Seattlest had avoided reading our favorite national papers over the past few days because we feared what stupid conclusions they might reach about Saturday's shootings, especially since the stupidity was so present from the beginning with our own damn local papers. However, the New York Times, of all places, instead recently printed a short article wondering what we're going to do with our homeless Wonder Bread sign, now that the property is slated for Nickel's-style urban assault development.
This Seattlest contributor lives just a few blocks from the now-defunct bakery (we're actually closer to Gai's, and over the weekend while working in the yard we distinctly smelled jelly donuts being made, and oooooh we hope that never goes away). That aside, our quiet little neighborhood has undergone massive change in just 3 years since we bought our house there. While questions about the sign abound, we've got more nagging concerns. Ironically, in a Seattle PI article about this very same subject a little under a year ago, Mark Faulkner, the VP for a local development firm had this to say: "We're getting more interest for the sign than for what we're doing there." Exactly. Time to stop worrying about the sign, people. That property is slated for street-level shops topped by at least 300 apartments.
Along with the Wonder Bread development, there is another planned just a few blocks away by the Central Area Development Agency (CADA), and a huge re-development of the Goodwill building and associated land is already well into the planning stages. Earlier this month, Mayor Greg Nickels released the Preliminary Recommendations (PDF) for his heartbreaking work of staggering hubris, the "Livable South Downtown" project. The project has a lot of vision statements and bullet points, but Seattlest fears that our little neighborhood, which is on the eastern edge of Nickels' blast zone, will fall prey to this frighteningly vague goal: "Identify the desired character of areas currently lacking clear development direction." We wonder how local businesses, some of which are owned by neighbors of ours, might feel about that statement.
The preliminary recommendation was made based on 9 meetings conducted by a committee comprising 25 "community members", nearly half of whom are architects, construction firms, or real estate development companies. Shockingly, this committee is recommending height increases in nearly every region identified--in some cases they advocate at least doubling the current limits in areas such as the waterfront west of Qwest Field and in Little Saigon.
Personally, Seattlest doesn't worry about losing views (we don't have one), but we do worry about what will happen over the next five years to our quiet, diverse little neighborhood which we actively chose to move into over more homogeneous options. We can hear the bulldozers rumbling in the distance, and in their wake we fear we'll have only indistinct block after block of condos and townhomes strung together by infectious sores of StarBuQFMcSubWalgreen complexes at every third intersection.
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Ha! The NY Times screws up:
"Still, some, like the Wonder Bread sign and the neon R for the Rainier Brewing Company, which is now in a neon museum, are no longer hovering above thriving businesses."
MOHAI is a neon museum now?
What conventional pablum you spew.
Touche, Raw Data. Drive-by insults via pseudonymous comment certainly puts you in an unconventional class. And spewing bile, that beats pablum, too, doesn't it?
Thank you, Raw Data. Next week I will, at your urging, work on some unconventional pablum.
My comment (admittedly puerile) was a reflection of the quality of your post.
So anyway, back to the um, article.
The concerns raised about development are valid. Things are gonna change around here, and we'll have to work nights and weekends to keep 'em honest. Let's face it, whatever the design standards we use here are, they're clearly toothless. We're tearing down 3 story brick buildings to build 4 story wood buildings with vinyl siding. For some reason, development pressure in Seattle is on architecturally interesting older buildings while jail/bunker (excuse me "international") style buildings seem to have a protective bubble around them. Worse than the staying power of these relics of an architecturally unfortunate era is the permanence of parking lots on prime real estate.
I am a supporter of the growth management philosophy that includes increased building heights in places like cities, and prohibition against buildings (read: subdivisions) in places like farms and forest. You really can't have the latter without the former. But those of us who already live here should be able to afford to stay, and we shouldn't have to watch it turn into a crappy, poorly designed place.
Growth can be a good thing, economically, culturally, politically, socially and in other ways. But it takes work to ensure that growth occurs as an enhancement, rather than an impact to a particular community. Building height limits can be a shortsighted and self-defeating way to achieve this. If we really had high design standards, tacky cheap buildings couldn't be built on prime property, right up next to the living room windows of existing buildings, and we might even find that big buildings could add character to the built environment. Right now it is set up in such a way that developers can build something that just looks good enough to their renters or buyers, and since they will spend their time looking out of, not at said building; this puts the rest of us at a disadvantage.
That's my 2 cents. If you got this far, thanks for reading my drivel.
Thanks for a thoughtful reply, Nate. I should add the caveat that I'm not advocating an approach that stalls growth in an area so close to downtown, that would be remarkably short-sighted. But as you point out, how that growth is envisioned and enacted can vary widely. The residents of the Jackson Place Community Council are all very adamant about trying to restore that "corridor" to a bustling street-level community that it once used to be. I concur--we'd love to see more small shops and smart building to make that area vibrant. That would indeed be much much better than what is there now (abandoned lots filling up with trash).
What I don't want to see is another complex like the one that went in across Madison from Deano's, which is a brick monstrosity with a huge Safeway at the base level, so that the entire 23rd Ave side of that block is a gigantic brick wall. What a waste.
The committee that is deciding what will happen to these South Downtown area doesn't represent the small business owners and single-family homes in the area, and we're all pretty nervous about what that could yield. The good news is that the Jackson Place Community Council is extremely active and involved, and that's the best starting point for keeping Nickels from deciding what the "character" of our neighborhood should be.
Thanks for this addendum, I couldn’t agree with you more. I hope the Jackson area community keeps the pressure on the city to work in partnership with them and I think it would be great if the city got serious about a real streetcar network--and I hope Jackson Street is where the next expansion happens. As for the Safeway building—ugh. What a disappointment that building is. We’ve got to get some stronger neighborhood-based design authority in this city.