Recent Stories with tag thornton place

Oh hello, nerds. Can't wait another two and half months for your precious Tron sequel? You're in luck, as on October 28th, Disney is hosting Tron Night all over the country (and even internationally), in which devoted geeks can briefly leave their mothers' basements stop playing WoW excitedly stand in line see twenty minutes of the new Tron film. (20th Century Fox did something similar for Avatar last year, which definitely served to boost the hype.) 

Locally, there's five Seattle-area IMAX theaters where you can catch the Tron Legacy sneak peek: Lincoln Square, Alderwood, Southcenter, Thornton Place, and Pacific Science Center. As of right now, it looks like free tickets are still available for all five locations. Have at it, nerds.

Earlier this week I was up at Northgate, and decided to drop in at the Thornton Place complex for the first time. I've been interested in the area ever since Seattle Public Utilities mounted a restoration project for Thornton Creek, which, fed by over 11 square acres, drains into Lake Washington. In former days, the creek had salmon and trout.

The creek has been daylighted, and its banks are coating themselves with greenery, but Thornton Place remains caught between the future its developers (Stellar and Lorig) hoped for and the recessionary one that appeared.

While apartments are renting, some 20 of the condos, which were not selling like hotcakes in the cooling housing market, developed a settling problem that was announced in early April 2010. Today, the 109 condos sit there, empty, aging, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. They're not Lorig's only problem.

In the meantime, Stellar is still looking for commercial clients for its retail space in the complex--they'd love a brewpub, and are considering hosting a farmer's market. And it's not precisely a ghost town: Regal Thornton Place, notes the Seattle Times, is raking in $17.50 per ticket for Shrek 3-D in IMAX.

But there's no denying the feeling you've stumbled onto the set of Life After People when you walk, all by yourself, down the promenade, to your right a revitalized creek pooling and tumbling over rocks, and to your left bare granite-top counters, one after another. Sooner or later, something's got to give.

Slightlynorth gives you...Belltown!

(Follow-up post on the architects, structural engineers, and general contractor here.)

The McGuire apartment building, at 210 Wall Street in Belltown, opened its doors in 2001. Now, just nine years later, it's closing them for good. Though the marketing copy, ironically, boasts "exceptional attention to detail in design construction," the 25-story building, with 272 units, is suffering from "corrosion of post-tensioned cables and concrete material and reinforcement placement deficiencies," according to legal real estate advisers Kennedy Associates. (Their full press release, with full grout details, is after the jump.)

Since repair is financially infeasible, residents are being relocated (with larger incentives the sooner they leave), and the building will be dismantled. Everyone must go by the end of this year. This comes as a bit of a shock to residents of the upscale building, who are paying $1,000-$1,500 per month just for studios. But investigation of the defects revealed that conditions were becoming unsafe, and Seattle's Department of Planning and Development is requiring the building's owner to submit periodic inspection reports to track the building's health.

Carpenter’s Tower, LLC, is the named owner, a partnership of the Carpenters Union, Local 131, and MEPT, the Multi-Employer Property Trust. They're suing the general contractor and architects (not named in the news release). Since it's unlikely the general contractor built just one structure, I've got a call in to find out who it was.

In the heyday of building before the real estate market crashed, roughly from 2001 onward, just-add-water condos sprouted up quickly. Nine years was enough to do The McGuire in--that doesn't seem that long. But the Seattle Times just reported on Northgate's Thornton Place condominiums, and the settling problem that 20 of the 109 units are experiencing, just a year after project completion. Floors and walls have separated by half an inch so far.... (more)