On his recent KUOW radio "Ask the mayor" show, 'Gridlock' Greg focused for quite some time on the real reason he would like to see a tunnel. The viaduct is 'ugly.' This is the same reason we heard for tearing down the King Dome. Now we have two ugly stadiums instead of one! By conservative guesstimate, half the buildings downtown are ugly. Shall they be torn down? The I-5 corridor is really ugly. Put a lid on it too?

It is good to live one's life with an eye to aesthetics. But one person's idea of what is pretty or not pretty cannot be used to determine the spending of billions of dollars. As the Herald pointed out so well in its Sept. 27th editorial, why is it that voters were smart enough to determine the fate of the monorail but are too dumb to decide whether a tunnel should be built along Seattle's waterfront? Maybe we are smart enough. The trouble might be that we just aren't pretty enough.

Peter Stekel

Alki