William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

More Amazon

"Amazon," wrote Brier Dudley yesterday in the Seattle Times, "tends to share about as much information as an introverted teenager, but it's turning 18 this year and finally putting down roots."

He's referring to the news that Amazon is buying three contiguous blocks of urban real estate, situated between downtown and the current Amazon campus in the South Lake Union Neighborhood.

Yesterday was President's Day, which for me means my parking garage downtown was closed, which means I drove around town for twenty minutes looking for free street parking (metered parking is gratis on President's Day). Lo and behold if I didn't end up parking just a block north-west of the reported Amazon purchase. So I checked out the lay of the land and took these photos on the walk into downtown.

This would be the northern-most tip of the new parcel, at the corner of 8th Avenue and Blanchard. I wonder if the tree will survive the construction.

Now looking southwest from 8th Avenue, just before Westlake crosses 8th. On the block to the back of the one in the foreground, between 7th and 6th Aves., is another lot full of cars. The construction on the horizon, south of 6th Ave., must be something besides Amazon.

This is the southernmost block of the parcel. Viewed here from Lenora just south of 7th Ave., one can readily appreciate how the new Amazon campus will abut and effectively extend Seattle's downtown. Pretty exciting!

Twisting your head over your right shoulder from the prior vantage point, or turning about 160 degrees if you'd rather not strain your neck, here is a view of the block bordered by 6th, 7th, Blanchard and Lenora. The King Cat Theatre, current home of Ignite Seattle, is the tan, squat building toward the left of frame. Always good to reference the Space Needle. If you are familiar with the current Amazon-ville, you know the splendid view of the Space Needle from Thomas St., looking west.

Last shot. This is from 6th Ave., just south of the corner of Lenora, looking due north across portions of all three blocks in the parcel. It is a heck of a lot of space.

Orange Friday

Traveling today. The picture below tells where and why.

I've been thinking about prospective sunshine all week. It was raining in Seattle yesterday. It has been raining in Seattle all week.

Program Notes: Two topics I can't get into today in depth, to which we will return, soon enough:

• The association of state and provincial securities administrators, NASAA, has floated a draft of its proposed crowdfunding securities exception. Kudos to Jim Hamilton for blogging an overview. Thanks also to @JoeWallin for tweeting a heads up about Jim's post. The biggest distinguishing feature of the NASAA proposal appears to be that it would require crowdfunding platforms to register as broker-dealers. That will not go over well with many of the folks commenting on the #Crowdfunding posts on this blog.
• Speaking of @JoeWallin, have you noticed that the approach he's taking on his blog lately is to survey core topics in a way that both revisits the fundamentals and brings them into current debates. Exhibit Number 1 of this method is his most recent post about "general solicitation." My own take is that practice has outrun the prohibition on general solicitation. That is, it's not just that the rule is crimping startup financings; it's that the rule is already being breached on an almost wholesale basis. Something's already toppled, and it behooves the regulators, as much as anyone, to reform the rule to conform to current practice.

Texture Map 3/5/7

The snow in Seattle has washed away as quickly as it first arrived, though it did linger the better part of last week. Downtown office routines, business travel, school classes were disrupted. City streets served as impromptu sled runs.

Here's a collage I put together to remember the week. I call it Texture Map 3/5/7.

The photos were all taken last Friday, late afternoon, along NE 50th Street, between University Way NE and 8th Ave NE. A Flickr set of the individual photos is here.

A Pedestrian Metropolis

I'm planning to go see the kinetic sculpture by Chris Burden, now installed in Los Angeles at LACMA.

But I'll go pre-disposed feeling it is wrong to identify as "metropolitan" an energy devoid of foot traffic.

In preparation, you might say, for viewing the sculpture, I took these pictures on a walk to work last week.

In my pedestrian version of Metropolis, the buildings move, more so than the traffic.

What gives the buildings their relative velocity is the leverage of the walker's slowly shifting perspective. Sometimes, it is possible to completely re-situate the skyline in just a few steps.

Discovery Park

Yesterday, January 1, 2012, was mild and sunny in Seattle.

Helen took me to Discovery Park. I'd been to interior bits of it, but never before walked down to the beach and the bend in Puget Sound where the lighthouse sits.

Very pleasant to be outdoors.

Hundreds of people out. So many acres, though, so many criss-crossing paths, there was plenty of room. Families speaking different languages. Scores of dogs, and, as Helen so trenchantly pointed out, not a single misbehaving dog owner.

Park Place

The building across University Street from my office's building is called Park Place.

It's not an ugly building but until recently it was invisible, perhaps because it lacked approaches designed to actually take you there. University Street functions as an on-ramp to I-5; the sidewalks funnel pedestrians away from the highway and west, down the hill in the direction of the waterfront, or else north, past my building, to the retail area.

But some clever architect(s) or designer(s) have given the building, and the whole block, character, through a redesign of what had been Park Place's throwaway entry area.

One of these pictures is of a workman finishing the installation of metal type to make sure you're struck with the name of the place (not sure I could put a name to the building before). Above the letters you can see a screen mesh, which somehow, by covering the space between the columns, accentuates the height of the columns. From inside, the mesh gives volume to the space, making it atrium-like, but still transitional - between outdoors and inside.

In the gray, drizzly winter afternoons of Seattle, it's hard to get a picture that captures how well the re-design draws the eye through a play with materials and texture. But in the early evening, the space show off for pictures. Chandeliers glow from the box and warm the whole street. Really nice work. They may need to put a chair or two in there.

GeekWire and Seattle 2.0

Smart move by Seattle 2.0 to mesh into GeekWire.

Seattle 2.0 engendered a self-awareness in Seattle that startups are a community. Hard to believe it has only been a few years since it launched.

In the short time GeekWire has been on the scene as GeekWire, it's gone from strength to strength. We are witnessing two professional journalists becoming media moguls before our very eyes. I suspect that eventually GeekWire will extend nationally or internationally, but already John and Todd are buiding a strong team and modeling a viable post-print journalism that rebuts the fretting of those who yet decry the death of newspapers.

Communication - writing, pictures, events around themes - is incalculably important. Sure, many entrepreneurs, companies and investors are under the radar, or even off the grid entirely - folks who shun publicity or regard stealthiness as a competitive advantage. But they benefit, too - ride free - on the flow of information, the sense of identity and the fact of community created by Seattle 2.0 and GeekWire.

I'm personally indebted, too. My readers and my friends know how important blogging is to me. I'm able to do it because of where I am in life - an empty nester, relatively senior in a law practice - but I wouldn't be doing it without the support of models like Matt Heaton, Joe Wallin, and Marcelo Calbucci. With Seattle 2.0, Marcelo connected me with my initial audience, sustaining me as I developed a rhythm and voice as a blogger.

Here's to the idea of authentic integration that drives Seattle 2.0 and GeekWire!

Photo by Martin Deutsch.

Sunny California

Orange, California

California and I have a complicated relationship.

The Pacific Northwest is my adopted home. I've raised three children there, my professional life is based there, friends there taught me how to blog.

In Seattle, unlike other parts of the world, things like good government and meritocracy don't seem out of reach. The art scene could be more robust (more shows like Paradise, now at the Frye, could change that (my review here)), but people are well read and capable of civic thought (public transport excepted). Too many in the Seattle startup community seem burdened with the insecurity that business grass is greener in California, which is nonsense masquerading as resentment. Amazon will continue to centralize power in Seattle. Microsoft will pay to train and then throw off engineers into the talent pool for years to come. The only way Washington State can fuck up and become truly provincial will be to under-fund education; otherwise, the brainwork of California companies will continue to migrate north.

But I do like the scene down here in sunny California. The people here are not like Washingtonians, but if they were, they would be a mix of people from Seattle and eastern Washington, in equal proportion, all in the same place.

California is full of the kind of people who shop at Costco and aren't too fussy to mind coffee from Starbucks. Contractors who congregate around open-bed pickup trucks early in the morning at mini-mall donut shops (that's how you find the good ones?).

I used to think Northern and Southern California were different worlds, but I don't think that anymore. The smell is the same. Eucalyptus everywhere. The outdoor air is everywhere scented the same. Interiors smell like new drywall.

Pictured: Eastside strip mall construction that I simply can't abide back home. But it seems okay down here. Maybe it's the sun and the palm trees?

Hasta la Vista, Viaduct

Off and on through the years of civic indecision over the fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, Seattlites have had mixed feelings about it.

Chicago has the elevated Loop. NYC, the Highline. The Viaduct is . . . an auto-era update of that American archetype, the elevated train infrastructure?

But Seattle doesn't have the enduring historical texture of Chicago or New York. Apart from the public library (a world class exception), Seattle has no important architecture or civic space downtown, and its avenues and streets, while walkable, don't entertain street life.

The only manmade space we pull off okay is decadently luxurious light industrial, and then in neighborhoods that circle downtown (and may eventually eclipse it). The pulse of this city may well be its air- and water-borne traffic. Just as well to not compete with the gorgeous harbor, the flight corridors criss-crossing directly overhead, the maritime patterns, the mountain ranged horizons.

Just as well to take the Viaduct - best driving view of the Seattle skyline and commercial waterfront though it may now provide - down. Seattle doesn't do nostalgia.

These pictures are from a Viaduct "open house" for pedestrians yesterday, to mark the beginning of the demolishing of a southern portion of the structure.

Day One

Last night I went to a public relations event put on by Amazon Web Services in the middle of their South Lake Union campus. (Shout out to my friend, the amazonian IP lawyer, Hillary Nye, who went with me and talked to 5x as many people.)

I love the energy in the South Lake Union neighborhood. Sure, the architecture should have been more ambitious, but the countours of the neighborhood retain the character of the area's light industrial warehouse past.

I hear from several sources that things on Microsoft's Azure run faster, but what really epitomizes the cloud better in the popular mind than Amazon Web Services?

Hillary and I arrived late, but we grabbed beer and negotiated our way to the sausages and pretzels - left of the stage where an AWS evangelist was already speaking. Hillary struck up a conversation with a laid back woman standing by the pretzels, and we bantered with her about the event, the food, the new Kindle, what not. Hillary offered to get her a plate of food, but the woman said she would wait till she was done speaking. Turns out she was Alyssa Henry, in charge of storage services on Amazon's cloud! That's her speaking on the left, below.

Everything is in Seattle's backyard, virtually and physically; and the people making and managing everything, they hang out here, too.

The locus of American history is in lower Manhattan. The locus of America's digital future is in Seattle. California is an afterthought.