Art by Juan Ferreyra
“You’ve got the ocean crashing up against the city, and the city getting swallowed up by wilderness,” Oliver Queen tells Dinah Lance in regard to why he loves Seattle. “And then you’ve got the tech industry booming right alongside fishing and logging. We’ve got too many white yuppies, but we’ve also got a huge Asian population. A growing Hispanic community. And yeah, I could do without the right-wing nut jobs, but they’ve helped inspire the Green Party Movement. People think of all these elements as divisions, but to me they’re intersections. Seattle’s a city of intersections.”
While the above reflections may indeed sum up the factual city of Seattle, Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance actually reside in a fictional version crafted by writer Benjamin Percy for the Green Arrow: Rebirth comic book series released in 2016. Queen – secretly the superhero Green Arrow – is heir to the Queen Industries megacorporation that, according to Percy, has been the driving economic engine of Seattle since the city’s founding.
During the course of the ongoing narrative, Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance – aka Black Canary – uncover a conspiracy initiated by the company centuries earlier and an attempt to transform Seattle into a self-sustaining enclave for the rich and powerful. Along the way, Benjamin Percy and the Green Arrow comic book offer an alternative history of the region that, while fictional, offers insights into the factual history of Seattle nonetheless.
“Long before this city was founded, a man named Robin Queen decided to call this land home,” Seattle Mayor Nathan Domini explains at one point in the series. “He was an explorer, did you know that? A cartographer. He saw rich possibilities in the Puget Sound area and set up shop. He made this place first into a trading post, and then built a fishing and timber powerhouse.”
While no one by the name of Robin Queen ever played a role in the establishment of Seattle, David “Doc” Maynard was an actual pioneer who likewise saw the potential of the region. As recounted in Murray Morgan’s Skid Row: An Informal Portrait of Seattle – initially published in 1951 – Maynard left his home in Ohio for California in 1850 but fate sidetracked him to Puget Sound instead. Although Maynard never ventured into fishing, he did initially spend time cutting down trees and then leased a ship to sell the wood in San Francisco.
Doc Maynard used that money to open a general store while claiming a 640-acre tract of land in what is today Pioneer Square. Maynard also befriended the Native American Chief Seattle, and when the time came for Maynard and a small handful of fellow pioneers to choose a name for their new city, it was Maynard who suggested Seattle as a tribute.
Doc Maynard never built a “powerhouse” like Robin Queen did in Green Arrow, but he did play a major role in the further establishment of the region. Anytime new visitors arrived in Seattle, Maynard would be the first to greet them while likewise encouraging them to reside in the area. He even gave away a portion of his own land so that Henry Yesler could build the first steam mill in the Northwestern United States, and sold another tract at a low price so that a blacksmith would open up a shop.
When Seattle was incorporated as a legal entity in 1853, a formal plat detailing the city streets was a perquisite. While Doc Maynard surveyed his own property, Arthur Denny was in charge of doing the same for the other major landowners. Both groups wanted their streets to run parallel to Puget Sound, but Maynard’s property connected with his neighbors at the exact point where the waterfront curved. When a compromise couldn’t be reached, two plats were officially filed, resulting in the streets of Seattle being tied together in a haphazardly fashion – an anomaly that still exists to this day.
The Green Arrow comic book offers its own reason for the irregular layout of Seattle streets. “I assume you’ve heard of ley lines, but if not, here’s the quick and dirty explanation,” a reporter tells Green Arrow. “They’re geographic alignments of ancient energy, if you believe in that kind of thing. Standing stones, churches, altars and monuments are often built over them. To tap into their energy, like a battery. These maps I found – they indicate Seattle was built to align with the ley lines intersecting here. They resemble the points of a star.”
In 1987, the Seattle Ley-Line Project received a $5,000 grant from the Seattle Arts Commission to identify and map existing ley lands in the city and then create environmental artwork to indicate and enhance their energies. As a result, Seattle became the first city in the United States – and maybe even the world – to have its ley lines located and mapped. The paths of these ley lines were superimposed over a satellite image of Seattle, which was then printed, framed and displayed at the Department of Construction and Land Use in the Dexter Horton Building.
“Some artworks start life in fiery controversy and eventually find enthusiastic acceptance,” Seattle Arts magazine explained in its April 1993 edition. “When in 1987 an artist working with individuals from other disciplines created an artwork tracking the invisible ‘ley lines’ in the Earth’s surface, it sparked a brief but nasty battle over the separation of church and state, art and faith. The Arts Commission was accused of funding a New Age, pagan sect. Now the work hangs happily on the wall of a new home in the DCLU, where many visitors figure it must somehow relate to the City’s zoning policies.”
Considering the abundance of available timber, it should be no surprise that early Seattle was constructed from wood. It should also not be surprising that crafting an entire city out of timber made Seattle susceptible to fire, and on June 6, 1889, the inevitable happened when the boiling glue used by a carpenter’s apprentice ignited some wood chips laying nearby. The flames quickly spread, and by the end of the day over two dozen blocks of the central business district had been destroyed.
In response, Seattle not only required that all future structures be constructed from stone or brick masonry but that the region damaged by the fire be artificially elevated before rebuilding. The area had originally been soggy tide flats that quickly filled with mud whenever it rained. By building eight-feet tall retaining walls on both sides of the old streets, then filling in the space before paving over them, the area became more hospitable.
Within the world of Green Arrow, this transformation resulted in a secret “underground” beneath the city, including a mansion built in 1887 that is currently being used by the sinister Ninth Circle criminal organization. The existence of secret passageways beneath the actual Seattle, meanwhile, were only rumors until resident Bill Speidel embarked on a campaign to restore Pioneer Square in 1954, which had deteriorated during the first half of the twentieth century.
Speidel’s research led to the discovery that an “underground” did indeed exist in Seattle. The revelation received extensive press coverage, with over three hundred people writing to the Seattle Times expressing interest in touring the long-lost passageways. In 1965, the Junior Chamber of Commerce persuaded Speidel to conduct one-dollar tours on “Know Your Seattle Day.” Speidel parlayed that initial excursion into an official Underground Tour that continues to operate as a “stroll through intriguing subterranean storefronts and sidewalks entombed when the city rebuilt on top of itself after the Great Fire of 1889.”
The city of Seattle has a rich and storied history, both in the real world and the Green Arrow comic book series written by Benjamin Percy. In the factual sense, that includes an economic reliance on natural resources and a tech industry launched in the 1980s by Microsoft. Queen Industries serves that role in the fictional Green Arrow, and while it was Oliver Queen’s ancestors who crafted Seattle into the city that it later became within the comic book, the region has its own real-life pioneers who shaped its destiny as well.
“Seattle’s a city of intersections,” Oliver Queen told Dinah Lance – and standing at that intersection is a bow-and-arrow wielding superhero named Green Arrow.
Anthony Letizia