(This will appear in the 10/7/09 Capitol Hill Times.)
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I just signed a contract with Wilderness Press to produce a walking guide to Seattle.
Of course, Capitol Hill and First Hill will be major locales in it.
After all, The Hill is one of America’s finest examples of a walkable neighborhood. You’ve got residences (in a variety of styles and price points), shopping, dining, entertainment, schools, churches, parks, medical facilities and more, all within a healthy stroll along sidewalked, tree-lined, lighted streets. Add the Hill’s adjacency to downtown and you’ve got the state’s biggest concentration of jobs, major stores, and tourist/scenic attractions.
The Hill also has extensive bus transit, both within the neighborhood and out to downtown, the UW, and the south end. (And there’ll be a light rail station on Broadway sometime in the next decade.)
Civic advocates, such as the Seattle-based Feet First, have long touted the many benefits of walkable neighborhoods. Such places foster a greater sense of community, bringing people into face-to-face interaction even if they don’t live or work in the exact same building. They save on energy and other natural resources.
And they offer more intangible benefits as well. Neighborhoods with a lot of foot traffic are simply more “alive” than places where everybody’s stuck inside either a building or a vehicle.
So it’s natural to find officials in other localities trying to figure out how to add the magic of walkability (and bikeability) to what have heretofore been car-dependent suburbs.
One local example: “The Landing In Renton.”
Out by the Boeing and Kenworth factories, where Cirque de Soleil used to be, and where Clay Bennett once claimed he wanted to put up a new sports arena for just a gazillion taxpayer bucks, a different kind of suburban district is forming.
Some of its retail blocks (particularly the Target and the Fry’s electronics superstore) are built in traditional strip-mall style, with storefront entrances recessed behind giant moats of parking.
But other blocks, including a “main street” intersection, are built direct to the curb, with storefronts opening straight onto real sidewalks.
There’s also a block-long apartment monstrosity, also built to the curb, with indoor/underground parking. A second apartment complex of this type is currently under construction, despite the nationwide building slump.
The Landing, in its current form, is a good start. But it’s not enough. Sidewalks, by themselves, do not a neighborhood make. The Landing’s developers know this. On their web site, they promise that by the time the whole project’s done, it’ll be a real pedestrian-friendly place. “Wide, vibrant sidewalks—lined with lively cafes, dynamic retail shops and cozy residential buildings—will encourage pedestrians to stroll throughout the varied streets. A collection of restaurants surrounding a strong retail core will create a venue vibrant enough to be a year-round destination.”
Until then, The Landing might be a nice place to shop, but it’s not quite the stuff for a walking-tour book. It’s a collection of your basic suburban strip-mall and big-box chains, designed and arranged a little differently.
Even when The Landing is complete, it’ll be something manufactured from scratch, representing what one developer/landlord believes are the shops and businesses and housing-stock types a neighborhood needs.
But traditional urban neighborhoods like Capitol Hill didn’t just grow organically either. They were planned and platted and nurtured by zoning laws. Much of Seattle’s urban cityscape was essentially built up from scratch in relatively short timeframes (from a few years to a few decades). Every building and block in our town has evolved since it was built, but they all were built by humans.
Places like Capitol Hill can be built again. Perhaps not with the same materials (those old houses and apartments used a lot of no-longer-cheap ingredients, including labor), but with the same sense of scale and vibrancy. Will they?
Back to the walking-tours book:
I already know plenty of spots on Capitol Hill to send the book’s readers to—Volunteer and Anderson parks, Lakeview Cemetery, 15th Avenue, Broadway, Pike/Pine, St. Mark’s, the mansions. And on First Hill there’s always the SU campus, the Stimpson-Green Mansion, St. James, the Frye Art Museum.
Where else should I send the book-buying walkers?
Let me know at walking@miscmedia.com.
I already told you I’m bringing my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story back into print next year.
Now, I’ve signed contracts for an all-new book.
It’s Walking Seattle. It’s a book of walking tours, part of a series by the Calif.-based Wilderness Press.
You can help me put this book together. Tell me what routes and destinations should be in it (especially if they’re not in previous books or flash-card sets with the same topic).
The biggest remaining locally-based financial company couldn’t resist the offer of really cheap office space at what, for three years, had been the home of the previous biggest locally-based financial company, Washington Mutual.
For one Seattle woman I know, who’s been working for Russell after being laid off from WaMu, it means she’ll be back in her former building.
For Seattle civic boosters, it means a modest stemming of the downtown office glut and several hundred more customers for local lunch spots.
For Tacoma civic boosters, it means the loss of the town’s biggest private employer, the anchor of its downtown revival hopes, the great white-collar hope that T-Town could rise beyond its economic tripod of shipping, manufacturing, and the military.
For Russell’s out-of-state owners, it means nothing more than an everyday cost cut, a paean to the Almighty Stock Price.
…has even made the pages of the Harvard Business Review. Their writer’s take: It’ll never make it.
…the Seafair Torchlight Parade drew thousands from the whole tri-county region to Fourth Avenue on July 25, to witness the usual sequence of drill teams, marching bands, floats, horses, big balloons, clowns, and politicians. This year’s grand marshalls were ex-Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren and local radio legend Pat O’Day.
KIRO-TV’s parade telecast ended promptly at 10 p.m., so the station could air a rerun of one of CBS’s near-identical detective shows. The telecast ended before the Seafair Pirates came into camera range, which is exactly like cutting off the Thanksgiving Day Parade before Santa shows up.
Now, the station has posted video of the Pirates’ performance online, perhaps as a make-up offering to angry parade-telecast viewers.
As promised yesterday, here are more images from Link Light Rail’s spectacular opening weekend.
I’m surprised how few people, now and during Link’s years of construction, noted the utter appropriateness of the route’s principal siting on Martin Luther King Jr. Way—formerly Empire Way, named for the “empire builder,” James J. Hill—a railroad tycoon.
Like a lot of Western towns, Seattle was made, and nearly broken, by the railroads. When the Northern Pacific decided to build its own company town (Tacoma) instead of making Seattle its western terminus, Seattle boosters persuaded Hill to bring his rival Great Northern line here. (The NP and GN eventually merged into the Burlington Northern, now BNSF.)
As big rail built Seattle as a center of shipping and industry, local rail built the city’s neighborhoods. In a few cases this was literally true, as developers built trolley lines to service their newly-built tracts.
Now, civic planning bureaucrats and “urban density” advocates hope that can happen again.
The operative phrase is “transit oriented development.” You might have read about it in The Stranger or at Publicola.
The idea is that, alongside the shiny new tracks and the trains that run on them, there should be shiny new residences, stores, and commercial structures. These would attract more regular riders for the trains, while bringing new economic activity to these neighborhoods.
(And they’d provide work for the construction biz, Seattle Democrats’ most loyal backers. And they’d help slow the ongoing tilt of the region’s population ratio from the city to the suburbs, a tilt that affects the city’s state and federal funding clout in many ways.)
So you get townhomes, neo-rowhouses, senior housing projects with ground-floor retail, midrise apartment/condo structures, and the promise of many more.
Some of these would be on tracts now owned by the city or Sound Transit, which were used as staging areas during Link’s long construction period. (It’s the taxpayers’ bad luck that the project bought this land while prices were going up, and is selling it as prices are going down.)
Of course, people already live and work in these neighborhoods (despite what you might surmise from “urban pioneer” stories in the local lifestyle mags). Light rail’s benefits shouldn’t just be for the new (read: upscale white) residents and workers, or for those current residents who happen to own saleable land.
For far too long, Seattle’s entire southeast quadrant (save for the Lake Washington waterfront) has been the city’s ignored stepchild. It’s the first place where halfway houses and social-service agencies get sited, and the last place where fancy shops and restaurants go. It’s got a lot of households that didn’t fare well when the region as a whole boomed, and that aren’t doing well now.
I’d like to see a transit oriented development that enhances the lives of south Seattle’s current populace, and doesn’t merely displace it.
Marie Claire magazine just declared Seattle the “best city to find single guys.” I know why.
This is a city of men who need women and women who don’t need men. A city of socially repressed geeks all vying for the attentions of empowered career women. And the more the women snub the men as unworthy of even a returned glance, the more the men ramp up the chase.
Yep, I was at the first day of Link Light Rail service.
Then I came back for day two.
I took a lot of images. I’m still sorting out my favorites.
So look for more in the next day or two.
It was a glorious two-day celebration of, well, of what?
Of yet another shiny New Seattle monument to world-class-osity? Not really.
To our modest li’l seaport village finally deserving to be called a Big League City? Nope.
To a cool new way to travel from downtown (almost) to the airport? Uh-uh.
Seattle’s first urban transit solution to run longer than 1.3 miles? Not even that.
No, this weekend marked the true beginning of Seattle’s Century 21. Through what is essentially pre-car technology, we’ve launched the first practical step toward a post-car era.
And it’s swift, bright, clean, and fun too!
Crowds, thankfully, were not as totally overbearing as organizers had hoped/warned. (After all, the trains will keep running after this weekend, just not for free and not with clowns and buskers performing at the stations.)
Link gets down to business on Monday. Don’t look for clues to its eventual level of success in its initial paid ridership. What will count will be long-term ridership trends. That, and also the “transit oriented development” projects penciled in on what are now vacant lots adjoining the stations. And those won’t likely get underway until people are building homes and commercial buildings again.
…makes films. He also collects films. Here’s a full hour culled from his vault of vintage toy commercials—Batteries Not Included.
Arcade, the Northwest architecture and design quarterly, devoted its summer issue to environmental themes.
But instead of hyping new “green” buildings and products, many of the issue’s essays (guest-edited by Charles Mudede and Jonathan Golob) propose a world with fewer buildings and products.
Granted, this year we’re not adding too much to the total world supply of them.
This is particularly the case with California professor Barry Katz’s closing piece, “The Promise of Recession.” Katz remembers how past designers such as William Morris sought to influence the world by promoting an honest, simple aesthetic. Then Katz imagines a near-future in which “every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to, our collective natural assets.”
This, he believes, means a lot fewer new products (of all kinds), hence a lot fewer people employed to design those products. But there would be work for “post-designers.” Some of these would revamp the already-built world to be more sustainable and more nature-friendly. Others would devise “an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.”
Similar themes are posited by Golob in “Green On Wheels.” He argues that today’s gasoline-powered automobiles are just about as efficient as they can ever be, when you figure in the costs of refining and transporting the fuel. No, Golob avers, “carrying about two hundred pounds of human being in four thousand pounds of boxy steel, glass and aluminum” is an activity whose time will soon pass, by necessity, whether we like it or not.
Also in the issue:
If we take Fry’s case (and those of the other Arcade contributors) seriously, the human-built environment will change. It’s not just unwise to keep going the way we’ve gone this past century, it’s impossible.
The only question is what we’ll change into.
