Mercer Mess
Two pieces worth reading on the Viaduct-Spokane St.-Mercer St. funding issue. Erica Barnett in the print edition of The Stranger, and Larry Lange on the P-I's Traffic Watch blog.
At issue is Mayor Nickels' attempt to push a Mercer St. upgrade through the city council. Nickels doesn't have the money for it, but he wants to link it to a rebuilt Spokane St. viaduct as a way to increase mobility when the Alaskan Way Viaduct comes down.
So far, the council isn't buying, prefering to wait until more funding is secured. They may have a point. To the outside eye, it seems like Nickels is just rushing to get Mercer done so it's nice and pretty in time for the Vulcan-built Amazon headquarters opening in SLU in 2011-2012, and he's using the Viaduct as a convenient excuse. But that's just idle speculation on my part.
That said, costs of a new Mercer St are going to continue go up, up, up. Maybe it is best to float a bond like the Mayor's suggesting and get to work.
Rendering of Mercer St. looking west from SDOT.
- Frank's blog
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Younger readers may not appreciate the significance of the illustration.
In the 50s and 60s 'urban renewal' meant the government taking entire neighborhoods, bulldozing them into open space, and using them for parking, freeways, stadiums, or, in the case of the U of W, student housing and university buildings.
As you might guess from the foreground of the illustration, the Mercer St ramps were intended to become a freeway to the Seattle Center. "Planners" of the time would not have been deterred by the fact that everything between I-5 and the Center would have to be parking to accomodate the traffic on such a freeway. In fact, one evening in '67 I looked north from the Camlin and about 75% of the land visible was parking.
Prospective investors could not miss the fact that south Lake Union had a big bullseye painted on it, and could easily become the target of the notoriously brutal and corrupt 'urban renewal' process of freeway building.
When the two-way traffic scheme on Mercer is finally implemented, Seattle will be able to turn the page on that piece of history. It's a chapter nobody will take much pleasure in revisiting.
Agreed. We're super lucky we never built that freeway all the way to Seattle Center. What an eyesore that would have been. On the other hand, traffic sucks getting in and out of Key Arena. One reason why I won't be sad to see the Sonics go.