What a difference time makes. And yet, the story is always the same. We begin with euphoria and end in depression. In 1998, the Seattle Times celebrated (though with some reservations—it feared the 1997 Asian Financial crisis would spread to our region) the opening of Pacific Place. The mall was part of a $400 million revitalization project that included the relocation of Nordstrom, a sky bridge, and a new office building, all promising to transform the supposedly blighted urban core into a consumer magnet. “Pacific Place, [a] retail-cinema-restaurant complex,” wrote Seattle Times, “will add glitz and variety to downtown Seattle, [when it] opens Thursday at Sixth Avenue and Pine Street.”
A little more than 20 years after that blast of optimism, the same paper was unremittingly gloomy about the vertical mall’s future. It had just completed a long (two-and-a-half years) and disruptive renovation that left almost everyone cold. Though the mall’s new look seems “pristine,” wrote the Seattle Times in 2020, it’s “for the wrong reason: There are barely any stores.”
The owner of Pacific Place at the time was Madison Marquette. The Washington, D.C.-based real estate company purchased the property in 2014 for a whopping $271 million. A little later, it also bought the parking lot, which has more levels (six) than the building (five), for $87 million from the city. And so, more than $350 million was poured into Pacific Place. At the end of last week, on May 17, Puget Sound Business Journal reported the block-big and capital-losing mall (it only has about 15 tenants) had been sold to LA’s BH Properties. The price tag was, unlike the sale of 2014, kept under wraps.
Pacific Place was doomed from the get-go, from the moment the idea of it was conceived by one of the founding members of Pine Street Development, Jeff Rhodes. The year was 1994. The plan was to think big. The belief was that the shock of a huge investment would restore the heart of downtown. The money for the plan came from many sources, including Kenny G, and the city provided the project with institutional support and a negative pick up on the massive parking lot. (Once the mall was fully operational, Mayor Norm Rice promised to buy and run the 1,200 subterranean parking units with the public’s purse.)
But the developers, who claimed to have long experience in the business, made two huge miscalculations. Both were at a macro/social/historical level. One concerned the then-in-progress decline of the suburbs and the form of its culture (cars, malls, low density). The other concerned the rise of online retail, which, at the time, was still in its infancy. The former was a clear and present danger. The latter, admittedly, was still obscure, despite the dot-com bubble, which, after bursting in 2000, numbered Amazon as one of its survivors. But mall culture was already in trouble in the mid-1990s because a growing portion of the public saw its sea-sized parking lots, its simulation of community feeling, and its impersonal goods in a negative light. Even by the 1980s, suburban culture faced the rising and relentless criticism of new urbanism. By the 1990s, the anti-car and pro-density principles of this movement had reached the mainstream. And yet the developers decided to transpose the suburbs, whole hog, to exactly where many had moved to escape it.
As if that wasn’t enough, the city devoted millions that could (should) have gone to affordable housing (increased density) to a parking lot that was so costly it became ammunition for the new urbanist cause. In the popular book Walkable City, Jeff Speck, using the research of parking professor Donald Shoup, pointed directly to the fact that Seattle had spent more than $60,000 for each stall below the mall. This was an extreme example of how the government subsidizes a large part of car culture. (Capitalism is never as cheap as it looks.) In fact, the city was ripped off when it purchased the parking garage. Seattle paid $73 million to own what cost $50 million to build, lost money maintaining the damn thing (“about $1.5 million a year“), and sold it for a song (only $87 million).
The parking lot is also said to have cost Mayor Norm Rice his chance at the big time, the Clinton Administration. He was the top runner for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development but was unceremoniously dropped when the vetting process likely revealed that he had directed HUD money to a project that was, in essence, for the rich and not the hard-working poor. Seattle Times of course called this interpretation of the fiasco a “cheap shot” in its 1996 article “Rice’s Loss Of Hud Job Is City Of Seattle’s Gain.”
Even the architecture of the mall was out of time with the times. As the blogger for the Buildings of Seattle, Keith Cote, explained, its postmodern style was in the “death throes” by “the late 1990s.” Though Cote is “a huge fan” of this kind of architecture, its “later phase… especially when applied to shopping centers, often resembles a train wreck.” Cote is also amazed that “such a bloated design and creative bankruptcy came from such a prestigious firm as NBBJ.” (NBBJ is the Seattle-based firm that designed Amazon’s headquarters and the Spheres.)
Let’s now turn to Amazon and the decline of brick-and-mortar shopping. When Madison Marquette purchased Pacific Place for loads of money, Seattle was in the middle of an economic boom driven by the tech sector. Downtown’s property values were skyrocketing. The future looked ever so bright. The mall was “90 percent leased and anchored by Barnes & Noble and AMC Theatres.” But in 2017, Madison Marquette apparently got greedy. It wanted to attract the deep pockets of tech workers by renovating the mall’s interiors and cramming a brazenly bougie entrance into the southwest section of Pacific Place that directly faced the gateway to South Lake Union. When the disruptive project was finally completed in 2020 for lord knows how much, “two-thirds of the mall’s tenants” were history. And so, Madison Marquette saw the revenue stream of nearly full occupancy drop to a 21-tenant rivulet. “Barneys New York, Barnes and Noble, Victoria’s Secret, Brookstone, J. Crew” and more left during renovation.
Then the pandemic hit, then the US economy lost a mind-boggling 22 million jobs, then the mall was directly hit by the Black Lives Matter revolt. Lululemon, the Canadian athletic apparel retailer offered a ray of hope. It moved into a larger space in the winter of 2020. But a little more than two years later, it called it day. With this departure, KUOW wasted no time calling the Pacific Place a “Ghost Mall.” To make matters worse, one of its remaining tenants is called Ghost Gallery. Of the 10 or so times I visited the place in April and May, I never saw this gallery open once. The same goes for a number of other businesses on its second, third, and fourth floors, which at one point were to be converted into office spaces by a bold developer based in LA (the plan tanked in the fall of 2022). As for the celebrated European-style atrium, its inactivity and emptiness are only made more visible by the merciless light falling from the mall’s massive skylight.
Only the top floor has businesses (restaurants and a cinema) that attract customers. Indeed, the vertical mall has become something like a floating strip mall. When you look down from this busy level, you see lots of security guards, a few people heading up to where you are, bad art here and there, and a large amount of capital that’s “like a patient etherized upon the table.”
I’m surprised Charles didn’t mention the 1995 vote to reopen Pine Street to automobiles as another one of the backwards-looking, suburbanization aspects of this project, and further proof that our corporate overlords had won the battle to destroy Seattle. Kurt got out just in time.
This is what happens when you put a bunch of business analysts in charge, who base all decisions on the past and blind to what’s on the horizon. I would argue that many of these retailers also failed for staying with the old two seasons approach to fashion cycles over the micro-cycles we see more commonly now. The food court was terrible and aside from the movie theater – which was a good idea but suffers the same challenges as brick and mortars – there wasn’t much reason for adults (aka downtown commuter clientele) to visit.
I offer you University Village, which is thriving during the “retail apocalypse,” beautifully landscaped, smart to integrate neighborhood draw/amenities (standalone restaurants and grocery stores) to diversify trips/attract new foot traffic.
Creative revitalization is possible, but not under the same old business models run by the usual network of entrenched powerbrokers. Put some artists in charge.
I’ll never forget how thrilling it was to have our very own downtown FAO Schwartz, even if it was only for a minute.
“Lululemon, the Canadian athletic apparel retailer offered a ray of hope. It moved into the mall in the winter of 2020. But a little more than two years later, it called it day.”
Lululemon had previously been a tenant at Pacific Place Mall; I recall shopping there with my girlfriend in 2012.
Not noticed by Charles was flagship tenant Gordon Biersch’s departure in the late 2010s. The brewpub had always been a huge draw for the mall, constantly full during weeknights and weekends. GB’s corporate decision to abandon Pacific Place was part of a national reduction in sites, after each of the eponymous founders had sold out, and had moved on with their lives and careers.
Does anyone really believe if Pacific Place hadn’t been built that the city would have created “affordable housing” on the site. That is some of the most valuable real estate in Seattle. At best it would have been luxury condo’s and apartments. Of course the conundrum is in order to get to the 15 minute walkable city urbanists love to drone on about you do need retail/services somewhere.
I’m surprised Charles took so long to state that malls are not as popular as they were a quarter century ago.
In related news: landlines are no longer popular, music is no longer sold primarily in hard-copy format, cable television no longer has any appeal, renting hard copies of movies has died out, and a host of other things that seemed like a good idea a generation ago have not stood the test of time. It’s almost like things change with the passage of time and development of new technologies! Who knew!?
Because nothing says “good for local economy” like a mall full of out-of-state corporate retail stores owned by out-of-state real estate companies. Just imagine a tube on the top of the building sucking money out of Seattle into distant bloated pockets.
Meh. People are always writing off downtown. I personally think the worst thing to happen to downtown was the construction of Westlake Mall and office building and the destruction of the “old” Westlake, with its funky collection of buildings and the Googie old Monorail terminal.
Interesting (?) sidenote: The city built that garage in an effort to get Nordstrom to move from their weird old downtown store (which was strung out along about fourteen buildings) to the empty Frederick & Nelson building. David Sabey, the last owner of Frederick’s said that if the city had built that garage earlier, it might have been enough to save F&N (which was a far superior store than Nordstrom). He’s still bitter about it, and so am I.
Tensorna dear, I think it’s interesting how every downtown Seattle downturn in the last forty years has been primarily because of things that have nothing to do with Seattle’s downtown.
Frederick’s was originally a division of Marshall Fields, which was loaded down with debt and set adrift during the M&A craze of the 1980’s. They tried going indy, and almost succeeded, but Kemper Freeman killed the deal that would have saved it (by selling the Bellevue Square store to a lower-end retailer).
I. Magnin – a high-end women’s clothing store that was all up and down the west coast – was closed because of decisions made by Macy’s corporate office in Cincinatti.
More recently, Macy’s threw in the towel on the old Bon Marche store because 1) They are abysmal at marketing, merchandising, and mercantile and 2) Amazon made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. (The same thing happened with Meier & Frank in Portland). There’s no reason that a well-run store couldn’t make a huge profit in that location. Maybe not a seven story department store, like the Bon, but the basement – with its direct access to Link – and a few floors above ground could meet a need for a growing residential neighborhood like downtown. Not everyone shops on-line, and a store that offers service and a good experience for the consumer can still do well. Look at the department stores in Europe.
Din Tai Fung still carries the whole complex on its giant shoulders.
Quick add-on to this great story: If Barnes and Noble were still at this mall, that would draw in a TON of traffic. Not sure why Pacific Place Mall made it so hard for Barnes and Noble to keep the lease, but it was the only (new books) bookstore left in central downtown Seattle, and it would help if they came back. Seattle is a big, big reading town and in the past Seattlelites would go there and then maybe see a movie or buy shampoo at Aveda or have a burger. I know Barnes and Noble was a capitalist corporation, but it is better than buying books online.
All these comments reminiscing about Pacific Place are making me pine for Gordon Biersch’s garlic fries.
Like @12 said, I remember Barnes and Noble always being pretty packed from when it opened well into the aughts. Borders on 4th (RIP) was also a great place to browse books that was relatively close by. Pacific Place had a ton of foot traffic for years and years, not only because of the mall but because of all the surrounding retail within the surrounding few blocks.
You can’t blame all of the decline of Pacific Place and the nearby area on the structural decline of retail. It isn’t like Bellevue Square or Southcenter, as they and their surrounding areas each continue to be bustling in the way Pacific Place no longer is. The difference is neither Tukwila nor Bellevue openly tolerated the things that Seattle did and does on their streets. So people voted with their feet and decided to go elsewhere.
Charles, I’m disappointed in the lazy reporting on this. You hit a nerve in me because you shitted on small local businesses. The Pacific Place may be a failure but Ghost Gallery is a Seattle Gem, that has resided in 2 spots on Capitol Hill prior to this location. It is your assumption that all spaces within Pacific Place should be 7-days a week, mall hours. AMC theatre has it’s own hours. Ghost Gallery is closed on Monday, like many other local businesses. As more and more local businesses shudder, I hope Ghost Gallery can survive a little longer so we can all keep enjoying the thoughtfully curated art, merchandise and wine before it becomes impossible to shop locally. Do better Charles.
It’s always bizarre to go past Johnny Rockets and see all the giddy people there enjoying life and ignoring the dying mall in the levels below where they sit.
I was in town for a conference in March and we hit Din Tai Fung several times, got a chance to kind of gawp at the weirdness of the vacant mall. Lululemon was still there despite Charles thinking they left a couple years ago? But they were vacant and the people I was walking around with would only mock their bodyshaming rep.
Want to know more? The whole ghastly story about HUD money, the usual city council players, Wild Ginger and 1990s downtown development (and the loss of the hygiene center) are spelled out in gloriously nerdy detail in “Securing the Spectacular City” by Timothy Gibson. So many deals! SPL has a copy or two to check out.
Id Thoris dear, the 90’s were indeed a mess downtown. My favorite horror story is how the Rice Administration basically gave away the Dexter Horton, City Light, and Arctic Club buildings in order to move City Government into a big ugly skyscraper that the private sector couldn’t fill. (A skyscraper that I suspect was modeled after the architect’s penis)
Then there’s the big empty hole that is the former Public Safety Building site, and you don’t want to get me started on that fiasco.