The three train stations embedded in the three major cities of the Pacific
Northwest – Vancouver, Seattle, Portland – are in the processes of being resurrected.
And now many of us are waiting: Will they (can they) bring together the main
centers and make for all of us one big urban reality?
This feature package is not a professional study of this possibility, or a
hard look at its feasibility, or a useful estimate of the losses and benefits
of increased intercity travel. It is instead a soft experiment by five writers
(myself, Bess Lovejoy, Matthew Stadler, Nic Veroli and Amy Kate Horn) and a
photographer (architect Jerry Garcia). A soft experiment that puts some of these
emerging energies into a language that drifts between what has happened in the
(real/unreal) past and what can happen in the (real/unreal) future. For us,
something is definitely happening, and so we must look at this something and
say something about it.
