The guy behind Born Again Bertha is local architect and cool dad John Kennedy, pictured here at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear held by Jon Stewart, one of Kennedys idols, in 2010.
The guy behind Born Again Bertha is local architect and cool dad John Kennedy, pictured here at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear held by Jon Stewart, one of Kennedy's idols, in 2010. Myra Lara

If you happened to walk through Pioneer Square on Tuesday, you may have noticed a 20-foot-long, official-looking (but highly unofficial) Bertha proposal propped up in the Occidental Mall. "Born Again Bertha" described a wild Plan B our current elected officials would never consider: filling the future, never-finished downtown tunnel with a K-8 school named after former mayor Mike McGinn, a rock climbing wall, an auditorium, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and a halfpipe for skating. The project also imagined some above-ground amenities, like monorail to downtown Seattle and a waterfront park. (Though, as far as we can tell, it somehow ignored Trent Moorman's "Giant Conveyor-Belt Sushi" proposal from last June.)

Neither the Born Again Bertha poster nor the snazzy website—bornagainbertha.com—revealed the project's creators. But The Stranger has learned that the brains behind "Born Again Bertha" belong to 50-year-old cool dad John Kennedy, a local architect who once drafted a plan to repurpose the Alaskan Way Viaduct into a bicycle freeway.

Two months ago, he said, back when things "seemed a little bleaker" for Bertha, he got to pondering alternatives. "I was thinking, 'Man, what could you do if you got abandoned?'" Kennedy, one of three principals at the Pioneer Square firm Sundberg Kennedy Ly-Au Young Architects, says. "Then I talked at people at parties and I started getting a collection of things to put down a 1,000-foot-long pipe."

One of the sections of Born Again Bertha dedicated to Mike McGinn K-8 School and a waterfront park, among other things.
One of the sections of Born Again Bertha. It's dedicated to Mike McGinn K-8 School and a waterfront park, among other things. courtesy of John Kennedy

A few weeks ago, Kennedy took out a long roll of drafting vellum and started drawing sections of the imagined plan while watching The Voice with his 10-year-old son. (You can thank the younger Kennedy for the "Wazzie B" skate park idea.) After Kennedy brought the whole thing into work, his office ran with the idea on Twitter, where people started excitedly sharing the Born Again Bertha link.

Kennedy's had other aspirational, if not far-fetched, ideas for the viaduct before. In 2007, he came up with the "Veloduct," a bike freeway put together using old viaduct parts that generated hot water with vacuum tube solar panels. (Check out the full thing here.)

Close-up of the Veloduct plans, a bicycle freeway made out of old viaduct parts.
Close-up of plans for the Veloduct, a bicycle freeway made out of old viaduct parts. courtesy of John Kennedy

Elected officials never really considered that one, obviously, but Kennedy isn't ruling out Born Again Bertha just yet. Even though parts of the plan require future President Jeb Bush (oh god, can we not?) having an epiphany about climate change while snorkeling, and then shifting national priorities away from Big Oil, Kennedy says a plan like his could, even in a non-alternate-universe, make for a fun reuse project. "If the thing really did get canceled, it could happen, sure," he says. (Here, though, it's probably worth noting that Kennedy's relatively tiny Born Again Bertha cost estimate—$134 million—is totally made up.)

If you missed Born Again Bertha the first time, you'll have another opportunity to check it out in person this weekend. Kennedy and his "urban intervention" team will be displaying the plans at the Green Lake Aqua Theater on Saturday—in keeping, Kennedy says, with the theme of abandoned infrastructure.