A conversation with Seattle
Google’s new Earth Engine uses an archive of Landsat satellite images to create time-lapse videos of regions of the earth from space: cities, rain forests, glaciers, deserts, whatever you’d like to zoom in on. There’s no embedding capability yet, so here’s the link to Seattle’s growth since 1984.
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The majority voiced support for Mayor Mike McGinn’s proposal to rezone parts of South Lake Union to allow for towers up to 400 feet tall or about 40 stories. At that height, buildings could obstruct some views of Puget Sound, the Space Needle, and Lake Union from Capitol Hill.
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This morning, a half-acre of former SHA property (official sale price: $2.88 million) at 12th Avenue and East Yesler Way is on the way to private hands–private Canadian hands, in fact, since the new owners are Gracorp Capital Advisors Ltd. of Calgary, Canada. They’re partnering locally with Spectrum Development Solutions, who have been very busy around Seattle providing housing for college students.
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So to sum up, for the past 20 years, the park has been at the center of a firestorm between what the city can pay for, what park-goers want and need, and what neighboring communities are willing to tolerate.
But as warring parties continued their constant bickering, the buildings on the old base, the ones the Navy said we had to maintain, have been falling apart as the result of neglect and Seattle’s notoriously unforgiving weather.
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Jeremy Barker, our At-Large Arts contributor, forwarded me some “new thinking,” that reminded me of the kinds of solutions that conflict with institutional values. Joanna Harmon in Minneapolis asks:
“What if small companies and loose collectives of theatre artists were enabled by a single group of administrators, rather than each company reinventing its administrative wheel?”
This will sound more or less interesting to you–I’m willing to bet–depending upon your role in arts administration.
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The argument here, as it has played out in other parts of the city as well, revolves around the amount of money that builders can make by adding extra stories. Developers, in fact, would like 180-foot-tall buildings. But should Pioneer Square look like Belltown?
To that point, argues Licata, the Pioneer Square Preservation Board spent the last four years working with the DPD to settle on suitable height limits: in this case, the proposed maximum height of 120 feet, if developers use an incentive zoning program.
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