This guy has apparently never set foot in Beaverton. Also: he's smoking something. Whatever it is, I think I'll pass and stick with the snus.

Beaverton is Bed, Bath and Beyond. It's an endless expanse of car lots and strip malls that stretch all the way from West Slope to Aloha. It's Chilli's and Red Robin. It's four-lane highways that drag on forever without a single twist or turn and too many stoplights. It's finding yourself with nowhere but a Chipotle to eat on an hour-long dinner break because the only decent, nearby restaurant (Noodlin') closed back in August. It's every chain store, fast food franchise and example of suburban banality imaginable all rolled up into one sloppy, sprawling package with a funny name that 4th graders love to laugh at.

Beaverton sucks. I know this because I spend 40 hours or more a week out there. Beaverton is Tigard with a 24-hour Starbucks instead of a Banning's Restaurant and Pie Shop. It's Gresham without....the...the...the Gresham. If it were a frozen yogurt flavor, Beaverton would be vanilla. Not French vanilla, just regular, plain old vanilla. The type of vanilla that comes out of a frozen yogurt machine at an all-you-can-eat, strip mall buffet- the same type of all-you-can-eat strip mall buffet that can be found in...

...BEAVERTON! Sure, they've got the Nike campus out there but it's still sitting on unicorporated land so the Beavertonians can't even lay claim to that.

I guess Matthew Stadler, who had a hand in designing the Seattle Central Library, is still trying to push his concept of the "Zwischenstadt" on the Portland suburb. I first wrote about this dream for Beaverton back in April and, yeah, I broke out a can of witless snark back then too.

On second thought, I wish him luck. If there's anywhere around town that could use a dash of creativity or a civic center that looks like a hairball coughed-up by a Transformer it's Beaverton.

(Thanks, Marie for passing along the article linked above, which appeared in last week's...Seattle Stranger? Wha...?)

Labels: Beaverton