If Seattle has faced a single divisive urban-planning issue in
recent years, it’s the waterfront. Namely, the enormous chunk of
concrete that separates Seattle’s waterfront from the rest of the city:
the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The vulnerable double-decker freeway, carrying
over 100,000 cars a day, is a catastrophe just waiting for the next
seismic tremor. Now the city has found its man to mediate a solution to
this and dozens of other urban-planning puzzles.
“I think the waterfront is very exciting,” says Raymond Gastil, who
on August 25 began his position as Seattle’s new planning director,
overseeing a staff of roughly 45 people at the city’s Department of
Planning and Development (DPD). “But the question is, ‘How do we make
it better?'”
Best known for his book Beyond the Edge: New York’s New
Waterfront, Gastil’s insight into the underused riverfronts along
New York City landed him the job of director of that city’s Manhattan
office, where he has served the last three years. He was also the
founding director of the urban-growth think tank Van Alen
Institute.
“It’s a pretty big job,” says Diane Sugimura, DPD’s director, on
Gastil’s new role. (San Francisco pilfered our previous planning
director, John Rahaim, in November.) Gastil will be overseeing citywide
land-use policies, neighborhood growth strategies, parks placement,
building heights, and urgent planning challenges—including
development around the new light-rail stations and envisioning a city
without a viaduct.
Known for being media shy, Gastil nevertheless speaks quickly and
deftly. He won’t commit to any one waterfront plan—The
Stranger reached him six hours into his first day on the
job—however, he does repeatedly refer to a proposal sketch by DPD
that depicts a viaduct-free Alaskan Way. He also favorably cites San
Francisco’s decision not to rebuild a similar structure along its
waterfront after the 1989 Bay Area earthquake turned it into a human
juicer. The reconnection of San Francisco with its waterfront is
considered an enormous success.
“It takes a great deal of dialogue,” Gastil says about his
philosophy for working with residents concerned about traffic and
various government agencies concerned with turf. “You just have to
believe that there is a way to accommodate change and preserve what
makes Seattle special.” He adds, “Everyone may not agree on that, but
you have to try.”
The waterfront may be the most contentious, unwieldy debate with the
most stakeholders—but it will be only one of Gastil’s
challenges.
His first task in Seattle will be finishing the nearly complete plan
to rezone south downtown—currently populated with parking lots
and squat warehouses—increasing residential density around the
King Street Station, the region’s future commuter-rail hub. In
addition, Gastil must tackle sensitive density issues around new
light-rail stations in neighborhoods, such as those in Roosevelt and
Southeast Seattle.
“We haven’t had a major discussion about what will be happening
around major stops on those lines as far as housing,” says city council
member Sally Clark, chair of the council’s land-use committee. While
Clark is unsure when the viaduct debate will rise again, she notes that
Gastil’s best contribution may be envisioning and articulating how the
city could function without it.
“It is our hope that Ray will bring with him some great ideas about
what the Seattle waterfront will be in its next life,” Clark says.
However, not every aspect of Gastil’s background cheers urban
development enthusiasts. During his tenure in Manhattan, he was
involved in the vetting of redevelopment of the West Side rail yard.
The property, owned by the transit authority on the isle’s Upper West
Side, was the subject of bidding by several developers. The winner
proposed several towers last year, both commercial and residential,
surrounded by greenery and walking paths. The concept has historically
been referred to as “towers in the park”—a design scheme
popularized by French planner Le Corbusier and widely reviled for
filling cities with impractical, empty, wind-swept plazas and
impersonal skyscrapers. The New York Times writes that the
proposal’s “tired urban planning formulas should force a serious
reappraisal of the public-private partnerships that shape development
in the city today.”
While Gastil should not take all the blame for the West Side rail
yards, he was “involved in the work of getting toward guidelines that
allowed the submissions to be made,” he says. But he’s focused now on
Seattle, where he attended Lakeside School.
“That was then and this is now,” says
Gastil. 