Some people are imagining what the downtown Seattle waterfront might look like. And as I and a few dozen others heard architect Lee Copeland say yesterday during a Seattle Architecture Foundation tour organized by Cristina Bump, downtown's waterfront doesn't necessarily have to look like Alki, or Golden Gardens, or Greenlake, or any of the shores along Lake Washington. It can be an urban waterfront. It should be; it should pull the everyday commercial life of downtown to the bay.
The illustration to the left above is by J. Craig Thorpe and is from the "University Street Arts Corridor for Pedestrians" proposal promoted by Cascadia Center. The image to the right, I took this afternoon with my iPhone. If you adjust for the difference in altitude, the photo on the right is looking up University Street in the same direction as the imagining to the left, but as seen from the middle of the latter illustration (you might say my photo was taken from the horizontal white street bisecting the illustration). The rectangular pond at the center of the illustration is essentially in the place of the asphalt street in my photo. The terraces of steps in both images (defining the horizon in my photo) are the same; they are the plaza of the Harbor Steps development.
At the crest of those steps, just across First Avenue, is the Hammering Man (who by the way is still not working) and the Seattle Art Museum. Turn left and go a few blocks, and you are at the cobblestone entrance to Pike Place Market. If, instead of turning left on First Avenue, you stay straight on University Street and keep walking up the hill another five blocks, you come to One Union Square, where I work, and Freeway Park, covering I-5.
I find it pretty exciting to imagine that I might, over lunch or even for a coffee break on a sunny afternoon, walk down to the waterfront as easily as I might walk to Pike Place Market.
What's that, you say? Why not pull the perspective back a bit farther, so we can see the present day counterpart to the green space imagined in the bottom half of Thorpe's illustration? Okay; you asked for it:
I admit that over the years I have expressed nostalgia for the viaduct and the whole old-world, industrial, city-as-exposed-utility aesthetic (our version of the elevated rail loop in downtown Chicago, perhaps). But after the tour yesterday, I'm finally going to let that go. The price we pay for the viaduct -- even considering the splendid views it affords new visitors driving north from the airport -- is too high. It isolates the waterfront and keeps it from being part of the experience of our working day.
