View of a Lost World

The story of a machine that shows us the past, the present and perhaps the future of a landscape we continue to make disappear.

Driving in from the Eastside on the Viaduct the other day, I was struck by how much we’ll miss this wide view of Seattle. Finding a clear  perspective on the city has never been easy — this is as true now as it was in 1851, when the Denny Party first founded Seattle across Elliott Bay, in what is now called West Seattle. After six months on that side of the water, buffeted by rain and wind, they conducted soundings, found a deep natural harbor on the east side of the bay and decided to decamp.

In the mid-1990s I put together a team for a public art project that came to be known as the Alki/Duwamish Culture Trail. It winds around Alki Beach — where the Dennys and their cohorts first camped — and moves south along the Duwamish Waterway (which was an actual river when the settlers arrived). I worked on the project with two fine Native American artists, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Joe Feddersen.
We were charged by the Seattle Arts Commission with installing public art along eighteen miles of bike and pedestrian trails. We wanted the art to provide as many perspectives as possible on Seattle’s history on each side of the bay.  When the project was complete, one hundred pieces would be embedded in the concrete paths.  Along the way, I found myself caught up in a side project.

As the three of us surveyed the ground around Alki, we spent many hours looking out at the water.  I had located some old photographs of the long-since-demolished Luna Park; I wished people could see what had once been out there in the water. I wanted to create something that literally superimposed the past over the present.

I sketched out a viewing apparatus that I thought might do just that — yet I had no idea how it would actually work or how to make it. I contacted my astronomer friend Woody Sullivan and asked if he knew anyone who might be able to help me with the viewers. He said he knew just the person: Ed Mannery, who designed telescopes for the UW.

I tracked Ed down and tried to articulate my idea. I told him that since the viewers were to be placed at the beach, they had to be bulletproof, be impervious to sand, have no moving parts and preferably not use any electricity.

Ed set to work making models, and we went through several iterations as the viewer took shape. In the end he created an elegant, robust solution. Seen in the proper light, between the view and the visitor’s eye there floats another view, also in focus. This is a view of what came before, like Luna Park, a disappeared world that exists only in photographs. Through the science of mirrors and optics and the principles of light refraction both views come to the eye at the same time.

I like to think the viewers offer us a chance to consider our collective role in the fate of landscapes.  We tend to think of landscapes as pretty much there. Yet they were formed by dynamic forces unleashed long ago, then tinkered with by people. Our area has been particularly affected by man’s tendency to move land around. We have made rivers run backwards or disappear, lowered lakes and opened them to the sea, turned hillsides into islands and regraded whole sections of the city.

We undertook these large-scale changes with a great sense of purpose.  In retrospect, that purpose now seems much more willful than necessary, the changes often as destructive as beneficial. Which leads to the question: Because we can envision changing a place dramatically, should we? These days, one hears a great deal about “visions” for our region, our city, our neighborhood, always seeming to contain lots of promise, just as they did a century ago. As any artist knows, the realm of visions is a powerful place, and it can eclipse the world in ways both redemptive and harmful. We have to be careful what we see in the region’s future, knowing that it might look very different in the light of day than it does in the half-light of envisioned tomorrows. 

Don Fels is an artist living in Fall City. His latest project also considers change to our region’s landscape over time. For more information, visit burkemuseum.org/waterlines.