On the morning of Monday, July 7, Capitol Hill resident Dennis
Saxman, 58, appeared at the King County Courthouse, wearing a gray suit
and a pair of matte black shoes
with thick, practical laces.
His goal: To send a proposed six-story apartment building at East
Pine Street and Belmont Avenue—a building that made it through a
two-year design-approval process, had copious neighborhood feedback,
and was revised repeatedly—back to the drawing board. To that
end, in February, Saxman filed an 850-page lawsuit in Superior Court
against the City of Seattle and development firm Murray Franklyn, which
had planned to start construction this year. “I should win just based
on the weight of the paper,” Saxman jokes.
The block was once home to several long-established neighborhood
businesses, including the Cha Cha, the Bus Stop, and Manray—the
kind of affordable hangouts that make dense neighborhoods like Capitol
Hill vibrant, interesting places to live.
Saxman’s goal, in part, was to preserve the kind of spaces such
locally owned businesses can afford. However, his motivation is split
between that admirable goal and opposing all contemporary design: “I
generally don’t like modern buildings,” Saxman acknowledges.
Arguing his case pro se, Saxman, a former attorney who moved
to Seattle from San Francisco in 1996, told Judge Julie Spector that
the building’s design would violate guidelines enacted by the city
council in 2000. Saxman believes those guidelines require all new
structures in the Pike/Pine neighborhood to match the area’s historic
brick architecture.
In his 12 years on Capitol Hill, Saxman has seen an influx of new
buildings, including the two Press buildings (across the street from
the proposed condos on Belmont Avenue) and the Braeburn (a few blocks
east on 14th Avenue), all of which he says “should not have been
approved” by the design review board.
“I think Dennis is very well-intentioned,” says developer Liz Dunn,
who helped draft the neighborhood design guidelines and recently
finished the modern warehouse-style Agnes Lofts on 12th Avenue and Pike
Street. “The guidelines are not intended to preclude good modern
architecture.”
Land-use attorney Peter Buck, who argued against Saxman at the
hearing, argued that the guidelines are open to interpretation.
That’s the city’s position, too. “This board decided that the
project did meet guidelines,” says Vince Lyons, the head of design
review for the city’s Department of Planning and Development. “It’s not
a prescriptive… code.”
Saxman does have at least one legitimate gripe: The buildingwith its
metal finish, red panels, and balconies—is as ordinary and dull
as any new building in Green Lake or Wallingford. Part of the reason
its shortcomings are so glaring, compared to other new buildings in
Pike/Pine, is that it’s a full block long.
On the other hand, thanks to Saxman, it’s currently a block-long
parking lot.
“We’ve lost a block of buildings, and now we have a gaping hole in
the street and community,” Chip Wall, a member of the Pike/Pine Urban
Neighborhood Council, who worked with the developers to reach the final
set of designs, complains. “I think what would be more effective for
Dennis to do, frankly, is to really have articulated a [development]
standard for people and rallied a group to go in there [to talk to
developers] with him.”
Judge Spector will issue a ruling by the end of July. If she decides
that the city was “clearly erroneous” in granting the permit or denying
Saxman’s appeal, the developer may have to revamp its design. In
theory, that sort of ruling could also change the requirements for all
new buildings that come under neighborhood-specific design guidelines,
requiring all new buildings to emulate old ones.
In the meantime, Saxman is planning for another appeal hearing in
September to stop a proposed apartment building on Pine Street and
Bellevue Avenue. But if he loses his case in court, his appeal, along
with his entire argument that design guidelines are prescriptive, will
hit a brick wall. 