PAUL DORPAT
INTERVIEWED BY DAVID HIRNING
THE FREE PRESS
Paul Dorpat, like many of the people you'll find in Seattle these days, did not grow up in this area. Dorpat came to the Northwest from California - but he's not one of the masses who moved here from the "Sunshine State" in the 1980s. Dorpat moved here in the 1960s, when Seattle was still in many ways a backwater burg, and he has lived here ever since.
What makes Dorpat rather unique, especially among those who are not natives, is that he has spent most of his professional life researching and chronicling his adopted hometown. A philosophy grad school dropout, Dorpat has dabbled in filmmaking and journalism, including the founding and editing of a '60s alternative journal called the Helix, which counted novelist Tom Robbins among its writers. But Dorpat is best known as the man who collects and publishes photographs of the Seattle of the past. His Sunday column for the Seattle Times, "Seattle Then And Now," has become a fixture in the Pacific Magazine each week.
Dorpat's collection culminated last year in a well-received video, "Seattle Chronicle," which contains hundreds of revealing photographs along with Dorpat's narration of Seattle's transformation.
With Seattle rushing headlong into the nineties, becoming a true cosmopolitan city even as long-time residents fight sprawl, the Free Press decided to talk with one who knows so much about where the city has been. The following interview with staff writer David Hirning paints a picture of a city and a country that face enormous challenges.
How long have you been a historian? How'd you get started?
I suppose that for the last 20 years I have been studying local history, largely involved in searching for pictorial evidences of the past - mostly photographs, but other things as well. And of course, in that context, I've also done a lot of reading in local history.
The way I got started doing history was accidental. I'd always had the talents for it, the capacities for it: I had a strong topographical sense, a good memory, a curiousity for a broad variety of subjects. History really involves you in that broad, Catholic curiosity. So I was made for it in a way, and I had the philosophical underpinnings, and all that. But then what happened is a friend of mine from college asked me to help him research the history of a business he was reopening, the Merchant's Cafe. So I helped him research that, and that's what got me started in the subject.
How's the history business these days?
There are a lot more people involved in doing local history (in Seattle) now than when I started doing it.
Why do you think that is?
Well, you see the local city is so alienated in its hum-drum qualities and rationalized behaviors. Any American city, or European city for that matter, is so invested with the rationality that's designed around consumption and promoting commodities, and the egos of the powers that be, that people are alienated. A lot of them hope to find some surcease, some balm from this continuing pain and alienation, by the study of history. So I think its kind of like a humanistic and intelligent alternative to religion. (Laughs)
What does local history, in particular, do for people?
If you know something about the history of your community, it gives a kind of depth to your experience of the present. It resonates ... you're more informed. You have a greater sense of the diverse human activity that went into creating this ... monster. It helps you live a better life. I know that from all the responses I get from people - I get really heartfelt responses from people, that they're really appreciative of being able to understand the history of their community better through this stuff.
Why do people react so strongly to your type of history, the photographs?
Most people know my work through the Times, where I use repeat photography to return to a historical situation, and take a contemporary photograph of a scene for which I have a historical photograph. What happens frequently is that the contemporary scene seems depressingly deteriorated in condition, or in spiritual values, or in aesthetic qualities, from the historical. Someone called me, in a review, the city's principal photographer of parking lots, because so much of the stuff I had shot to show what had taken the place of historical structures revealed a parking lot.
Is that some symbol, of the emptiness of the modern city? I mean, people park their cars and just leave them there. The lots kind of take over (the city).
Yeah, they take a lot of land, and make the environment even more bleak than it already is. First of all, the modern city is designed as a rational structure, usually with grids, that violates the general topography, just runs rampants over it. Or in the case of Seattle, cuts down the hills.
It used to be that everything was about growth and expansion in cities, and in all of America. Somehow that changed, especially here, and people started to say - enough. When did that happen, and why?
Well, there are inexorable forces operating in society, and in the expansion of urban cores. As population increases, as people more and more move into the cities - and this is happening practically everywhere - they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger, they're sprawling, they're getting uglier, they're getting more polluted, they're getting more violent. All the things that could have been predicted, by creating cities which were bigger than manageable, bigger than it was possible for people to rule by.
So we're there, at the point of being out of control?
Oh, we've been there for a long time. We're out of control. All these little things the politicians do in an attempt to ameliorate these great forces is pretty petty.
So it's inexorable, as you say, meaning we can't stop it?
Well, short of revolution.
Tell me about the alternative paper you helped found in the 1960s, The Helix. Where did that come from?
The moment of inspiration for the Helix came in the office of the Free University, a kind of alternative to the big university, which is what the UW is. One of the persons I had managed to interest in coming to the Free University and teaching was Paul Sawyer, who was a Unitarian preacher and a Harvard grad. A very brilliant guy, and quite an artist really. He suggested to me - "What we should do," as I remember it, and I remember where he stood in the room and everything, he said "Why don't we create a paper - something like the Berkley Barb."
So the Berkley Barb was kind of a model?
Well, it was hardly a model, really, when it comes right down to it. The paper we did was quite unique, really; you'd have to use a number of models. And also, through time the Helix changed a lot, and within any one issue. As the editor, I can tell you I only read about 40 percent of the copy! (laughs) But there were a lot of really good writers, and good talents.
They were not materialists in any sense - their priorities did not involve making money or accumulating things. Their priority was to be on the street, to be involved. And the street was not in any sense like the street as you know it today - I mean it was really a creative place, it was really a "Living Ave." There were a lot of friendships made there, a lot of notions created there that you could go off somewhere else and do them.
Why do we still yearn for the sixties?
The yearning for the 1960s is actually the yearning for the Greek polis. It's yearning for smaller communities or vital neighborhoods, or the medieval commune, the free city.
Is that type of society not going to happen again?
As long as we're asleep in the now, and (don't) have the imagination to envision the alternatives, as happened in the Depression and in the 1960s. Unfortunately, in both those instances, it required resistance, it required a setting in which the inequities and irrationality of the established system was so obvious, by an unjust war in Vietnam, and by an economics that had gone amok during the Depression, that the resistance to those woke people up and they thought of new forms of relating to each other. So I suspect that the sprawl, the alienation, and the violence - all the dystopic, ghastly qualities of the modern arrangement - will hopefully not result in more mayhem, but will ... people are bright, they have great potential for being productive and creative, and lets hope that were able to respond and create more just arrangements. I don't know how it's gonna happen, though.
Where do you direct your energies to help make a difference in the future of this area, of society?
I think the solutions to the contemporary problems need to be so extensive and radical that I can't really attend to the details that well, because it seems so frustrating. So I'm inclined to think I have a future with fiction, with dreams, with the sort of Utopian scheming, in maybe a fictional form. This also relates to my activity as an escape into the past. Although I'm not a purveyor intentionally of nostalgia, I think what I do is complex and enriching, it still is in some sense a criticism of the present. So I would hope for a more egalitarian, creative future.
Finally, I wanted to ask you, "Whither Seattle?" That is, where do you find the essence of the city?
I think Seattle's topography, its hills, how the water and the land imbricates, in so many fantastic kinds of overlappings. They weren't able, even with all their engineering efforts, to destroy that very significantly. And that variety is a very important part of this town. And also the natural surrounds. It's sort of a natural ground of being that exists beneath a society, that sort of has this great imagination, that would suggest perhaps that what we put on top of it has the hope of being equal to the imagination of the setting.
Seattle Chronicle, a two-hour video on early Seattle history, is available for $29.95 from Tartu Publications, P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.
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Contents on this page were published in the February/March, 1994 edition of the Washington Free
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