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The New York Times visits the provinces, vintage edition

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Until informed of this by djw yesterday, I was unaware of this classic, which is right up there with “why are there no museums in Los Angeles?

That a city priding itself on a nerdy-but-nice blend of socially liberal consciousness — Oakland of the north, some have called it — would have an N.F.L. team noted for its hyperaggressive tactics on the field, as measured by assessed or sometimes overlooked penalties, does make some Seattleites scratch their heads. 

Nobody has ever called Seattle the “Oakland of the north.” (If there was an “Oakland of the north” I guess it would be Tacoma, but not really.) And as Charles Mudede observed at the time. this is literally true:

Oakland of the north? I have never heard Seattle described in that way in the 23 years I have lived here. And what happened when I googled this oddity? I found only two references to it: One, of course, is in the NYT piece, and the other is found in a Washington CEO article about “Bremerton rising” (the PDF). The exact sentence: “[Bremerton] is the Oakland of the Northwest, The Harlem to Belltown’s SoHo, a Compton with rain.” I can forgive Washington CEO magazine for this cheap kind of suburban boosterism (it pays the bills), but not the most important newspaper in the land. Lawd, today.

Nobody has ever said “Bremerton is the Oakland of the Northwest” again either, but at least that person recognized that the “Oakland” of a metro area cannot be its largest and most famous city. And as Mudede observes, the stiff earlier in the article about drivers smiling and waving to each other routinely is also pure fiction. Obviously, one cannot expect anyone from or educated on the west coast to be on the staff of the New York Times — let’s not get crazy! — but surely they could have found someone with some history in the area to look at the draft first.

Sadly, the interview with famous local Seattle restaurateur P.F. Chang had to be left on the cutting room floor.

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