Situated directly between the Great Wheel and the Seattle Aquarium, the new pier extends the city’s front porch out into Elliott Bay and enhances a natural gathering space close to some of the city’s most popular amenities and well-used pedestrian corridors.

Seattle will celebrate the pier’s grand opening on Friday afternoon, with a community event from 4 to 8pm following a 3pm ribbon cutting. It’s a big milestone when it comes to construction along the waterfront, which began when the City started replacing the Alaskan Way seawall in 2013.

A complement to popular Pier 62, which has been utilized this summer as a concert venue, Pier 58 will add another flexible space for waterfront visitors to hang out, with Friends of Waterfront Seattle set to provide programming. The turf lawn is likely to prove a draw for pick up soccer games along with more structured, scheduled events. Close by is the staffed restroom, which has been seeing high usage after it opened this spring.

“When we were envisioning the design for this space, it’s really the heart of the waterfront,” Angela Brady, the Director of the Seattle Office of the Waterfront, Civic Projects, and Sound Transit said this week at a press preview of the new park space. “This is kind of as central as you can get. And because we wanted to make sure the proximity of the public restroom was close enough to the playground area and really the heart and center of the waterfront.”

The new park space features a direct nod to the 1974 Waterfront Park, in the form of Waterfront Fountain, a sculpture created by James FitzGerald and Margaret Tomkins. Housed in a brand new water feature, the fountain was restored after falling into Elliott Bay when the former Pier 58 collapsed in 2020 as it was in the process of being demolished. The fountain joins additional water features along the waterfront including George Tsutakawa’s Joshua Green Fountain further south at Colman Dock.

With the completion of Pier 58, construction on the entire waterfront overhaul is tantalizingly close to completion.

At the north end of the corridor, work improving east-west connections at Bell Street is nearly complete, and this week the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) completed work on the final bike connection along Alaskan Way that will connect to the Elliott Bay Trail in Myrtle Edwards Park. Meanwhile, the Elliott Bay Connections project, funded by Melinda French Gates, Mackenzie Scott, the Diller-Von Furstenberg Family Foundation, and the Expedia Group, is in full construction with the aim of completing before the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Currently, that project is causing headaches by closing the Thomas Street pedestrian and bike bridge between Uptown and the North Downtown waterfront.

Seattle’s most hotly anticipated playground

Kids from around the Seattle region have been watching the new playground take shape at Pier 58 from behind the construction fences for months, stoking anticipation for the grand opening this week. The centerpiece of the playground is a 25-foot-tall climbing structure intended to mimic a jellyfish, which kids can climb up into, with an attached metal slide.

Surrounding play equipment, including a smaller slide for younger kids and other climbing structures, make the new playground the largest play area in downtown, much larger than the play areas at Westlake and Occidental Park. It’s also grander than the small play structure along the Overlook Walk pathway up to Pike Place Market, also built as part of the waterfront project.

A third waterfront park play area was initially envisioned on an SDOT right-of-way in Belltown, but that project ended up cut from the scope of the final corridor overhaul. It’s still unclear what that spot of empty land will become, after Seattle City Light abandoned plans for an electric vehicle charging facility.

“The jellyfish concept is really a blend of art, and architecture, and play, but what always stands out to me as a person who spends a lot of time on playgrounds, it’s also how much visibility there is in and around structure. It’s really important for parents, especially in a busy waterfront site. So really keeping things really light and airy,” said Melissa Quinn of Earthscape, the Canadian firm that designed the play structures.

In a city that’s often hostile to the needs of kids, the new playground offers a major amenity that’s designed to keep kids wanting to return.

“It’s about a level of open-ended play,” Quinn continued. “There’s not just one correct way to do it. There’s lots of different opportunities, at different levels, a graduated challenge. Some kids are maybe going to engage with it very differently than other siblings. But the goal here is that it gives kids a reason to come, not just once, but over and over again.”

While not as directly as the new Pioneer Square habitat beach, Pier 58 also includes elements intended to enhance the existing Elliott Bay marine ecosystem. The gap between the pier and the rest of the pedestrian promenade at the playground is intended to let natural light filter down into Elliott Bay, a move that serves a significant purpose.

“The core values of the work that we’ve done on the design for the overall waterfront is we wanted to put back something better than what was here before in terms of marine habitat and improvements for marine life,” Brady said. “One of the ways we can do that is by providing areas of plenty of light, natural light, which helps the algae grow and helps create some food sources for the juvenile salmon that make their run every year.”

A novelty today, the new Pier 58 is almost sure to grow into a beloved fixture as Seattle residents and visitors alike get used to the city’s new waterfront park.

The post Seattle’s Pier 58 Reopens as Final Piece of Waterfront Park Puzzle first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Central District Art Walk demonstrated this on June 6 when a few dozen art lovers gathered in a vacant commercial space adjacent to the nonprofit Arte Noir’s gallery in Midtown Square at 23rd and Union, which the nonprofit had activated for the “Baggage Claim” fashion show. 

The audience assembled in the unfinished space, lit solely by the evening sun, to watch 12 Black models cycle through, appareled in timeless wares that personal stylist Justin Leggett curated from the collections of local vintage stores: Jamil, The Lemon Grove, and Throwbacks Northwest. Each model entered carrying a retro handbag packed with tops, accessories, and outer wear that they’d slip into to modify the fit they initially wore, before strutting out, leaving their luggage behind, only to return a few minutes later wearing a new base outfit and toting yet another bag perfectly complemented to whatever they now wore.

When the audience wasn’t admiring Leggett’s eye for fashion, they chatted amongst themselves and browsed the clothes racks the retailers had installed for a one-night pop up to accompany the show. The event, like so many art walk activities in the Central District, brought together all the things that Jazmyn Scott, Arte Noir’s executive director, said she loves: “art, Black people, my community.” Those are the very things that inclined her to accept the role leading the organization after her mother, Vivian Phillips, founded it in 2021.

Phillips, Scott, and Arte Noir have been vital to rejuvenating the Central District art scene as they’ve worked alongside other arts organizations, restaurants, and shops to create a vibrant hub at an intersection essential for Seattle’s once Black-dominated enclave. In Midtown Square, depending on the day, you can catch a concert, take a dance lesson, attend a yoga class, or pull up to a party. As a former program director, Scott said she regularly asks: “What are the ways that we can reel people in and sometimes give them something that they never knew they were going to get?”

Arte Noir is just one of several community-first arts spaces throughout the city that exemplifies how the cultural sector brings communities to life, and helps neighborhoods recover from down turns—or even help prevent them from happening. Other organizations and spaces that do this particularly well are Base Camp Studios and Common Area Maintenance, each of which operates two locations in Belltown.

(Disclosure: Syris Valentine is a paying member of the writers program at Common Area Maintenance.)

When Nick Ferderer and Base Camp Studios, the nonprofit arts collective he founded, first began cleaning and renovating their second space on the corner of 3rd and Stewart, the former storefront had sat vacant and vandalized for three years—just one of many 3rd Avenue businesses shuttered by the blight of downtown closures that hit during the pandemic lockdowns. Bergman Luggage, the previous tenant of Base Camp’s new gallery whose sign still adorns the corner of the building, was just one of many businesses on that stretch of 3rd that closed during the pandemic.

“For the most part,” Ferderer said, “[the Third Avenue Cafe] was the only thing that had any activity on the ground floor” when Base Camp moved in.

Over three months at the end of 2023, Ferderer, with some support from friends and family, hauled 55,000 pounds of trash out of the building’s second floor. That trash went on to form the core of the “Ghosts of Belltown” show that both mourned and commemorated the neighborhood’s legacy. But an avant garde art show wasn’t his main motivation: he wanted to clear the upper level quick as he could to convert it into a collection of private art studios to start bringing the building back to life. While cleaning out the mass of debris, Ferderer found among it all a permit from 1996, which led him to believe that the second floor may have lain vacant for decades longer than the Bergman storefront.

These kinds of closures and vacancies can have a negative ripple effect, Ferderer said, with foot traffic slowing down and potential public nuisances creeping in. But a similar effect can ripple in reverse as organizations and businesses start moving back in. He’s seen this happen over the two and a half years since Base Camp Studios 2 first opened to the public, with businesses popping up on both sides of 3rd, and Cannonball Arts converting the former Bed Bath and Beyond just down the block into a 66,000 square foot contemporary arts center.

Ferderer was quick to add that he doesn’t believe Base Camp is the sole catalyst for any of these openings. But, he said, when someone knows they won’t be moving into a ghost town, it can make the decision to set up shop somewhere just a little bit easier.

Because artists and creatives have a particularly scrappy, do-it-yourself attitude to creating spaces and conjuring beauty with whatever resources they happen to have at hand—and bring their community along for the ride—the sector has been a major part of the mayor’s Downtown Activation Plan.

One program in particular has supported this: Seattle Restored, an initiative led by Seattle’s Office of Economic Development and two nonprofit partners, Shunpike and Seattle Good Business Network. The effort has tapped artists and small businesses to activate vacant storefronts at 56 locations across the city through art displays, pop-up shops, and, in some cases, long-term leases. Seattle Restored has even partnered with Base Camp to subsidize studio rentals for around a dozen artists at the 3rd Avenue location.

This has been critical not just to revitalize downtown after so many businesses closed, but because the pandemic hit the city’s art sector itself particularly hard. Downtown Seattle is the artistic core of the Pacific Northwest. Two thirds of creative careers in Seattle are housed there, according to the Downtown Seattle Association, and the neighborhood accounts for around 20% of the region’s artistic workforce. As a share of local employment, Seattle ranks as the city with the fourth largest creative economy in the country, beating out Nashville, Atlanta, and Chicago, among others. 

But Covid-related disruptions caused nearly half of all creative workers downtown to lose their jobs. Thankfully, the arts scene has nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels thanks in part to Seattle Restored and other efforts, like the Hope Corps grant program run by Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, which has funded artists and creatives across the city for three years running and which will host dozens of events this summer. But many artists and organizations still feel like the city can do more, even as they applaud what’s already been accomplished.

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In Belltown, the city has an opportunity to expand the impact of Seattle Restored and related programs to further support the efforts of local arts organizations to revitalize downtown. There, a historic building called the El Rey may soon be torn down after a series of misfortunes befell it, but a dedicated group of artists dreams of rescuing it from demolition.

Around a year after SOUND Behavioral Health acquired the El Rey, which served as a residential facility for up to 60 people in need of mental health care, the nonprofit had to shutter it after deferred maintenance led to sewage leaks and plumbing troubles. Sometime later, a vandal broke in and tore through the building to scavenge a meager amount of saleable copper, all while inflicting a million dollars in damages. Because the plunder impaired the main fire and electrical panels, water and electricity to the building had to be shut off, and SOUND Behavioral Health became responsible for placing the building under around-the-clock fire watch at the cost of around $45,000 per month, the group said.

The maintenance required to make the building once more fit for the services SOUND Behavioral Health provides, alongside the ongoing security costs, led them to apply for permits to tear down the historic 115-year-old building because, despite the extensive retrofits that have aimed make the structure earthquake-ready, demolition is the only option they say they can afford.

The arts-nonprofit Common Area Maintenance, often simply referred to as CAM, operates one of its shared studios in a commercial space next door to the El Rey. Soon after their leadership heard that the building may come down, CAM got involved in conversations about what it might take to save it. Those conversations emerged in part because of concerns that the demolition could affect the integrity of the building that CAM currently occupies, which was built at the same time as the El Rey, but also because Timothy Firth, CAM’s founder and executive director, recognized what the building could mean for the organization and the community if they took it over themselves.

“Demolition was one of the only options that [SOUND Behavioral Health] had,” Firth told The Urbanist, “until I approached them and said, ‘Hey, we could save it for a community-benefit purpose.’”

Firth and CAM have imagined manifold community benefits that would bring a unique use to each of the four floors of the building, plus the roof and the level below grade. The basement could easily become a ceramic studio and fabrication space for CAM members, Firth said; the first floor would provide storefronts, community resources, and art studios; the second floor, nonprofit offices; the third, residency space for artists and writers that partner organizations bring to town; the fourth, affordable housing; and the roof, an intimate event space with views of the Space Needle, Elliott Bay, and the Olympic Mountains.

Firth said that SOUND Behavioral Health and the contractors they’ve hired for the demolition already love the vision that CAM has for the El Rey. But to realize it, CAM has to get the City on their side as well.

Right now, SOUND Behavioral Health has a $2 million loan on the property held by the Seattle Office of Housing, and riding along that loan is a covenant that requires the building owners to provide 60 units of housing affordable at 30% area median income. That requirement makes the El Rey almost impossible to sell, particularly given the building doesn’t even host 60 individual apartments, and SOUND fulfilled the quota by providing multiple beds in the same unit.

But, as Firth has talked more with the Office of Housing, the office has expressed a willingness to facilitate the sale of the building to CAM, even though their vision for just 10 affordable housing units doesn’t meet OH’s needs. That still leaves CAM with the challenge of dealing with the loan. “For us,” Firth said, “the idea of buying this building for $2 million is completely out of reach.” But they’re eager to pursue one path in particular: getting the city to lift the housing covenant and facilitate the sale of the building for a single, symbolic dollar at the same time that it defers the loan for 40 years of public benefit, at the end of which the city would waive the loan. It “happens all the time,” Firth said. 

For instance, a similar deal was struck between the city and Africatown Community Land Trust, so the Black-led nonprofit could transform the historic Fire Station 6 into a community center.

(Syris Valentine was previously employed at Africatown Community Land Trust, where he supported the renovation of Fire Station 6.)

If CAM could convince the mayor and city council to agree to a deal like that, the last obstacle would be raising the estimated $3.5 million required to renovate and restore the building, “which is absolutely something we can do,” Firth said. The organization would plan to activate the building in stages, Firth said. That would ease the fundraising pressure and allow them to use early successes to attract more grants and donations to bring the rest of the building to life.

But CAM is working against a tight timeline. There may be only weeks, months at most, before the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections issues SOUND Behavioral Health its demolition permit, and as soon as they have paperwork in hand, the building will start to come down, because SOUND can’t afford to wait.

Should the miraculous happen and CAM acquire the building, the organization would have ample work ahead. A tour of the building reveals missing ceiling panels, torn out dry wall, dangling wires, and drilled out cement. While some of that damage was done by the copper scavengers, most was done by the contractors as they assessed what it would take to demolish the building, Firth said. Despite the debris, Firth talked on the tour as if the building were already the pristine arts and community space he envisions.

Part of his ability to so crisply visualize what the El Rey could become comes from his experience taking vacant, dusty spaces and enlivening them. This is what he and his community did when they occupied their first location 10 years ago on 2nd between Blanchard and Lenora, and it’s what he is currently doing at their second location on 1st and Vine. Both of those spaces had been empty for years before CAM took them over, and before Firth and company put in the same sweat equity that Ferderer has given to Base Camp Studios.

Pursuing these activations is important not just in the short term for providing continued recovery post-pandemic, but for the future of the city as well, especially with the World Cup coming to town next summer. The international event could bring three-quarters of a million people to Seattle a year from now, and if the city wants to take full advantage of it, Firth said, the best option is investing in more than just temporary, short-term installations but funding projects that provide long-term opportunities for artists to own the spaces they activate, which is exactly what the El Rey represents. Permanence and ownership is also something that Jazmyn Scott emphasized as important.

By supporting the transfer of El Rey to CAM, the city would create a permanent space for artists and creatives in a downtown neighborhood that will bustle during the World Cup, and Firth is confident CAM could easily activate the ground floor in time for next year’s tournament. The alternative, if the mayor and city council don’t help facilitate this deal, could mean yet another empty plot would be left behind to haunt the city’s core—possibly for decades, similar to the Civic Square pit next to city hall.

Ferderer, Firth, Scott, and others interviewed for this story all talked about how vital the arts are not only for the economic activity they spur, not only for the tourism opportunities they create, but for the essential nourishment they provide for the human spirit. As the Office of Arts and Culture’s manager for creative placemaking, Alex Rose put it: “Were we not resourcing arts and culture, we’d be lacking in our human experience, in our civic life.”

Which is to say that Arte Noir, Base Camp Studios, Common Area Maintenance, and the artists and organizations that receive support through Rose’s programs, all collectively make Seattle what it is. And without those groups and without those artists, the city would lose its spark and become a place where people may still live and work but which, ultimately, feels hollow.

“If you don’t value the arts,” Ferderer said, the question then becomes: “what do you value?”

The post Resilient Arts Sector Revitalizes Seattle, but High Rents Remain Hurdle first appeared on The Urbanist.

Over a year trying to deal with ARTS, the renamed Seattle arts agency, I was continually confronted with obfuscation and being told that what I proposed was impermissible according to the City’s legal authorities, with whom I was never allowed to meet. Trying to unscramble invisible eggs cooked up by unseen chefs was decidedly Kafkaesque.

The Paragon, named for a wooden halibut schooner built in Ballard 100 years ago, features a 3/5 scale wooden boat frame, its form taken directly from the original plans. The sculpture was built and installed by the Port of Seattle on the Duwamish. The wood came from old-growth fir timbers and the boat frame was built by once and future boatbuilders at Tacoma’s Bates Technical College. 

The wooden boat structure was chosen to represent the long and often tragic history of fishers and their wooden fishing vessels on the site. Duwamish people lived and fished there in canoes for well over a millennium, until being starved out by industrial-grade pollution that rendered their fishery untenable. European immigrant fisher persons found their way to the abandoned waterfront and built houses and a collection of boat-building sheds. They launched their wooden boats on the Duwamish and headed out to cleaner waters.

In turn, they were chased away by the Port which (re)claimed the land and immediately began bulldozing the wooden structures to build Terminal 107. Work was halted by the State Office of Archaeology which suspected there had been a native village there. The Port agreed not to develop the land and make it into a park. I was offered the possibility of creating a sculpture for the park, if it sat very lightly on the land. I worked with the Duwamish Tribe and the Port to create a suitable design. A fine and welcome challenge.

As I researched the history of the site and interviewed community members, I learned what had unfolded there. I decided to place the wooden boat frame high in the air, out of harm’s way, and to serve maritime history as a 3-D billboard for passing motorists on West Marginal Way. I created a series of graphic panels with narratives about the various people who lived there. 

Since they didn’t yet have an art maintenance crew, the Port turned over the newly installed Paragon to the City of Seattle for its care. As required, I submitted a maintenance plan to SAC, calling for periodic inspection of the wooden structure, and power-washing and resealing, when needed. ARTS performed the maintenance once in 20 years. This despite my entreaties to inspect and treat the visibly aging wood, and that of their own conservator who for years advocated the same to her superiors.  

Anticipating a joyous centennial celebration for the original Paragon last summer, I insisted last May that the wooden frame be inspected and cleaned. To the conservator’s horror she found rot and an army of carpenter ants eating away. Immediately, ARTS told me the entire sculpture would have to be destroyed, it having become a safety issue, their “number one” priority. I replied that wood could and should be repaired. I also asked why their concern for safety hadn’t led them to maintain the sculpture. 

ARTS has now answered that question publicly, saying they have insufficient funds to maintain their public art collection. If they cannot be cared for, then why do they commission new works? 

My “discussion” with ARTS about the Paragon has been characterized by months of waiting on faceless, nameless city lawyers to determine next steps. I was told repeatedly that besides safety, risk management was the arts agency’s primary task. 

As an artist, I court risk — it being essential to what we do — tempting fate by embracing the unknown. I understand that cities cannot exactly be looking to be risky, but turning themselves inside out to avoid it might be worse than counterproductive. The Paragon’s death sentence is being driven by Seattle’s all-consuming fear of lawsuits, such that common-sense solutions like replacing rotten wood become outrageously complicated.

Working with communities and a wide variety of institutions, I’ve completed complex collaborative projects around the world. The public process is messy, full of tangents and false-starts, time-consuming and cumbersome — but jumping in builds in meaning. The wholesale adoption of “risk management” by ARTS seems to have put it on a collision course with the art and artists its mission says they support. 

Once word got out that the Paragon was in trouble with the City, abundant support came from the West Seattle community, and Nucor Steel stepped up with a terrifically generous offer to provide financial, logistical and material help. They arranged for Barnhart Crane to lift the wooden boat structure off the steel supports and bring it to their nearby facility on the Duwamish. While the ants ate away undeterred, we were told that Barnhart could not touch the sculpture. Risk had to be assessed and managed, never mind that Barnhart is licensed, bonded and insured and does this very thing every day. The boat was not allowed to be moved.

The few “meetings” I’ve had with ARTS were all online. In a year, I never heard from the city’s public art manager. The two committee meetings which will seal the Paragon’s fate, though technically “open” to the public, will not take place in a physical space, and will be completely mediated by the computer. With everyone off in their own corner, turning from human contact to screen-based ‘gatherings’ seems inherently antithetical to building or serving community.

Could it be that Seattle, epicenter of tech-ness, has moved itself irrevocably from the collaborative face-to-face, hand over hand work of making public art? Is “public” art now a misnomer? 

Paragon celebrates the Duwamish’s long social history. Taking it apart will literally undue its artfulness and historicity. From the beginning, my discussions with Nucor, a large mill producing steel components, were about what the sculpture has meant to the community. Ironically, with ARTS it was the very opposite. The sculpture was seen as so many potentially harmful pieces, never as a city treasure.

Deaccession, the “technical” word ARTS uses to explain its planned destruction of Paragon, is a bureaucratic way of saying letting go, without saying so. This wordplay allows them to destroy art without explicitly stating so. The decay of the Paragon seems to me emblematic of a terrible decay in public discourse and public process. In Seattle, we seem ever less able to say what needs to be said or do what needs doing; meanwhile the ants continue eating away.

The post Op-Ed: Ants — Has Seattle Strayed from its Public Art Mission? first appeared on The Urbanist.

BelRed is arguably a nascent South Lake Union combined with its own spin on SoDo and the International District. The Spring District station area has a South Lake Union feel with tech offices emerging from a large light industrial presence. The BelRed station area has the more international feel, but you have to get past some of the historical industrial uses near the station first. When it comes to attractions, there’s more to see in the Spring District and more to eat around BelRed station.

Things to explore in the Spring District

The Spring District’s master-planned development and neighbors are rather interesting urbanist attractions. The master development has transformed half of a light industrial super block into a mixed-use neighborhood. There are new parks, amenities, streets, and pedestrian spaces to explore right outside of the light rail station.

One café in the Spring District is right next to the station, The Urbanist’s Ryan Packer has deemed Dote Coffee Bar a candidate for best café along the 2 Line. You can find all four Dote locations along the 2 line.

To the northeast of the station, Sound Transit’s Operations and Maintenance Facility (OMF) East and the Eastrail are ripe for urbanist adventures. Especially if you’ve brought a bike or are down for a long walk, the sidewalk along the OMF East connects up with the Eastrail that will currently take you to Kirkland’s fastest growing neighborhoods — downtown, Moss Bay, and Totem Lake. Enjoy views of the OMF’s railyard and trains as you circle the facility, as well as wetlands and public art.

To the south of the Spring District, there are some additional places to get a drink. The Goose Pub and Eatery hosted The Urbanist’s 2 Line celebration. Bellevue’s Crab pot, Bellevue Brewing, and the Rose Persian Market are also in that area.

Don’t forget to check out the station’s public art too! Louie Gong, an artist and educator who founded Eighth Generation, created a cut metal mural of a dragon and phoenix with a feathery motif common in Coast Salish art. Gong is of mixed Nooksack, Chinese, French, and Scottish heritage.

What to eat around BelRed Station

The BelRed Station station area may look unassuming right now, but once you peel back a few industrial layers there are quite few a cultural nuggets to explore. Outside of the badminton academy, table tennis club, ski school, and Mox Boarding House, food is the main attraction of the station. By Cuisine you can find these restaurants in the BelRed Station walkshed:

• Columbian
  • Monserrate Colombian Cuisine – A market/restaurant hybrid with great empanadas and Colombian treats
• Various Chinese
  • Frying Fish – A Sichuan restaurant with, well, great fried fish and a solid menu of other spicy offerings. I high recommend going with a group.
  • Liuyishou Hot Pot – The PNW’s branch of the international hot pot chain
• Taiwanese
  • Facing East – Try Taiwanese street food and comfort dishes here, especially the stewed pork over rice.
• Various Indian
  • Rasoi Indian Restaurant and Bakery – An Indian restaurant and bakery offering various Indian cuisines.
• Japanese
  • Donburi Station – By the same folks who brought you Fremont Bowl, this restaurant offers great Japanese rice bowls.

The BelRed station areas are a diverse tapestry of cuisines and attractions, but it’s important to note that the area is changing fast. Developers are eyeing the area, we already know of projects that will displace some of businesses we’ve talked about. Many of these restaurants are in older industrial or retail parks that make for lucrative redevelopment. Especially with a coming rezone in the Bellevue Comprehensive Plan update, the pace of change will only accelerate. Go explore them while you can and anticipate the new businesses that will come with all the new development.

The post An Urbanist Guide to Things To Do in Bellevue’s BelRed first appeared on The Urbanist.

Our Favorites: January through March

Our Favorites: April through June

Our Favorites July through September

Our Favorites October through December

Special Recognition: Photo Essays

Every year, we get a couple of really good photo essays and 2023 was no exception. From a new art space in Ballard to a new convention center Downtown, The Urbanist‘s reporters had a lot of places to explore. Here are four of our favorites.

Inside Look at Seattle’s New Convention Center Expansion, by Ryan Packer and Ray Dubicki – January 29, 2023

Seattle Street Ends: West Seattle to South Park, by John Feit – March 30, 2023

Into the Slop: A New Type of Music and Art Space Opens in Ballard, by Ray Dubicki – April 3, 2023

Photo Tour: Discovery Park in Its Full Summer Glory, by Doug Trumm – July 2, 2023

Illustrations

Finally, there are times that pictures and words don’t combine to get the exact image that’s required for a story. So we have to put in some effort to illustrate it. The Urbanist does frequently share the skilled work of architects and designers who use graphics to round out their own reports. Sometimes we have to try and keep up with them to make an illustration in-house. Or make a new illustration to cut through the gobbledygook they’re shoveling. Here are a few from the year.

The post The Urbanist 2023 Year In Pictures first appeared on The Urbanist.

There’s increasing recognition of how vital urban art installations are. They help to shape both the physical landscape of cities and influence the culture of communities. Let’s explore this vibrant medium a little further.

The Evolution of Urban Art Installations

Art in public spaces is nothing new. Even aside from Neolithic cave paintings, there are examples of murals and carved graffiti in the bustling cityscapes of ancient Maya. Much like today, these were used to communicate key facets of culture to others.

Since around the 1970s, though, installations in urban areas have tended to fall into a couple of distinct categories. There’s graffiti, which takes the form of painted text but can be far more artistically complex than this description. There’s also street art, which focuses on more varied imagery. Usually, street art is associated with murals, but it can also include stickers, sculptures, lighting, and even mosaics.

Urban art debate today has often centered around the legal considerations. Street art and graffiti can be sanctioned or commissioned by private building owners or local authorities. Though, it’s important to note that unsanctioned urban art is also a powerful form of expression, whatever Mayor Harrell’s feelings on the matter may be. While to some it may be vandalism, it is nonetheless a symbol of unrestrained creativity and social activism.

The effect is that today, urban art has a complex impact on cities. There’s an aesthetic vibrancy that elevates the architecture and other features. It also gives opportunities for citizens to contribute their artistic talents to something that gives them a voice in a challenging world.

Aesthetics and Urban Identity

Urban art installations contribute significantly to the aesthetics and identity of the city. In some instances, the identity may be limited, as “legitimate” murals can be restricted to select artists chosen for projects. However, the fact that artists also independently put their stamps on cities provides additional and untethered authenticity to the character of the landscape. Additionally, you’ll often find that street art in specific areas will reflect the nuanced cultural elements of individual communities. After all, art is frequently created through the filter of the artists’ cultural heritage, their struggles, and their celebrations. This means that urban art plays a role in teaching locals and visitors about who lives there. 

A great example of this is in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. Street artists from a range of cultural backgrounds have been creating murals both directly on walls and on plywood. Particularly following the political and social upheaval surrounding Black Lives Matter and the Covid-19 pandemic, artists have been adopting the area as a canvas. They’re expressing how events have impacted their cultures and they’re protesting through the medium of art.

Community Engagement and Social Impact

Urban art tends to be accessible, both for audiences and artists. This is a quality that has made it an increasingly effective tool for community engagement. Festivals are providing spaces for artists to create meaningful work and for community members to connect to it. There are also projects designed to leverage the power of art to influence social challenges.

For instance, urban art can help boost public health education. Healthcare in the U.S. at the moment, including the state of oral healthcare, is riddled with financial, social, and geographical inequalities. This impacts how effectively communities are able to access treatment and knowledge. Organizations like Health Education through Art, have been effective in combining youth health education and advocacy with public art projects. This provides a forum to address challenges alongside the enrichment of creative activities.

Another example of impactful community urban art engagement is Mural Arts Philadelphia. The organization arranges multiple projects each year designed to bring community members together to build relationships and facilitate a dialogue around challenges. Its collaborations empower communities to direct their talents and ideas to explore culturally vital subject matter, such as restorative justice and sustainability.

Challenges and Opportunities

For all the benefits of urban art installations, there are challenges cities and arts organizations need to address. There has to be a focus on ensuring projects are accessible both for artists and the viewing public. It’s also vital to establish inclusivity measures that ensure underrepresented artists and communities can engage with projects.

Equally, though, there are opportunities, some of which may help address challenges. Projects could utilize innovative practices, such as incorporating quick response (QR codes) into art that links to descriptive text for people with visual impairments. Meaningful collaborations between diverse community members offer chances to share resources.

Particularly concerning issues of inclusivity and accessibility, it’s important for planning processes to be thorough, with chances for bottom-up engagement. Before a project begins, leaders should conduct feasibility studies. These help to determine how likely the project is to succeed and what resources are required to address the challenges. Studies will highlight physical risks that may be barriers to those with accessibility difficulties so accommodations can be arranged.

Future Trends

Just as public art has evolved over time, there are continued shifts in urban installations. There are already trends for interactive pieces that are not limited to visuals but also textures and sounds. Tech, such as augmented reality (AR) is also beginning to provide added dimensions to murals.

In the future, we’re likely to see even greater integration of tech, though this may be tempered by other priorities. Climate change may well affect how cities implement urban art, in line with sustainability goals. More sustainable materials could become the norm. Indeed, environmental messaging may have an even more prominent presence in the cultural content of installations.

Throughout these developments, it is vital for communities, businesses, and administrators to collaborate on supporting urban art installations. This is a uniquely accessible and powerful form of expression that has multifaceted benefits for communities. It also creates a legacy that tells the story of the city and the people who enrich it.

The post Urban Art: Elevating Aesthetics and Cultural Identity in Cities first appeared on The Urbanist.

Terra Nil shows up on the App Store as “a reverse city builder.” Admittedly, I’m a little protective of my city builder games. Like, it would be weird to suggest a particular video game (SimCity) compelled me to a particular graduate degree (Urban Planning), but here we are. So reverse city building, and you have my attention. 

Lovely, fairly simple, with a zen soundtrack, Terra Nil has exactly the right look and feel of a game that asks you to bring life back to a desiccated wasteland. From volcanic islands to crumbling urban ruins, the game gives you a handful of tools to first decontaminate the soil, then reintroduce life to places where it’s been ruined. Slightly ironically, it does eat battery life on a tablet, so stay next to a charger.

Each level starts with a short description of the landscape to be worked and some of the initial hurdles to be unraveled. The flooded city, for example, doesn’t have enough plantable land between the ruins. So that needs to be reclaimed from the sea floor with dredgers. But the dredgers make the land unstable and too much digging will result in damaging earthquakes. Other biomes require the player to treat tainted land or blast open volcanic rock.

There is a cost to each of these actions, and a rolling tab is paid for every piece of equipment. But that account can be rebuilt with plants and animals. After the initial wave of decontamination or soil prep, irrigators can be installed to start greening the level. As these moderate the atmosphere, new plants arrive and can be installed with other types of equipment. 

As each stage progresses, the biomes start to differentiate. Tundra turns to trees. Stones turn to lichen forests. Deep water turns to coral reefs. At the edges of these, animals appear. When the land achieves a certain balance, it’s time to clean up. You get an airship and transport system, then have to step backwards from the outside of the map, recycling equipment as you go. Once the garden is set, you lift off for the next level.

Lovely and zen casual games on a portable device make it sound like the game will fall into a certain category, so let’s dispatch that right now. This game is not going to appeal to someone that’s on the Candy Crush end of things because there’s not the casino payout flash of matching jewels. Terra Nil also doesn’t have a lot of the appeal of the idle games where points just accrue to unlock more ways of making more points accrue.

There’s a handful of games that came out a while back that were like little Rubik’s Cubes or puzzle boxes. They were more procedural or sequential, not about button mashing skill so much as rewarding the player finding hidden connections. Hitting the blue button would drop a seed, but it would only grow into a tree if you had opened the river gate the turn before. They’re some of the few games that I took notes.

The hardest part I ran into in Terra Nil was a stage where I had not prepared enough land to install the sunflower field. That would be fine, except there was only one chance to get it right. You either did or didn’t have enough space for the sunflowers. If you didn’t, it was time to reset the puzzle box and start the sequence all over again.

And that stands in stark contrast to city builder games. The beauty of SimCity, like its real world counterparts, is that the game is iterative. Yeah, there’s losing scenarios. (City hit by an earthquake right after you blew your budget for a stadium! Fiction is so weird.) But there are also unlimited ways to get to the winning ones, including working the problem. Terra Nil’s puzzle box doesn’t have that kind of leeway. Early mistakes can be irreversible.

Where the underpinning of Terra Nil is an unlocking contraption, the base structure of SimCity is a concept called The Game of Life. Not the one with the little cars and pins, but the one developed by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It’s flickering lights on a grid, where the squares have to obey certain rules based on the state of their neighbors. Off squares, or “dead” cells, stay dead unless they have three “live” or turned on neighbors. Live cells only stay alive if they have two or three live neighbors. Fewer living neighbors and they die by underpopulation, too many living neighbors and they die by crowding. Every generation or turn checks every square on the grid, and cells switch to alive or dead. Rules for lights on a grid is a game only a mathematician would understand much less adore, and even its creator fell out of love.

Until you see it in action. Some shapes are frozen stable, like a 2×2 square where each of the live cells has three neighbors and none of the surrounding dead cells has enough to change. Other shapes are oscillators, that change in place. Certain bars just flip where they are and stars twinkle. Then there are the movers. Five square shapes that glide across the screen. Rolling, heavyweight figures that have been named spaceships by theorists and special arrangements of breeders that can spawn them. 

And once you see Conway’s Game of Life underway (you can play around with a version here) it’s impossible to miss its connection to SimCity. Too much industrial pollution and your residential areas stay dormant. Commercial served by train and roads sprouts to a tower. The square zones live or die by what they’re next to. Success emerges from the interaction between cells, and there’s always the opportunity to make small tweaks or grand gestures to realign the entire game. Very much the way to build a city, either digital or meat space.

It is a little unfair to compare a recently released app about flowers to one of the most transcendent games of all time. And Terra Nil does offer both Gardener and Zen modes that make the game easier or let you just putter around without specific objectives. But it is useful to consider what it takes to make a game like SimCity so different. Surprises don’t necessary come from proscribed achievements from hitting the right key sequence. Surprises and achievements and healthy cities come from emergent interactions. 

Which makes Terra Nil absolutely successful. Treating a city like a jewel box is a perfect city unbuilding simulator. If you want to take apart a neighborhood, there is nothing like adding too many rules or pretending it’s a terrarium. Boiling down urbanism’s iterative game of life to just rote procedures is absolutely the way to dismantle a city. 

Terra Nil was developed by Free Lives and published by Devolver Digital. It is available on Steam, and free on various app stores with a Netflix subscription. 

The post Terra Nil Shows How To Unbuild a City first appeared on The Urbanist.

The block-long Magnum Storage building is among those too big to notice structures. It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the fact that the hulking three-story wall on Shilshole Avenue is the same structure that sits behind a parking lot off Ballard Avenue between the Kavu outlet and the shuttered Great State Burger shop. 

But attention is coming to the top corner of this building. Slop is opening and promises a new type of art space and venue that the city is missing. It’s not the industrial use that the neighborhood’s waterfront is accustomed. But Slop and the team of people running this space may be doing the hard work of energizing the city’s venues on a new, post-pandemic footing.

“Be goofy, and have fun. Get silly.”

Talking with the folks organizing Slop is an exercise in optimism, both in the potential for the space and the fascinating world of Seattle’s arts and music scenes. “Seattle underground needs an injection,” according to Syco, who led the graffiti murals that grace the walls of the space. 

Scenes (plural) seems to be somewhat misleading, because Slop is a convergence of ideas. The space is much like the four founders themselves, who have overlapping but complementary experiences and skillsets. Sawyer Hindle is a producer doing the team’s design work, coming from club promotion and DJ’ing under the name Sawyer James. Lauren Taylor is the events and marketing manager, when not DJ’ing as Korra the Kid. The artist known as Syco leads the graffiti side as art and creative director.

“Not a director!” he says. 

And Danny Strok is the venue manager, coming up through promotions roles at different venues after hopping from a career in sales. She found herself bored in the corporate world and sought out an internship for a venue that she found on Craigslist. “I met Syco through the music. Then Lauren and Sawyer. We met through music and Instagram. We worked on a rave together and we became friends.”

The team coalesced last year as they worked together on an earlier art space, the Ballard Pop-Up Art Gallery that took over the shuttered consignment shop just north of NW 24th Avenue and Market Street. When that event closed for the building to be redeveloped, the team organized themselves into Slop.

Henry Hog, The Slop’s logo and mascot, sums up the team’s creation through collaboration. Syco designed him, Hindle refined it to logo, and it’s Strok and Taylor getting the pink round face out to the world. Taylor also tells a bit of the legend. Slop is not an acronym or  “We were thinking ‘Slophouse’ and that was the pig theme. But we don’t play house music. So just Slop.”

The multimedia perspective is a crucial component of Slop’s concept. Wrapping around the space is the art of dozens of graffiti artists befriended and recruited by Syco. Hindle and Taylor create music as DJs in overlapping genres. “Hip hop and techno and everything in between,” including a couple sub genres that I had to look up but we will just call “bass forward.”

It’s the convergence of art and music that separates Slop. According to the team, working in dedicated music venues can pigeonhole. As Taylor puts it, “The overall goal as a DJ is to have everyone dance and the music flow well. You want to cater your set to the other musicians you’re playing with… It’s one of the duties as a DJ to mold yourself into where you fit best into the set.”

Which makes the multimedia background of the team, and the flexibility of the venue, a massive strength. As Hindle says, “It’s a very large, genre spanning thing. That’s what’s nice about this space.”

Big Empty Room

Walking in from the street, technically the alley west of the northern end of Ballard Avenue, one might expect dark and metallic. Instead, the room opens to eclectic warm and daytime light from high windows. A tire swing hangs from an exposed wooden beam, timber of a size that don’t get grown any more. Gauze streamers and strings of oversized bulbs dangle and braid around utility conduit in the high open ceiling. Paintings find their spaces between open wall joists and a movie screen is ready between repatriated newspaper boxes.

The two concrete walls to the south and west are covered top to bottom in graffiti art. SYCO’s crew, called MRSA, interlaced their work together on the west wall in a roll of puffy text tags and block letters. It reads as a dialogue, spilling across the wall behind groups of stylish modern couches. The south wall is sectioned, each of the dozen spaces dedicated to the work of a separate artist. Bright, overlapping characters and riffs on animals pull from different parts of the world’s strangest storybook.

The space itself is 7,000 square feet of open floor plan that begs to be used and misused in the best ways. It lends itself to the flexibility that the team wants to see at Slop. The opening night party in late February was an invite-only music and art show driven by neon and curiosity. 

The space and its potential is alluring. “People come out of the woodwork when they see a picture of a big empty room. Like everyone was pulling us up on Instagram and was like ‘what is this room and why are you inside it?’” says Hindle. It brought out the generosity of the arts community, from the painters contributing to the walls to connections for the furniture and pieces of equipment. Moving away from the expected is the ultimate use for the space.  “You can go to someone’s house or a bar or a music venue. Our goal is to be a rec space, or a community area.”

Perhaps not ultimate, actually. “We could host a wedding here,” quips Taylor. “That would be boss-level venue.”

The immediate Ballard community has been interested in the work happening off this alley just near the bell tower. “There are some of us that live in the community,” says Hindle. “We were nervous of the reception. You never know which side things are going to come down on. If it makes its way to Nextdoor, is it going to be a positive thing? Or will people perceive it negatively?”

But the reviews they’ve heard have been super positive with inquisitive kids and curious neighbors (like at least one reporter) sticking their heads in while passing by for Salt and Straw. First they’re happy to see this building being used. Second, they’re happy to see something new, with people that don’t come to Ballard a lot. Says Syco: “If you want a $60 candle, you’ll find it in Ballard. But you won’t find this.”

The next events planned for the space include a movie series and fundraising events. The team hopes to raise enough funds to get a collaborative mural on the outside of the building, facing the busy part of Ballard Avenue. And on April 9th, Slop will host a market put on by the Cosmic Thot Collective from 12pm to 5pm. The event will feature vendors, media, fashion and a “roller vibe” with music by DJ Having Sex. 

Physical Barriers and Liquor Barriers

The venue is of its time, having its own social media presence as well as the support of the expansive networks of its founders. “It’s the business of flirting,” says Strok of social media, specifically Instagram. “There’s times I don’t want to be on Instagram, but I know it’s how I reach so many people. It’s so easy to connect with creatives that way, just on the business level. You can interact with their posts and become friends. It’s crazy.”

Such networking is also the basis for the group and the space’s future. Slop is trying to fill a gap in Seattle arts and nightlife that became more pronounced during the pandemic. As Taylor puts it, Slop’s larger goal “is create events where people can come and express themselves in many different forms. Whether that’s a reptile art show or a movie night, whatever it may be, create somewhere where the cool hip people can come gather.”

Talking with the team behind Slop, there is a collective feeling that something in Seattle is about to click over, or kick up to another level. They point to XO Seattle and its artist and music takeover of a Pioneer Square building as highlighting something novel in town.

Taylor, in her work at other venues, found the need was pervasive. “Collectively, people are looking for something new or the young’uns aren’t connecting to the generations before them have set up as far as extra curriculars. And so it’s a bunch of people who want something to do and they want to unleash and let loose with nowhere to do so.”

Hindle agrees on the aspect of looking for something different. “A lot of established venues are built around being a bar. It’s a different energy, with a liquor barrier. It limits who you can ask.

“And things are so expensive now,” he adds. “Going out to dinner is a decision.”

Syco confirms it through a mouthful of sushi he brought in a takeout bag. “Right! Thirty bucks on this sushi and I was looking forward to it all day! It was a decision.”

It’s amazing to consider this monolithic industrial building as lowering the barrier to accessing art and culture in Seattle. Its vast space and the broader ambitions of its founding team, Slop’s new home in Ballard promises just that. Slop is a big empty room, full of promise.

The post Into the Slop: A New Type of Music and Art Space Opens in Ballard first appeared on The Urbanist.

Fortunately, there are a suite of excellent short films that are nominated, and one of them is the tram-centric live action short Nattrikken (Night Ride) from Norway. Lots of good pictures of snowy tracks and quiet urban transport as Ebba hijacks a tram while trying to get home on a cold night.

Alas, she picks up some of the people difficulties that go with it, including hostile encounters and the question of when are we ready to stand up and help. There is a scene of anti-trans assault and corse language. Shorts often culminate in satisfying closures and you don’t need to wade through two hours of self-indulgent CGI to get there.

Props to The New Yorker Screening Room for featuring a few of this year’s nominated shorts. And if you need more bite sized morsels, the Seattle International Film Festival will be held May 11-21 and their shorts programs (including animation and the amazing WTF) is always good.

The post Sunday Video: Night Ride first appeared on The Urbanist.

For those who don’t know, Minecraft is a video game that was released in November 2011 which falls into the genre of “sandbox games”. Generally without a particular story arc or goals, the game lets the user move around a generated landscape collecting resources, crafting them into tools, and building a life. There are monsters that come out at night and difficulty levels from Easy to Hardcore, as well as a “Creative Mode” that just lets folks enjoy their crafting experience.

The open nature of the game has allowed players to run wild with their dreams, with sites and threads dedicated to the amazing builds that they’ve created. There’s also a genre of Minecraft narrative stories that can be surprisingly well done in the most grating YouTube way. There are quite a few extensive Minecraft build projects that look to recreate a particular city, the Earth, or somewhat terrifyingly, the entire cosmos. The popularity of the game plus the people spinning off creative works has catapulted Minecraft videos past a TRILLION combined views on YouTube. Pretty good for a game older than quite a few of its players.

But Greenfield stands out among these builds. It’s a fictional West Coast city built to scale, where each Minecraft cube represents one cubic meter of actual city. The buildings are complex both inside and out. The dynamic map offers an overview of the scope for non players, and a perspective of what covers the 57 square kilometers in-game. The coordination between builders alone, not to mention the overall vision and plans, make the work unique. The project has its own YouTube channel including videos on participating, but few of those videos quite encompass the awe at the project as PippenFTS in this week’s Sunday Video.

The post Sunday Video: Visiting Greenfield, MC (That’s Minecraft) first appeared on The Urbanist.