Because a city's convention center is in constant competition with the convention centers in other cities, it can't stop growing. It needs more and more space. The Washington State Convention Center is locked in this regional race. Portland, Denver, and Vancouver, BC have convention centers that are bigger than ours. And size is the only thing that matters when it comes to this form of architecture. It doesn't matter if the building is as ugly as the pylon beneath an off-ramp; it just has to very big, most important of all, bigger than the rest. This is the hard law of the event business. (I wrote about this in 1999, during the WTO riots.)
A deal has just been struck between the space-hungry Washington Convention Center and King County Metro’s Convention Place Station. What the former wants is to transform the bus station into more of itself—a convention center. But when this happens, what will become of all the buses that use the station and the tunnel?
"The Convention Place Station was actually slated to close a long time ago," explained Frank Abe, the director of communications for King County Executive Dow Constantine. "It was planned that once the Northgate Station opened, which will be in 2021, and that's not that far away, that buses will be removed from the tunnel, and the trains will run more frequently. All that's happening with this deal is that the buses will be removed from the tunnel 16 months early."
All I can say about this is that I'm happy to wait for the distant opening of Northgate Station. But every day leading to the opening of the stations in Capitol Hill and the University District hurts so, so bad. My life will change when those lines are finally alive.