Incorporate
The following essay is a draft of an excerpt from my working manuscript.
Sometime around 2009 — right when Facebook was becoming something that “everyone” did instead of just college students — a proliferation of a certain kind of Facebook group started blooming.
“You know you’re from Shaker Heights if…” or “You know you grew up in Fort Collins, CO if you remember…” A quick Google search of “Facebook accounts of places you grew up” harvests page upon page of search results. Toward the top of my own search is a group in Placentia, California; the description reads, “This group is for anyone who grew up in or lives in Placentia, California. Not PlacenTA…Placentia! Please keep the posts to things about, from, involving Placentia. Some of you may have lived in Brea, Fullerton, Yorba Linda, or Anah[e]im Hills and still worked or were educated in the P~YL School District like El Dorado, Valencia, or El Camino…you are welcome.” Noted.
People have a lot to say about their hometowns — they have thoughts about the possibly amorphous borders of what constitutes the place, what’s different or “ruined” about the area since they lived there, and even what years of residence are considered most “authentic.” And thanks to the internet, they can share these thoughts with everyone else. The Placentia group happens to be public, which means that anyone with a Facebook account can see what others post, and a scan shows me that it’s a mix of announcements (the Placentia Chamber of Commerce shares about events), people’s unearthed treasures (softball badges; then-and-now reunion photos; old newspaper advertisements showing fabric softener for 69 cents, Sirloin Tip Roast for $1.29 per pound, and 4 avocados for 69 cents — remember this is California), and open-ended questions to provoke hundreds of people to reply: “What year did you move to Placentia?”
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The “I Miss Retro Bellevue” Facebook group banner.
The Placentia group is not so dissimilar from a Facebook group that I am a member of for my hometown — Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle.
This group is a private group called “I Miss Retro Bellevue.” Here’s the description: “For people who grew up in and remember Bellevue, WA before 1992…this page is a Nostalgic view of our town — for you to post memories, photos, and share thoughts about what Bellevue was like before it was…ahem…like it is now.”
Bellevue residents celebrating the LOOK Magazine designation.
© MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection
Why the “ahem”? Compared to the last place I lived prior to my current residence — an 18,000-person, 200-year-old suburb of Boston that wears the “ruralburbia” title all too well — Bellevue’s growth in the 75 years since it officially became a city makes it look like from-nothing-to-something Abu Dhabi compared to steady Sudbury, Massachusetts, where the roads and traffic patterns seemingly still reference passage-ways designed for horses. Bellevue was incorporated with a “third-class city” designation on March 31, 1953. During Washington’s early statehood — keep in mind that this didn’t happen until 1889, more than 100 years after the formation of Delaware, the first established state in the United States, as well as Massachusetts of course — cities were classified by population. A third-class city had between 1,500 and 10,000 residents, and at the time of its incorporation, Bellevue had 5,950 residents. In 1955, LOOK magazine declared Bellevue’s designation as an “All-American City,” a title granted by the National Civic League to cities since 1949. The current description of this award reads as such: “The All-America City Award recognizes communities that leverage civic engagement, collaboration, inclusiveness and innovation to successfully address local issues.” Although the metrics and judging are difficult to pin down, one would be hard-pressed to see this award as something that would actually discourage residents from taking pride in their home. However “squishy” it might be, the award is a positive — the National Civic League cites the somewhat vague trifecta of benefits as “Economic Stimulation, Pride and Collaboration, and National Recognition.” Although the criteria doesn’t feel far off from those puzzling “Who’s Who” lists, “All-America City” is a terrific moniker for a municipality to claim. Prior to its incorporation, Bellevue was a primarily rural community, and until the Lake Washington Floating Bridge was constructed in 1940, a ferry was required to travel to Bellevue — a getaway of sorts — from Seattle. So earning this majestic title just 15 years after an engineering feat connected this bucolic space to the hustle and bustle of what was seen as the time as urban progressivism was something to be lauded.
“Incorporation” may be merely a vocab technicality, but in my poetic mind space wherein everything deserves a bit of coincidence and serendipity, I employ some sort of woo-woo framework for analyzing why, exactly, an “ahem” is required in that Facebook description. A city is “incorporated” and — surprise — it’s a term we use for businesses too. By 1994, when Jeff Bezos incorporated Amazon, a company he started in his Bellevue garage, seemingly unstoppable growth was on its way thanks to a combination of the booming tech industry (the main Microsoft campus is in next-door Redmond), relatively affordable housing compared to California, no state income tax, and the natural awe and draw of the Pacific Northwest. A 1983 Microsoft recruiting ad asks “Why do outstanding systems programmers work in Seattle, Wa? Microsoft.” The quarter-column-width ad then delineates some of the perks of heading out West. They include “small company with lots of interaction of sharing of ideas” as well as “mountains, ocean, desert, rain forest, rivers and lakes all within easy reach.” By 1992, the population of just Bellevue had grown to over 100,000 — a nearly 1,700 percent growth in 40 years.
Much of the discussion in this Facebook group is generated by people who grew up in Bellevue in the 1950s through the 1970s. While I came of age around the same time that Bellevue was taking off in this 21st-century direction, most of the group’s members harbor more quaint memories of what is now considered an “edge city” — a former suburb or “bedroom community” turned complete and sky-scraper filled city into itself. Bellevue is now home to over 150,000 people, and its largest employers are Microsoft (8,700 full-time employees), T-Mobile (6,300), and Amazon (3,100). Here’s what Wikipedia has collated as current plans for downtown Bellevue: “In 2019, Amazon and Facebook announced plans to open large engineering centers in Bellevue with plans to add several thousand employees. In 2018, Google also opened a major engineering facility in downtown Bellevue. As of 2020, there are several high-rise office buildings in Downtown Bellevue that are under construction or in active planning and design phases, including Bellevue 600, part of a major Amazon campus.” This development renders Bellevue nearly indecipherable to many and perhaps not surprisingly, rankles many of the Facebook group members, many of whom remember Bellevue from “the good ol’ days.”
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To “incorporate” means to gather together in an official and whole entity.
The IRS likes “incorporation,” as that’s what it takes to make a business enterprise legal. But “incorporate” also means “to embody” or “formed or added into a body.” I envision a football huddle, the Whos in Whoville singing “fahoo fores, dahoo dores” in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, or simply my husband and I, with our two children, squishing onto a tiny love seat to watch Mr Bean back when the kids were young enough to do so. An amorphous blob of units that have committed somehow to band together into something bigger via a shared purpose and perhaps collective memory. Yet it’s tricky when an entity or institution is officially incorporated because the mechanics perhaps bring to life a rose-colored view of place and its ins and outs.
In these groups, the yearning for “what used to be” is palpable and is often more frustrated in tone than wistful. By an informal observation, many of the members who post in the I Miss Retro Bellevue Facebook group seem to have graduated high school in the late 1960s through early 1980s, although Bellevue’s history certainly predates its incorporation in 1953. Yet, like all historical lenses, these members’ fond recollections illuminate the majority experience, for prior to the suburbanization of Bellevue, the now-city was also home to a substantial population of Japanese and Japanese-American residents who were sent to internment camps during World War II. Who’s the group that gets to say what’s what?
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Thirty-one years after Jeff Bezos incorporated his startup hatched from his Bellevue garage — first legally known as Cadabra, Inc.— I type “Bellevue, WA” in Amazon’s search bar. Here are the top results:
A number of generic “Bellevue” t-shirts created by some hidden manufacturer. (If I scroll down to see “more items,” I see the exact same shirts for places like Burleson, Texas and Kannapolis, North Carolina.)
A Bellevue / Redmond / Kirkland /Sammamish, Washington Street Map (Surprisingly, this has 9 ratings and one actual review from 2022.)
A book titled Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital. (Wrong Bellevue!)
The top result, however, was one of those ubiquitous “Images of America” books that you have likely seen in gift shops, museum stores, historical sites, or just in regular bookstores. They’re put out by Arcadia Publishing and rely on hyper-local history aficionados for the text. The one at the top of my search results is called Bellevue: Post World War II Years, authored by the Eastside Heritage Center. I imagine all the people on I Miss Retro Bellevue might like it. (I mean, to be fair, I like these kinds of books too.)
Incorporate: One guy’s “no regret” project-turned-business-turned-recipient of everyone’s attention and dollars.
Incorporate: A changed built landscape, a strangely urban yet sterile downtown where one landmark — the Yuen Lui photography studio — stands alone, only surviving because it provides temporary office and parking space for every other construction project around it.
According to Tamara, a woman who agreed to a phone interview after responding to my query on the I Miss Retro Bellevue Facebook group, “Everyone’s version is different, but for sure it is just a completely different place. Totally different. I think that’s where some people in that Facebook group can’t revisit. Like the way they remember it just doesn’t exist.”
Homesick for: A place? A time? A fairy tale? I suppose “incorporation” could be a duel between progress and provincial — with a lack of clarity on who or what can lay claim to either. Thank goodness we have Facebook, incorporated as TheFacebook, Inc. in 2004, to explore our sundry thoughts about it.
Members of the I Miss Retro Bellevue seriously have a lot to say about this structure. It’s ok — I get it because we had numerous family photos taken here too!