Guide to Everett

I just posted my "Guide to Downtown and North Everett" with Everett's top 10 places over at my website (www.sandykaduce.com). I posted my favorite places in categories, so there are more like 30 individual favorites. I bet you didn't know it was possible for a former Seattleite and self-admitted snob to HAVE 30 favorite places in Everett! Well, it is!

This brings me to the topic of tonight's blog post--why do people always diss Everett? When I was growing up, and even when I first moved to the north end, I always looked down my nose at Everett. Everyone I knew did. And maybe our reasons for doing that made sense 20 years ago. But in the last five or ten years Everett has really transformed. Yet, people still think of it as the blighted, dying, blue-collar mill town that it was in the 1970s and 80s.

Some background might be helpful. My family has its roots in Everett--my grandfather was a personnel manager at the Weyerhaeuser mill in the late 1960s, and my family lived in Eastmont from 1967 to 1970. So, my family remembers living in Everett near the end of the time that Everett's downtown core was still a thriving community. Throughout the '60s and 70s as people moved to the suburbs and became more dependent on cars, businesses one by one moved out of downtown to malls in outlying areas. Then the lumber industry went into decline in the 1970s and '80s. By the time I was in my teens, downtown Everett was nearly a ghost town, full of empty storefronts, pawn shops, and plasma donation centers.

However, the city government and concerned citizens recognized the value in preserving and reviving the historic core of downtown Everett. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the city government worked hard to attract jobs to the area. A major success was the Navy's decision to build a homeport here. A variety of other projects and measures encouraged development and revival in downtown, most notably, the construction of the Everett Events Center and Everett Station. So far, it's working. It's not a 100% recovery--there are still a few empty buildings, mainly because a few absentee landowners have chosen not to invest in retrofitting and upgrading their buildings, so they sit empty. But, most of the storefronts in downtown are now filled with a variety of thriving businesses.

But, because Everett had a bad reputation for so long, many people still think it's the dying mill town it once was. The good news is, because of that you can still buy a decent house in Everett and not spend a fortune on it. Yes, Everett is still a blue-collar place in some respects but that kind of diversity is part of being an actual city, rather than a suburb or bedroom community. Part of being a real city is having rich and poor, young and old, white, black and all shades in between.

Everett is a success story and I think in five years, everyone will know about it. Right now, it's still something of a secret. If you've never been here (and most people who don't live nearby haven't--we are very parochial here in Puget Sound) you wouldn't know what you're missing. The word is starting to get out, but it's happening slowly. Maybe that is a good thing.

A few years ago I never thought I would say this, but I love Everett. There is a great community of people here, it has a lot of cultural and entertainment opportunities, and abundant natural beauty, yet, it is a diverse community that hasn't lost touch with its blue-collar roots. I like that about Everett. That's what keeps it from turning into a sterile, "Disneyland for the rich" like other neighborhoods that have similar attributes. Everett is a city in its own right, with all the good and bad that goes with that, yet it has a friendly, small-town feel and an energy that I, and many others enjoy.

Everett may be a secret now, but I doubt it will remain one for long.