Comments

1
Very interesting.

Too bad that we won't be able to afford it if they waste all our taxes on the Billionaires Tunnel, though.
2
Ugh, barf, puke. We can be the first city to center its waterfront around a vast expanse of nothing! Whoo hoo!
3
I'm with Fnarf on this one. We already have so many beautiful parks and green spaces throughout the city. "A healthy lifestyle isn't accessible" my ass.
4
Comments 1 and 2 are so incredibly predictable I had written them in my head before I even looked.
5
What Fnarf doesn't understand, I think, or fails to acknowledge, is that this park is not just for us. This park is for the tons and tons of visitors and friends that come to Seattle every year and walk down there after hitting the Market.

It's not just for us, it is for the overall image of our city.

If you can't handle that, you're ignoring this very real fact.

We need a park there.
6
#5 What YOU fail to understand is that Fnarf is a genius who knows everything about everything, but especially about urban planning. How lucky for you that he has declined all offers to lead prestigious design teams (who as a result are run by utter morons) in order to spend all day ranting on the comments threads here.
7
We must help teen tourists fulfill their dream of ritually arriving at the water to climb wooden walls from which they can jump into Puget Sound, giving Harborview a steady stream of the hypothermia cases they so enjoy. Cienna, thank you for going to the presentations, after a long day at City Hall too.
8
as long as we save the precious sweet gum trees i don't care what it looks like. no street tree holocaust! no amount of money is too great to save this asset (whereas the Sonics could fuck themselfves). THEY'RE IRREPLACEABLE!

love, nick licata, the brains of the city council
9
@5 is correct.

Maybe we can clone Nick ...
10
Anyone who thinks teenagers are going to want to swim in the downtown portion of Elliott Bay has not taken a good long look at, or dipped a toe into, said bay.

These sound like too much airy-fairy and not enough specifics. What, specifically, would they change? What businesses would relocate? Where would people park? How would they get there? How do you have this oh-so-pretty Bay Park and still incorporate the land Hanjin Marine has a long-term lease on? Do we keep the marinas? the Port of Seattle properties?
11
I think that was Daniel Friedman ( dean of the College of the Built Environment at UW ) doing the moderating.

I'm hoping for GGN. I'd like the local designers to stay employed.
12
Marshall Foster is a great guy and a smart planner who gave a decent intro to the show, but it was Daniel Friedman, Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at UW, who moderated the questions after each presentation. Sadly, many of his questions were unnecessarily convoluted rather than illuminating, for laymen and professionals alike.
13
Yeah, this thing is going to be empty except for the derelicts. But then again, maybe it will draw all the riff raff from the other parks.

They need to get to work on scheduling a competition for whoever is design our way out of the black hole they're about to create.
14
Kudos for sticking it out, Cienna. One small attribution correction though (unless I was having a stroke, which is possible): Marshall Foster spoke a little to kick things off, but Daniel Friedman from the UW was the moderator and question-asker.
15
@12 Agreed. Friedman was too busy showing off his own smarts to be a very effective host.
16
@10 - This was a capabilities/portfolio presentation, not a design presentation. No one was showing ideas, just talking about their philosophies and past work.
17
Cool, but the new land they get to use is smaller than Cal Anderson Park due to the new surface highway that WSDOT is building. And the space will be sandwiched between that new highway and a redesigned Alaskan Way with higher speeds and capacity.

Put a landfill there and be done with it. Hire these guys to design Seven Hills Park instead.
18
@16, I think the comment was to the concern that we be sure philosophies and past work of potential designers assure us that they're capable of fomenting economic vitality alongside eco and park aspects, not instead of them.
19
And it's not 20 acres of land, it's not 9 acres of land like you reported last time, it's less than 7 acres of land in a narrow sliver, after WSDOT builds their boulevard.
20
Field Operation designs imaginative, functional parks that are specific to place.

Imaginative? Sounds great. But this, of course, means they won't be selected.
21
High Line is a one liner - anyone could have done it. Yes it is a very high quality design, but the site is really what makes that project. What the waterfront, and more importantly Seattle, needs is something extremely sensitive to place; something that is informed through living in the city and the waterfront.

although Corner, MVVA, and WRT all had local consultants, GGN is the ONLY lead design firm based here in Seattle (one the waterfront itself!). sure all teams have local consultants, but judging from Field Ops and MVVA's presentations - it seems like they will be running the show (if they get it).

Anyone can build the viaduct into a highline - the real challenge is going to be weaving the waterfront into the City.
22
@6, this isn't about me being smarter or more aesthetic or talented than the professionals. The point is, it doesn't matter how skilled you are if you are doing the wrong thing. A park is a disastrous idea, and the greatest park in the universe is not better here than a crappy park.
23
GGN very much nailed it. They were the only team, probably due to their locale, that understood the importance of the myriad mini-places and spaces that are involved; how this is about re-integrating a very large and diverse area with the rest of the city.

All the other teams seemed like they were more interested in another big, showy, enviro-extreme feather in their caps.
24
@Fnarf, you seem a bit caught up on this. I don't think anyone is suggesting a giant, 80ft x 2 mile long plaza.

What I gathered from the presenters was that there was a lot of interest in reshaping the area, perhaps bringing the bay in more or pushing the walking paths out. I think as we move through the process, and as development interests arise, there will be opportunities to integrate some public/private partnerships that could satisfy what you want.
25
@5

That's just what we want. A place where people who don't live here can go to hang out and do nothing! They can bring their own food, since I'm sure the city won't allow mobile food to exist in the open spaces. Then they leave trash everywhere so our tax dollars will be used for cleaning the area. We can all skip along the bricks going through yet another dead area of Seattle that produces nothing and nobody will want to go to. If there is such a fucking demand for more park open space why aren't there thousands of tourists enjoying hempfest park on non hempfest weekends? We have thousands of square miles of beautiful open space within 30 minutes of downtown, let's not build another urban playground/wannabe Microsoft campus in some of the most prime real estate in the world. Lease the land, build a maze of new non linear businesses, preserve the views as much as possible and maximize the tourist dollars downtown. The opportunity to use this space to revitalize downtown is immense, an it seems like everyone wants to turn it into a fucking hackeysack park. Multimillion dollar revenue negative hackysack windchime vagrant park that the residents of Seattle will end up avoiding just like all the other non occupied spaces downtown. Yet anther area that the locals will guide the tourists "around" while they try to get from the market to the ferry.
26
@2 & @22:
Fnarf, you are being ridiculous. I'm not sure what your motivations
are - perhaps you want to spite downtown or you enjoy posturing as the contrarian who is smarter than everyone else.

Whatever your hangup, the bottom line is that your assertion that a waterfront park would be "disastrous" is as idiotic as anything John Bailo or Will in Seattle have ever said.
27
@25
If you want to build a park that will be overrun by vagrants and thugs, the key design element is that it must be small. Think Vic Steinbrueck Park, Regrade Park in Belltown, or Flo Ware Park in the CD. The new pocket park on Republican and Federal Ave in Capitol Hill also has great vagrant potential.

If you've ever been to the waterfront as it currently stands, you know that it's not dead. So, how exactly is replacing the viaduct and the creepy parking lot beneath it going to kill it?
28
She had me at "healthy." As in no. I think it's instructive to look at what the water front used to be, before the viaduct, and before the World's Fair. Boats, jobs, drinking, vice, unions, vice, and prosperity. Bring it all back. Pay attention to the bums. They channel the ghosts.
29
@12, thanks! I've updated to correct that info. Also, I loved the Q and A, I think most of the questions provoked thoughtful, unexpected answers--for example, Friedman's question to Corner about how to respect and integrate native culture into the design, and Corner's response, which was, "We're not looking to make their culture nostalgic. We want to engage these different cultures while not overly sentimentalizing the story, bringing in the current sense of the contemporary."

31
@28 for the win.

God I miss the days when most of the people on the waterfront were drunks, not tourists. And lumberjack shirts were worn because people were lumberjacks.
32
@27

I think the density of Alaskan Way is the reason why I don't see a super amount a vagrancy on the waterfront. Yes currently there are a few beggars/homeless that camp out down there, but nowhere near the amount up in VS park. Or Occidental for that matter. I used to do sales in the market/waterfront, so I have literaly spent thousands of hours in those areas. The businesses bring in the right crowd.

I won't deny that vagrancy will occur no matter what happens to this area, I would just like there to be somewhere for people to go in this area besides a giant feel good park.
33
Addendum to my previous comments...I want locally owned small businesses in the area. If it ends up being a bunch of cheesecake factory/PF changs type places, then brick the whole fucker over and put out 300 cots for the bums.
34
I completely disagree that GGN nailed it. I thought they had the worst presentation of all of them. One of the gentleman was explaining some extremely complex and academic type concepts and then he said "this is how were going to do it". He was standing in front of a slide that was a drunken scribble that made no sense what so ever. They were not able to articulate how they plan on doing any of it. I am terrified of the idea that we would hand them the reins to this project. A presentation of that magnitude is not easy and I am not judging solely on that aspect. However I think that a failure to communicate your ideas so that people can understand them is where they failed. Every one around me was confused and trying to figure out what they were talking about.

In my opinion Field Operations seemed the most up for the task and clearly communicated a clear vision. I also think that Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates was very good as well. They spoke to frugality in a way that we need to hear. Seattle has a terrible reputation for maintaining their parks and they nailed it on the head. We may need to design something that requires very little of the city beyond the construction phase.

Overall it was great to see forward thinking concepts. Kudos to Seattle for showing up for the presentation! 1700+ in attendance.
35
@26, if you think yet another giant park is a useful thing to fill our waterfront with, you're insane. You're just wrong. I've explained myself here and on Seattle Transit Blog over and over, but people like you who don't understand what cities are for, and cover up your flatulent anti-commerce park love with vacant, contentless insults like "as idiotic as anything Will in Seattle or John Bailo have ever said" are destroying this city.

The waterfront area is FILLED with parks already. You're forgetting the many Port parks that line the waterfront, and which almost no one ever visits.

The reason homeless congregate in Victor Steinbrueck Park isn't because it's small; that's absurd. They go there because non-homeless activities don't crowd them out. Vibrant city areas, like the Market just steps away, don't have serious homelessness problems because the commercial activity fills the space first. The park there, like most parks, is useless space, where the handful of employed people sit and look at the water for ten minutes before dying of boredom and moving on. Maybe they eat their lunch there, on a nice day. It's not a particularly bad thing, but it's not a hugely valuable use of the space, and the PRESENCE OF LARGE NUMBERS OF HOMELESS PEOPLE PROVES IT.

Putting another park on the waterfront is a huge missed opportunity. We have a chance to recharge the entire downtown, reconnect Pioneer Square, the Market, and the Waterfront, but we're not going to do that. We're going to create a lifeless barrier that people have to cross, which will destroy what's already there, not create more of it.

A park is going to fail at both its objectives. It's not going to restore any kind of nature to the central waterfront, which is a stupid goal in the first place. If you want to "restore Puget Sound", you have to INCREASE and FOCUS central density, not disperse it further. The Sound is threatened not by the central city but by the horrifically destructive development that's taking place in the remote exurbs. The city's not going away.

The other objective, enlivening a dead space, is hampered by the insistence on proven garbage ideas -- boulevards, parks. These things do not energize, they dissipate. City parks provide a relief, but if you continue to wipe out the thing you're supposedly providing relief from, you're just turning what used to be a city into another vacuous suburb.

A suburb almost as vacuous as your indefensible and logic-free attacks on my well-outlined ideas. "If you've ever been to the waterfront as it currently stands, you know that it's not dead. So, how exactly is replacing the viaduct and the creepy parking lot beneath it going to kill it?" utterly fails at making sense entirely -- you can't kill something if it's not dead? Seems to me quite the opposite -- if something is alive now, shouldn't that be protected and built upon?

Speaking of parking, where are those thousand-odd cars going to go? I know it's fashionable to say that cars have no place in a modern city, but quite the opposite is true -- cities are EXACTLY where cars belong. It's distant exurbs -- where all those cars, driven by tourists and shoppers and so on are going to go when you take away their spaces -- that need to have their car habits moderated.

By making the central city more like the woods, you invariably make more woods into city elsewhere, where you can least afford it.
36
Farnf, it is a little preposterous and incredibly arrogant on your part to postulate what cities are for. The truth is, they are for whatever we want them to be. If the citizens of Seattle want a waterfront of open space, they will use it for that. If they want activities located there, those will happen, too. It think, if anything, there will be enough space to have different levels of interaction, and (contrary to what your personal taste seems to be) no action at all. Personally, I have worked downtown for over 20 years, and from my perspective there is damn little peace and quiet here. I appreciate the thought and effort you have put into what you think a city should be, but you have an obvious bias against a environment (suburb) you don't like. Well, I hate the noise created by the viaduct - its deafening roar is inescapable from any part of the waterfront, and I hate the way it has chopped off the city from its bay. I hate looking at the ugly monstrosity and I hate the dead zone underneath it. I look forward to going down to Elliot Bay in Pioneer Square and being able to carry on a normal conversation there. I look forward to watching a sunset over Elliot Bay without having the viaduct block the view. I look forward to walking, or running, or riding my bike along the waterfront, without dodging cars. Most of all, I look forward to what the citizens of Seattle will do with the amazing space they are creating for themselves.
37
I thought the presentation by field operations was by far the best. The goal of the evening was to demonstrate the ability to engage the public, excite the audience, and respond to the questions - and they definitely nailed it. The rest were pale in comparison.
38
The walls/paths in the bay and stairs leading down to the water sound cool and all, but you don't need a park for that. As others have already stated we need business down there as well.

I'd like to hear more on how we activate THE BAY and not just this little strip of land. How do we preserve and increase waterbased businesses on the waterfront?

Get some REAL business activity going on down there for people to watch and you won't have enough space for all the cafes and beer gardens.
39
Dan Friedman did a wonderful, classy job.....? What presentation were you at? He was arrogant and demeaning, especially to the 3rd group.
40
Eventually this will be good for the Duwamish- the open sore crapped in by Boeing and the military that pours into the bay.
41
"Daniel Friedman from the UW was the moderator and question-asker"

I was absolutely dumbfounded by the questions Friedman asked, or maybe more so about how he framed them. Friedman was more intent on showing everyonbe how smart he was that he did a disservice to the presenters and the audience.

He was working so hard to be so smart he showed up like an idiot.

Lessee, Paul Schell as dean of the design school @ UW, then this buffoon- no wonder UW Architecture School has such a national reputation

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