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Elliott Bay Sunset Sold to Hotel Developer
By Wallis Bolz
Irene Wall stands in front of her favorite view: Elliott Bay from Victor Steinbrueck Park. |
DOWNTOWN - Irene Wall lives on Phinney Ridge. She's fighting for a downtown view, specifically, the view from Victor Steinbrueck Park in the Pike Place Market. Uplands LLC, a partnership of Wright/Runstad and Intracorp, and Wright Hotels are ready to build a 9-story, 400-room hotel on the waterfront, abutting the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and right in front of the northwest corner of the park's panoramic view of Elliott Bay, the Magnolia headland and the Olympic Mountains.
The hotel is the last piece in the Port of Seattle's central waterfront redevelopment scheme, which includes the Waterfront Landing Condominiums, the two World Trade Center buildings, the Bell St. Pier Conference Center, the Bell St. Pier and a marina. On March 4, DCLU approved Wright Hotels' application for a Shoreline Substantial Development permit. Wright Hotels is developing the Waterfront Hotel at 2100 Alaskan Way for Marriott Corporation. And Wall has appealed DCLU's permit decision to the Shoreline Hearings Board.
"Two years ago," said Wall, "I was down at the waterfront with some relatives. We had decided to have some drinks at the Edgewater and take the trolley to the baseball game. Now I had been observing the development of the waterfront from the Viaduct, but the up close look I got that evening shocked me." Bulky new buildings in Belltown and along the waterfront obscured views of the cityscape and Elliott Bay that Wall had long cherished.
Wall began attending Design Review meetings in August 1997. The Design Review Board was tasked with ensuring Uplands' compliance with the Mayor's Recommended Design Guidelines for the Central Waterfront Project Street Vacations. The guidelines called for small-scale development, preservation of panoramic view corridors, a great deal of public open space--including a large plaza at Lenora, public access to the waterfront, shops and attractive roof treatments.
In exchange for attention to these public amenities, Uplands obtained seven street vacations and aerial rights from Burlington Northern Railroad. By 1997, however, there was no grand plaza at Lenora, rooftops had nought but a coat of white paint, the World Trade Buildings blocked a portion of the panoramic view and a lively retail presence had yet to be established. Design Review had one last shot, and it was the Waterfront Hotel.
"I tried to convince DCLU to rein in the Port of Seattle and do some smaller scale development. It didn't happen," said Wall. "Instead, we have a 400-room Marriott box and an elevator shaft at Lenora."
DCLU did not deny the size of the hotel would have deleterious impacts on the park's panoramic view. The EIS addendum for the Waterfront Hotel noted that "Steinbrueck Park is a city public view protection site. The proposed hotel would eliminate views of the Bell St. Pier and would reduce the views of Puget Sound, Elliott Bay, and the Olympic Mountains." And in a December 1998 memo to the Mayor, DCLU director Rick Krochalis wrote "View impacts from Victor Steinbrueck Park remain an issue...We believe that there are design solutions, which would be more costly but possible. We also believe that the project will get a strong negative reaction from the public even with the amount of view blockage that we are willing to allow. The Market and Steinbrueck Park remain a strong local attraction as well as a magnet for tourists, thus calling for the best urban design solution possible."
While the best urban design solution might well call for the removal of one or two floors from the hotel, DCLU's tied it's own hands with a 1989 amendment to Seattle's SEPA code, coincident with the initial planning of the waterfront development. This amendment allows the city to mitigate view obstruction "only when public views from outside of downtown would be blocked as a result of a change in the street grid pattern." The seven street vacations essential to the Port's redevelopment scheme do change the street grid pattern, but the hotel does not affect the public view of Elliott Bay from outside downtown.
To DCLU's credit, it has managed to persuade Uplands to step back the hotel building from Lenora to provide a larger view corridor as well as cantilever the mechanical penthouses, which preserves a view of the Olympic Mountains from the park. And the eight-foot sidewalk in front of the hotel is counted as public open space. Wall is not that impressed. "The public benefit is little versus the developer benefit, which is large."
"The project is in accordance with what is on the books," explained Tim Walsh of Wright Hotels. "We went through numerous design reviews and accommodated numerous requests."
Wall intends to press her case because, as she puts it, "I happen to be a native Seattlite who loves the view of Elliott Bay from Victor Steinbrueck Park and Alaskan Way."
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