Centered! Yes, it is all about us

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IT WAS A BRIGHT and brisk morning when I set off on my journey to the very geographical center of Seattle. The workaday world whirled about me, but I was focused on the belt buckle of the city's hour-glass figure, the navel of its body. I sought the kernel, the core, ground zero, the hub. The centroid.

Exiting The Seattle Times' side door, on Fairview Avenue, I turned left and walked a half-block to the corner. I cursed myself for forgetting my sunglasses and Chapstick, but I zipped up my coat and moved on. I crossed the street and headed east on Thomas. At the first intersection, I turned left and trudged 15 feet north on Minor Avenue North.

After two minutes of traveling, I arrived at the center of Seattle and basked in all its meaning and metaphor: a dilapidated old house with paint and shingles so mottled the place appeared to be shedding before my eyes. There was another beaten house on one side and a vacant grass lot on the other. Nicely understated.

But this was only one of two coordinates I had been given by city geography wonks, so I continued my journey.

To reach the other center point - or centroid, to put it in geography lingo - I had to walk 90 feet farther north. There the city's center was an unmarked spot of concrete in the middle of the street. A row of diagonally parked cars and the Cascade neighborhood playground sat to the east. A low-slung office building, home to Allrecipes.com, was on the west.

Getting this far had taken the help of librarians, geographers, surveyors, geodetists, city engineers, aerial photography and some map-folding. I even tested the center by cutting out the city's shape from a map, pasting it on a mat and balancing it on my finger. I came very close.

I had weathered geometry, triangulation, hand-wringing over definitions, and nit-picking about what "center" meant. I struggled through indifference from smart people, bad geographer jokes ("If Fremont is the center of the universe, why wouldn't it be the center of Seattle?") and pressure from my boss to make sure the center was conveniently found at her very desk.

Being a centrist who lives a median life, I take the middle ground seriously. Four years ago, I set out to find the geographical center of the state. It was so important that I hiked three miles up and down an overgrown trail just outside of the little apples-and-pear town of Cashmere. I tiptoed over logs that bridged a creek, trudged through mud and up a steep hill before coming upon an embedded brass marker. There it was, in etched permanence: "Geographic Center of the State of Washington." For that moment, I felt centered.

I felt strongly that Seattle should know and celebrate its centroid, too.

•   •   •

I RECEIVED my first break at the city's engineering office, which does all kinds of cool stuff with global positioning, aerial photography and map-based technology known as Geographic Information Systems, or GIS. Seattle has perhaps 22,000 GPS reference-point monuments embedded in various intersections. (Yet it has no center marker!)

Gavin Schrock is a surveyor who, before joining the city, did stints with the Department of Defense and as a stand-up comedian. He kindly flattened Seattle's hills, plugged up Lake Union, and calculated city limits according to geodetic-grade GPS controls. Then he employed a program that essentially put the city into a rectangular box and drew an intersecting "X" through it. The X came out at Seventh Avenue and Stewart Street, a few blocks south of The Times.

But Schrock knew that was too inexact. Because of the city's irregular shape, he then took the preferred method among the geographically inclined. He went searching for the centroid, the center of the city's land mass - treating it as if it were as flat as a pizza pan and balanced on a finger, like I did. Only he used computers.

Here's what he came up with:

Latitude: 47*37'15.65"

Longitude: 122*19'59.84"

(For layfolks, that's the old house about 15 feet north of the intersection of Thomas and Minor).

Here's how he arrived at it:

Area: 2409038215.53

Perimeter: 375492.33

Bounding box:

X: 1245528.70 - 1293772.98

Y: 184055.48 - 271599.08

Centroid:

X: 1270526.79

Y: 230132.20

Moments of inertia:

X: 1.29E +20

Y: 3.89E +21

Product of inertia:

XY: 7.04E +20

Radii of gyration:

X: 231374.95

Y: 1270566.14

Principle moments and X-Y directions about centroid:

I: 2.41E+17 along (0.01 -1.00)

J: 1.38E+18 along (0.01 0.01)

This made complete sense to me.

But Schrock issued the standard warnings - that he was simply applying preciseness to the imprecise, that this sort of thing relies on assumptions and causes geographers and geodesists to bludgeon one another.

In fact, Tom Nolan, the city's GIS director, had the city's chief cartographer do a calculation. They pegged a spot 90 feet north on Minor, in the middle of the street.

Still, that's only a half-block difference in a big, weirdly shaped city. I was encouraged.

I was left with a decision. Even the geographically challenged know there cannot be two centers. It was up to me to do a little editorial triangulation.

•   •   •

NOLAN'S centroid held dark significance. It is the very spot where, two weeks after I moved to Seattle in 1985, a thief broke my car window during the most hellacious rainstorm I had ever witnessed. By the time I discovered the vandalism, my brake pedal was drowning and my car seat was sponge-squishy. Welcome to Seattle.

I went up to the frayed old house that Schrock had pinpointed. Turns out it is a rental obtained and owned by none other than Paul Allen (yes, that Paul Allen). He is considering whether to replace it and other buildings on the block with a 149-unit complex of townhouses, apartments and a small retail space as proposed by Seattle developer Harbor Northwest.

I'm sorry; Allen already has the unmissable Experience Music Project and plenty other landmarks. He can't have the geographical center, too.

Despite all their coordinates, computers and math, most geographers and geodetic experts answered my inquiries with, "It depends ...."

All right. What if I factored in tidelands and harbor boundaries? The center would move about a block or two west, probably.

What if I split the difference between the two spots on Minor and the imaginary "X" crossing at Seventh and Stewart that Schrock initially came up with? That would move the center a little south. Perhaps my boss' desk is the center. But I couldn't do that; it's too unprofessional. Besides, it would be my desk.

Then it came to me as I stood in the middle of Minor. I turned my back to Allen's old rental and faced east. There, sat the Cascade Community Garden, a "P-Patch," a tiny subdivision of vegetable and flower beds that has survived urban renewal and car exhaust.

If the two Seattle experts were 95 feet apart why couldn't I stray 20 feet, the equivalent of a tomato toss? You know, that jolt we took during the Feb. 28 earthquake could have slid everything a little to the southeast.

I strolled through the organic oasis. Its compost piles and rainwater barrels were beautifully out of place, a symbol of Seattle's vanishing eccentricity. There, amid the wood-bordered plots, I caught a harmonic convergence similar to that day at the Cashmere rock.

This place could certainly be at the centroid. The garden even has a 3-foot-high cement pillar with nothing atop it. A perfect place for a plaque commemorating this long-overlooked distinction.

I realized it would be getting dark in about six hours so I turned back toward the office. My work on Minor Avenue North was done. I had discovered the geographical center - the ultimate centroid celery stalk of Seattle.

Writer Richard Seven is easily the most centered member of the Pacific Northwest magazine staff.