Probably not fair to label her with something she didn’t build but the vacant hole in the ground across from city hall — the old SPD HQ site — is her downtown claim to fame. She didn’t build anything there either. She also presided over leaving almost $1B on the table in the Mercer Megablock deal.
The old Northgate Mall site, still being disassembled/demo’d sits on 55 acres of prime land, right next to a freeway, a major E/W arterial, and the current north terminus of the light rail system. We could have had many things planned and built there but what did we get? A hockey training center. We could have had the Barbican with 20 acres to spare. In addition to 2,000 flats, either in towers or closer to the ground, all in the brutalist style that fits so well in Seattle, as well as local versions of…
- Barbican Hall: capacity 1,943; home of the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.[4]
- Barbican Theatre: capacity 1,156; designed exclusively by and for the Royal Shakespeare Company[2][5]
- The Pit: flexible 200-seat theatre venue
- Barbican Art Gallery and the free new-commission gallery The Curve
- Barbican Film: 3 cinema screens with seating capacity of 288, 156 and 156
- Barbican Library: Public lending library with special collections in arts and music
- Restaurants: 3
- Conference halls: 7
- Trade exhibition halls: 2
- Informal performance spaces
- The second-floor library is one of the five City of London libraries. It is one of the largest public libraries in London and has a separate arts library, a large music library and a children’s library which regularly conducts free events. The Barbican Library houses the ‘London Collection’ of historical books and resources, some of which date back 300 years, all being available on loan. The library presents regular literary events[6] and has an art exhibition space for hire. The music library has two free practice pianos for public use.
All of this could be under construction or even partly complete, but for the lack of imagination Seattle hides behind its preference for process over progress.
A well-designed development there, with housing for 2,000 households (or more if the whole parcel was used), could have created a north end cultural explosion, meeting people where they live rather than expecting them to go downtown. Capitol Hill is the only part of Seattle that can compete with anything like the above list, but getting there? That area was laid out around streetcars and people…Northgate wasn’t even part of Seattle for most of the city’s history. Your best option to Cap Hill from the north end is the light rail and you have to go to Northgate anyway…why not just let it be your destination? Or, better, your address? I’m sure some would argue that tower blocks by the freeway would be somehow unsightly but they would be nowhere near as tall as downtown’s office towers. And that’s all downtown is… if you have even visited or even seen the UW/Seattle compus, this should look pretty familiar.