building."

A spokesman for a group trying to preserve and repair the viaduct, however, said the video was in "bad taste." because it seemed a slam against viaduct-advocacy groups like his own.

There are viaduct issues "that we have argued, fought about in this town for decades -- view preservation, historic preservation, economic development," said Art Skolnik of the Viaduct Preservation Group. "This is the mayor who represents all citizens and he should be encouraging our citizens to speak up, get involved, come up with creative ideas (about the viaduct). He should be the bandleader for doing the right thing. Whether he agrees with it or not he should be encouraging these groups."

In an e-mail Skolnik had his own idea for the mayor's message: "Ignore him."

More headlines and info from Belltown, Downtown, Queen Anne, Sodo, West Seattle.

P-I reporter Larry Lange can be reached at 206-448-8313 or larrylange@seattlepi.com.

Soundoff (Read 13 comments)
Other cities have replaced elevated freeways with ground-level boulevards. Given recent discussions of this, do you think this is an option that would work in Seattle?

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