A year ago, Chris Patano stood at the corner of Boren Avenue and Pike Street, looked out over Interstate 5, and began to sketch in his notebook.
Earlier that same day, Patano had left his architecture firm, Patano Studio, and walked up Pike Street, through the soulless glass canyon of the convention center and then along the concrete walls of Freeway Park. When he got to the windswept Plymouth Pillars he turned toward Boren Avenue. Where there were once homes, shops, gardens, and a grand stairway called the Republican Hill Climb that connected South Lake Union to Capitol Hill, today there is a canyon filled with cars.
As he walked, Patano stared down into the freeway’s canyon and then up at the cranes raising new skyscrapers alongside it. As an architect specializing in parks and public spaces, he was used to filling in gaps, to seeing possibility in empty spaces. But the potential of I-5 had always eluded him—a massive scar that cut the city in half, I-5 was simply too overwhelming a void…
