Something I wrote six years ago:
There was a time when a city could be the capital of a century, the way Paris was the capital of the 19th century. In the 20th century, particularly the second half, cities could only be the capital of a decade–for example, Washington, D.C. was the capital of the ’60s, or Los Angeles was the capital of the ’80s. The ’90s, however, had two capitals: Seattle and New York City.
As with century capitals, decade capitals have clear conclusions. Washington, D.C., came to an end with Watergate; L.A. ended with the Rodney King riots; Seattle ended with WTO; and New York ended with WTC. Now the question is this: What is the capital of this decade?
The answer has finally arrived: Chicago.
We have left the Seattle/New York period and entered the Chicago one. We get a sense of this in every sentence Chicago Fan writes:
Apart from the irony of Obama resembling McCain’s putative President-hero [Teddy Roosevelt], there will be a lot of practical results from Obama’s Chicago connections. Beyond upping the odds that Chicago will land the 2016 Olympics, I can also assure you that Hyde Park-Kenwood (Obama’s home neighborhood) has just become the safest urban neighborhood in America, despite its high crime stats
He knows that he lives at the center of the new world.
One other point: The dominance of The Windy City over the next decade also marks the end of capital-sharing arrangements and the return of the one.
But, wait, is there something we are missing? Chicago is really the capital of the next decade; Seattle and New York were the capitals of the 90s. What about the OOs? Was it just a vacuum? No. Something was there. Between the end of the Sea/NY stage and the start (November 4th) of the current one there’s nothing but the capital of the 10th century, Baghdad. It returned as a zombie capital, a negative capital, the capital of an upside down world, the capital of the Bush years.
Baghdad is the capital of the OOs.
Whats the murder rate, poverty rate, racial demographics of south of I-90?
@45, “Silicon Valley had more to do with IT expnasion in the 90s than Seattle will ever have to do with it ever. Period.”
I’m sure you’re right. But I was sort of talking about something different from weighing the actual economic contributions of Seattle vs. Silicon Valley, namely the mythology of Seattle within the American imagination (as codified by the admittedly anecdotal little plastic doo-dads manufactured for the Trivial Pursuit 90s edition.) The Bay Area has been important for a long time for lots of reasons, but Seattle didn’t really emerge onto the national and international scene until the 1990s, and when it did, the software and “dot-com” businesses were a large component of its identity. It is that cultural momentum, more than the actual dollar-amount contributions, that I think made Seattle a “symbol” for many things that embodied the American mythos of the 1990s.
Oh, and the first sub-heading in Wikipedia’s article on “culture of the 1990s” is “Grunge, Generation X, and the ‘Alternative’ Decade.”
The predominant youth culture trends of the 1990s were overwhelmingly influenced by grunge and other music styles closely associated with Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Like I said, I was a teenager in Texas at the time, and I remember getting the impression from the popular media that Seattle was all the rage.
perception and reality are often times at odds.
Sweet!
@39, where do you think Cafe Allegro and Vivace got the idea? There were espresso joints in Little Italy and Greenwich Village, Boston’s North End, and San Francisco’s North Beach, not to mention London and (ahem) Italia when the people who started Allegro were still drinking baby formula. Cafe Mediterraneum in Berkeley also long predates anything in Seattle. Espresso was a code word for “beatnik” TWENTY YEARS before the Allegro opened.
The world doesn’t start on the day the yuppies discover it.
I fled Chicago and will never return. After a few blizzards it don’t look so fucking pretty anymore. Besides, your car rusts out before it’s paid for. And those potholes! Oy vey!
I’m not sure that “pop culture trends” are the only or even the best way to judge “capitals”. Flannel shirts are just not that interesting in the long run; and they tell you less about the 1990s than, say, smiley faces do about the 1970s — another shortcut symbol without much meaning or resonance.
And nobody associates smiley faces with any city.
I think Silicon Valley’s real impact was long before the 90s, though; the original garage entrepreneurs were Bill Hewlett and David Packard, in the 1940s, before Bill Gates was born. Then, in the 1960s, things really started hopping, with Fairchild and then Apple, and a million others. While tech in Seattle has always been about one big company, the Valley has always been about HUNDREDS of companies — and “Silicon Valley” was in the vernacular twenty years before anyone ever heard of Redmond. The real driver of multiple small, innovative engineering companies in this area was always Boeing, not Microsoft.
Nowadays, I think Google (Mountain View) is at least Microsoft’s equal in “mindshare”.
Sorry if this seems lame, but isn’t it spelled CAPITOL?
Isn’t Obama from Honolulu?
Charles
Dig this
http://www.slate.com/id/2204287/
Seattle is now and has always been one of the top 5 greatest cities in the world. That is a well known fact. Chicago, NYC and especially LA are mostly fake, bullshit cities where nothing particularly original is created.
The fact that Bellevue Ave was from the Silicon Valley area in the 90s (“I WAS THERE!”) has been so incredibly enlightening as to his character that everything he’s said previously makes so much more sense.
I think Seattle did play an important role in the 90s and acted as a sort of counter-balance to the “established” east coast. We wore jeans and t-shirts to the office, so our work was different. We were surrounded by nature, so our play was different. During the 90s, Microsoft created a windows and MS Office empire, but they also made IE the dominant browser (and still is to this day), not to mention created Expedia, Slate, and MSN. Google didn’t even get it’s start until the tail end of that decade and is much more associated with the turn of the century than the 90s. Then there are the dotcoms that were based out of here, including the very successful Amazon which moved far beyond just selling books.
In the 90s, Seattle was where the future lived.
58:
You’d think people who lived on Capitol Hill, particularly those who read Marx, Benjamin, Althusser, and so forth, would know the difference between “capital” and “capitol.” Pretty funny.
Americentrist. The capital of the ’00s is Beijing. 🙂
@64 Right you are!
@58
No, “Capitols” are buildings, like the temple in Rome or the home of the legislative branch of our federal government.
A capital is a city, typically a government seat, but in this case “capital” is being used in more of a cultural and economic context.