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1. In2theknight
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   I just saw this movie on DVD for the 1st time last night. I wasn't living in Seattle during this time. I'm curious if any of this effected West Seattle in any way (marches that shut WS streets down, curfews, noticeably lower police presence, etc).
   Also, do you think this changed Seattle and its' people at all or is this the same city it was before the WTO event happened?

   Posted 2 years ago #         

2. JoB
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   i wasn't here then.. but i too am interested in people's perceptions of this...

   Posted 2 years ago #         

3. Gina
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   If you didn't need to go over the bridge, there was really no impact on West Seattle, unless you used Metro to get around. Difficult to get through downtown, so of course busses were greatly delayed, or never showed. It was the holiday season, I think Southcenter and Northgate and Bell Square benefited since shopping downtown was out of the question.

   The way I think Seattle changed was that it stopped competing to host these kind of events.

   Our city infrastructure cannot offer security to large gatherings of world leaders. Other US cities do better.

   The two secure hotels were several blocks from where conferences were. If we had a large hotel/convention center set up, I think the mobility issue would be solved. But it would not be fiscally wise.

   Posted 2 years ago #         

4. datamuse
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   I haven't seen the movie, but I remember the WTO protests themselves quite well; at the time I was working at 6th and Pike, which meant that as the week went on I had to show my Amazon.com badge to National Guardsmen to get to work; Pike Tower was inside the no-protest zone.

   What I mostly remember was getting the strong impression that SPD a) really didn't know how to do crowd control, b) hadn't been expecting such a large turnout, or c) both. I grew up in the D.C. area where large-scale protests aren't exactly rare. DCPD gets a lot of flak for a lot of things, but one thing they are very good at is effective crowd management. Meanwhile, midway through the week SPD apparently decided that pushing protesters toward Capitol Hill would be an effective dispersal method. I'm no expert, but it seems to me that shoving people into a residential neighborhood might be counterproductive.

   The other thing I remember was going to lunch partway through the week with a friend of mine who was protesting. We wound up in conversation with a WTO delegate from India who'd been shut out of the meeting and was spending his time talking with protesters instead. He told us that until then, he'd thought that Americans supported the WTO pretty uniformly. It was interesting.

   What I saw happen that week and what wound up on the news were pretty different--lots of attention on people breaking windows and setting fire to trash cans, when (as usual in my experience) the vast majority of the protesters weren't doing those kinds of things. But, you know, that's not unusual.

   I lived in WS at the time and there really wasn't any direct effect outside of downtown and the immediate environs, notably Capitol Hill.

   Do I think the protests made a difference? Not really, no. They might have, and there was some evidence for a year or so after that they were, but I think 9/11 and its aftermath overshadowed that.

   Posted 2 years ago #         

5. datamuse
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   Good point, Gina. Seattle really hasn't hosted an event of this kind since then.

   Posted 2 years ago #         

6. DM
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   I haven't seen the film yet either. Thanks for reminding me.

   Yep: Nothing disruptive happened in West Seattle.

   Long term effects to Seattle: I think folks are correct about Seattle not hosting anymore large scale controversial international events.

   This may seem unrelated, but I think it IS related: I distinctly remember the Mardi Gras riots in Pioneer Square that followed two and a half months after WTO. It was as if Seattle suddenly had a reputation as a riot town. Up till then Mardi Gras in Pioneer Square had been lively at night, but nothing like the full-on aggressive mayhem that erupted after WTO. It was as if people were ready for a fight, cause that's what you can do in Seattle. Out came the riot gear again....The Mardi Gras riots fell out of the news almost immediately because Seattle and the region experienced a significant earthquake the morning after the last riot. As I recall it took a couple years for the police to NOT show up in full riot gear for Mardi Gras in Pioneer Square. Now it's a minor yearly blip on the map.

   The WTO was such a complex situation. There may have been other lasting effects in Seattle that I'm not aware of. I'd be curious to here what people think.

   Posted 2 years ago #         

7. datamuse
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   WTO was the inception of the Infernal Noise Brigade.

   I also recall it as the only example I can think of where Greenpeace and the Teamsters showed up to a protest on the same side. But I don't have the impression that those kinds of alliances lasted.

   Yeah, that followed Mardi Gras was...weird.

   Posted 2 years ago #         

8. Bonnie
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   We were on vacation out of the country at the time that happened. So I didn't see any of it!

   Posted 2 years ago #         

9. WSB
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   It happened during my 2-year break from TV ... I was the local executive producer for ABCNEWS.com. Realized before long it was a national story and we needed to get folks downtown. The young man who wound up in the middle of it, Jonathan Dube, got an award because of his work. He also got tear gas in his eyes.

   No one has mentioned this yet so I will. One major West Seattle effect. It's part of what led to West Seattleite Greg Nickels' election as mayor. The then-mayor, Paul Schell, was considered so ineffectual during this event and then during Mardi Gras 2001 (which was followed IMMEDIATELY by the Nisqually earthquake ... I was at Q13 the day of the quake for my job interview, having been laid off by Disney earlier in the year, and the quake hit when everyone was set up for a special report from City Hall as the mayor and others were going to address the MG rioting) ... that Schell didn't even make it out of the 2001 primary.

   Another West Seattleite's political fortune is tied to that - city attorney Tom Carr. Then-city attorney Mark Sidran didn't run for re-election because he chose to run for mayor in 2001 instead. He lost to Nickels. Carr won the city attorney's job that year (and is running for a third term this year).

   -TR, longtime Seattle political wonk

   p.s. 10 years later, the aforementioned young journalist, Jon Dube, has risen to a VP position at ABCNEWS.com ... the site was based here in Seattle in its early years but is now based near the main network in New York - I moved to other work in Disney after declining relocation to NY when ABCNEWS.com moved in early 2000. Where DOES the time go ...

   Posted 2 years ago #         

10. JoB
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    TR..

    time passes but every event is a stepping stone to another.. as you pointed out so well.

    Posted 2 years ago #         

11. Aim
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    It's also about the time that Seattle, as a general rule, went from having a silly sense of humor about itself to being so freakin serious about every damned thing.

    Posted 2 years ago #         

12. Trick
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    I was running a couple eatery's across the street from the curfew zone in Belltown.
    One had delegates in there, the other had protesters meeting to discuss the days events.
    Looking across the street seeing the police on horses all lined up. I ran across the street to ask the commander what he recommend I do if the protest crosses the street.
    He recommended I lock the doors and keep the guests away from the large windows we had.
    It was the first time I noticed that our police were no longer police but outfitted military soldiers with local made batongs, helmets, all black uniforms, anonymous officers, tear gas and rubber bullets.
    Watching the Iran protests and what happened to them was really no different than what happened here in our lovely emerald city. It was almost surreal at times.

    Posted 2 years ago #         

13. JoB
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    Trick...

    i experienced the same thing in Portland in the late sixties with the infamous park blocks incident.

    My baby and i were safe because although they were not allowing people to leave the park (even mothers with children) a policeman accompanied me to our door and tried the key himself. Had it not fit that door next door to the park.. i would have been forced to stay in the park and been there when they charged...

    i keep thinking we are done with this .. but i am not sure we ever will be. Needless to say.. that not the face of community policing any of us prefer...

    Posted 2 years ago #         

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