Comments

1
AGREED.
2
DISAGREED.
3
Wishful thinking.

Billboards are best used to ask everyone to turn off the lights after the downtown developers gut our city councilmanic bonds for an insane gold-plated tunnel, don't you think?
4
Sure, Seattle should "reassert its own economic identity and focus on attracting new employers", but I don't see how allowing illuminated signs in our skyline will do much to achieve that goal.
5
Maybe if Seattle tolls incoming bridges, raises bus fares and parking costs, they'll attract more employers and employees.
6
Given that the sign in the picture is unreadable, and the new sign standards are for smaller signs than that, how will this help 'branding' for the companies?
7
I don't see the big deal, either way. Maybe tax the goddamn things, owing to their visual pollution. But the rolling homeless shelter that they call a transit system is not gonna do the job. Becoming car-unfriendly is just not enough.
8
Change is scary. Why do things have to change?
9
Oh, come on. What a load of shit.

Yes, Seattle has shed more jobs than the suburbs. But claiming that a lack of huge signs is a substantial cause of the job losses us utter bullshit.

Try a better argument, moron. One that actually makes sense.
10
Tell you what.

You install some mooring cables for the clean energy zeppelin fleets for your brave new world, and we'll let you put up some steampunk billboards of zombies smoking cigarettes with the catchy wording "Seattle Steampunk Zombies Light Up in Anticipation".

How's that for a compromise?
11
Are you tired of business interest minded pols and apologists holding the notion of more jobs against our templates like a revolver? "Give us what we want or we'll shoot this dog."
12
One of the few times I just flat-out agree with the DSA on a development-related issue. The signs at issue are not all that huge, certainly not in relation to the scale of the buildings to which they would be attrached. Modest signs of the type envisioned add life and character to an urban skyline, making it less like that of its bland suburban neighbors.

But I do have two questions -- First, what's this with the requirement that the signs be white in color, and only letters? Is the goal to make them as boring as possible? No chance for a flying red horse here?

And second, why only for 200,000 square-foot tenants? Any significant business in a building should be eligible (one per building, please), not just the biggest of Big Business. (What happens when a business downsizes and suddenly occupies less than 200K? Does it have to take its sign down?) Talk about special privileges for Big Business, this is it.
13
It's funny (which is to say sad) that today's Seattle progressives are in fact today's reactionaries.
14
Much ado about nothing. Getting your tits in an uproar about these signs only reinforces the idea that Seattleites are a bunch of belly-aching NIMBY's.

15
@12, quite so. They legislate a requirement that the signs be as boring as possible, then complain that the resulting signs are boring. And the city gets duller and uglier every day.

If people really cared about this "corporate looking" business, they'd complain about the hideous buildings that the architects design for the corporate clients, but you never hear about that. That Russell building actually isn't too bad, though, by the standards of today. A nice sign would make it better. A mediocre sign would make it better.

The city's design board is a joke and an oxymoron; design does not, can not, and never has proceeded from a board, and this board in particular appears to be unusually dedicated to both blandness and micromanagement.

Meanwhile, all over the city restrictive sign controls have caused a plethora of truly horrible flapping banners, which are supposedly temporary and thus exempt from some of the regulations. Nobody complains about those, either.

The motives of sign opponents are false; they claim to be motivated by aesthetics but they are in fact motivated solely by an antipathy towards life.
16
Ooh, "solely".
17
I don't know or care enough about skyscraper signs, but the fact that the DSA support it makes it a terribly awful idea.

DSA: Originator of such ideas as "fining the homeless," "deep bore tunnel," and "Richard Conlin."
18
@17 for the triple shot espresso win.
19
Wait, we have a design board that dictates our fugly architecture? Can we do a post on THAT?
20
Hong Kong has a great skyline, even with the corporate logos.

But this has nothing to do with attracting jobs to downtown. Jobs lose to suburbs because small towns like Bothell fill-in the swamps at North Creek and allow bland office parks situated in mega-blocks of four story office building clusters. Proper regional growth management (that actually cared about not allowing development on wetlands) would not encourage this kind of suburban sprawl. When an international mega-corp wants to fill 10,000 jobs, that is where they put them, without any care at all about the commuting nightmare they just set up for all those employees (if they even bother to hire Americans to work there in the first place.)
21
@16, yes, alas. Solely. All else is mask.
22
I suppose everyone on here that opposes the additional signs on the tops of downtown buildings would also want the current ones removed then? WhHHAaAA?!? Betcha didn't even notice there are already several of them. I saw 4 walking only a few blocks down 4th Avenue the other day and those were only the ones could see from my vantage. As usual, the short sided hipsters that troll the Slog overreact for nothing.
23
"The fact that the DSA support it makes it a terribly awful idea."

See what I mean by reactionary? That moron Will is your classic faux progressive Seattle reactionary. These people have not a single idea in their head and no goals. They just resist change and try to turn the clock back to when they were 6 and the world was comfortable and familiar.
24
I'm not actually opposed to more signage on skyscrapers. I just think Scholes' argument is bullshit. Lack of signage has nothing whatsoever to do with the loss of jobs downtown. Gross mismanagement and bankruptcy by WA Mu is largely responsible for the sudden disproportionate drop in employment downtown.

Advocate for signage all you want. The proposed signs really don't bother me a bit. Just try to come up with a persuasive argument that isn't complete bullshit.
25
Some person in Atlanta is going to want to move to Seattle to work just because of signs on buildings? Saying to her/himself, "Gee, I sure like the way Seattle is branding itself."
26
After looking at the sign mock-ups and the closer mock-up I would need a 300mm telephoto lens just to read it from ground level. I guess these signs on buildings idea is mostly for night time illumination.

Signs on big buildings don't bring in jobs nor does the lack of signs take away jobs.
27
We're losing jobs because of poorly managed advocacy groups like the DSA that spend more time trying to get handouts and gimmes than they do thinking of workable solutions to problems with the current job market.

I think the best thing we could do for Seattle, and Downtown Seattle especially, is to oust the entire DSA board and start from scratch.
28
Re my piece @12 supporting the downtown signs, I'm supporting the conclusions reached by the DSA author, not his arguments for them. The notion that somehow signs will benefit downtown employment in any significant way, is, of course, his joke on us.
29
I lived in Denver, and the massive Qwest sign looming over downtown is more embarrassing than you could believe. It feels like the entire city is being branded like a steer. Every photo of downtown Denver looks like a qwest ad, not an ad for Denver. If a company wants to do this in Seattle, we need to put a price tag on it that is so high it would completely balance our city budget w/o the recent cuts, then more. This is not about tagging a building, it's abt claiming an entire city. Free advertising every time someone publishes a photo if our skyline. No deal unless there's tons if cash.

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