Eccentric Seattle: Pillars and Pariahs Who Made the City Not Such a Boring Place After All [Paperback]

J. Kingston Pierce (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2003

In Eccentric Seattle, readers explore the Emerald City’s troubled, tragic, and bawdy past as well as the more familiar, rosy portrayals. A visitor in 1897, at the height of the raucous Klondike gold rush, called the Pacific Northwest’s most ambitious city "more wicked than Sodom." Just over a decade later, President William Howard Taft—speaking with greater generosity, or perhaps less skepticism—declared the town to be "one of the most magnificent combinations of modern city and medieval forest...that has ever delighted the eye of men in this or any other country."

The truth, as J. Kingston Pierce shows in this irreverent account of Seattle’s past, has always been somewhere in the middle. It was there, after all, where burghers once plotted to import "pure young ladies" from the East to marry local loggers...where big-dreaming bankers embezzled funds to raise a hotel in their own honor...where a bogus religious prophet was "shot down like a dog," while the press cheered...where a canny woman’s political coup helped land her the mayor’s post...where irate shipyard workers brought about America’s first general strike...and where the Happy Face, that ubiquitous "symbol of abject naïvete," was born. Whether about famous or ordinary citizens, Pierce’s selection of colorful anecdotes provides captivating reading.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I like this book immensely. J. Kingston Pierce knows how to have a good time with history." -- Richard Hobbs, historian and author

About the Author

J. Kingston Pierce is a longtime Seattle editor and author, whose taste for the obscure and outlandish elements of America’s heritage has led him to write "San Francisco, You’re History!", "America’s Historic Trails with Tom Bodett," and numerous essays for Northwest and national publications.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Washington State Univ Pr (September 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874222699
• ISBN-13: 978-0874222692
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,519,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The stories that made Seattle, November 21, 2003

By 

Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eccentric Seattle: Pillars and Pariahs Who Made the City Not Such a Boring Place After All (Paperback)

Seattle's current self-indulgent concept of itself is of a comfortable, jets-rain-and-flannel-shirts backwater now finally being forced to wrestle with the fact that it's become a "big city." But as J. Kingston Pierce's subtitle suggests -- and his interesting and entertaining history reveals -- that vision of Seattle's past, if it was ever accurate, was at best only an interlude between the Emerald City's rowdy origins and the fast-paced *urbs* we are today.

For much of its early history, Seattle was a quintessential frontier town. And from that standpoint, many of the people to whom the author introduces us didn't really strike me as that "eccentric" at all. On the contrary, they seemed like the fairly standard character types one found in many American frontier settlements: the brothel keepers, the moralists, the criminals on the lam, the get-rich-quick artists, the Horatio Algers determined to make a fortune through hard work, the people who failed Back East and came west to start over, and, inevitably, the politicians.

Though these characters are familiar, Pierce does a fine job weaving them into the interesting tapestry that is Seattle history, and showing how they continued to affect the city even after its frontier days were long dead.

I for one can hardly wander through a city without wondering what kind of history took place there, what it looked like 100 years ago, and how it became what it is. The "sense of place" is very important to me. I understand Seattle a lot better for having read this book. Pierce has given faces and stories to many of the names that stare back at us from building fronts and street signs, uncovered important landmarks (literal and figurative) in the city's history, and generally done a good job proving the argument his subtitle asserts.

If, as Winston Churchill suggested, how clearly you see the past shapes how clearly you'll see the future, anyone interested in the future of Seattle (or, less pretentiously, anyone simply interested in some entertaining true stories about places that may already be familiar to you) should definitely get to know this book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fun and informative collection for tourists, January 9, 2004

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eccentric Seattle: Pillars and Pariahs Who Made the City Not Such a Boring Place After All (Paperback)

Eccentric Seattle: Pillars And Pariahs Who Made The City Not Such A Boring Place After All by longtime Seattle editor and author J. Kingston Pierce is an engaging regional history of the great city of Seattle, Washington. Kingston Pierce's keen interest in unusual aspects of history are reflected in the sometimes bizarre anecdotes (mothers urging their children to stuff salt up their noses, scores of proper Victorian ladies forced to climb 8 to 30 foot high ladders) he's gathered and included in Eccentric Seattle, stories stretching through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to present a rollicking composite picture. Eccentric Seattle is a fun and informative collection for tourists or residents of Seattle to read through, and a highly recommended contribution to American Regional History.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant & entertaining history, March 27, 2006

By 

Thomas C. Wilmer - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eccentric Seattle: Pillars and Pariahs Who Made the City Not Such a Boring Place After All (Paperback)

An engaging and captivating read. I sure wish someone like Mr. Pierce had taught history at my high school! This guy breaths life into history with humor, passion and brilliant insights. Pierce obviously loves history and manages to make it all come alive through his deft wordsmithing. As I delved deeper into the book, it became obvious that before ever writing a word, Pierce must have spent many months doing his research (including tracking down, across the Northwest and around the country, living descendents of his historic, eccentric characters.It is also a friendly read. Each eveninig before bed I'd devour another chapter. Sadly, after I finished the book I found myself foraging through the table of contents, like a depleted tin of almond roca, in hopes that just possibly I had overlooked a morsel or even a crumb of his delightful tales of Seattle's historic characters, charlatans, swindlers, realtors and hustlers. Bravo Mr. Pierce!