Skolnik, Just STFU
For whatever reason, Art Skolnik has decided to disgrace and chip away at the concept of historical preservation by using it as a tool for his own personal desire to keep the existing viaduct. It doesn't matter to him if people look at his efforts and say "Boy, this historical preservation stuff is a real pile of crap".
Why doesn't it matter to him? Does he have a brain tumor? Has he himself decided that historical preservation is a pile of crap, something he no longer cares about and can denature with abandon, pissing in the soup, as it were?
Let's be plain- the viaduct was no engineering marvel. It met no need, there was no cleverness in design, no great challenge in building, and it instantly denatured and destroyed vital neighborhoods that didn't recover for 30 years. Lots of stuff happened in the past that is not worthy of historical preservation, and the viaduct is one of those events. Nor, in fact, is Skolnik actually proposing historical preservation, which entails painstaking repairs in the same manner as the original. Rebuilding the Cutty Sark in fiberglass, or adding a fiberglass skin, is not historical preservation.
Skolnik had a chance to go down in history as one of the good guys- and he's blown it. It's not the kind of thing we can be forgiving of, if we actually value historical preservation or why we do it.
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Just for the fun of it, I would like to point out that pre-Sound Transit, Skolnik worked for Metro as the chief planner for South corridor light-rail. It could easily be said that he had much to do with shaping the current route that link is taking. Draw your own conclusions, but to me it is very interesting to see the same names in urban planning reappear year after year.