Today’s big story at the Daily Journal of Commerce: the parks dept. is considering turning Bell St. into a boulevard with more park and less car. I’d love to read the story, but it’s an exclusive. At least they have a nice large graphic that tells some of the story.
I suppose I’ll be visiting the library today…
Hey Matt,
Just sent the text of the DJC story to the Orphan Road contact email.
ECB
I live near enough to Bell Street to find this very exciting, so I did a little digging on the city’s website. Here’s the press release:
http://www.seattle.gov/news/detail.asp?ID=9762&Dept=40
Sounds like so far it’s just a proposal from the Mayor’s office, which will need the council’s approval. It could be a great amenity, and it’s encouraging to read sensible plans like piggybacking this onto a time the street will need to be dug up anyway, but there are also a couple of things that worry me about it:
- Third & Bell is one of the nastier parts of Belltown. Any time the dog park is not full of dogs, there’s drug dealing around it, and the sidewalk in front of Kelly’s is the only place I routinely cross the street to avoid when on foot. If these can’t be cleaned up, I could see them keeping people out of the middle of the new park boulevard.
- Most of the buildings along Bell Street pretty resolutely face away from that street. If they contain public-oriented businesses at all, they’re on the opposite side from where the wide, parkish sidewalk will be, and face the avenues. I suppose whatever eventually goes into the vacant lot at 2nd & Bell could partly address this, but there’s a lot of blank wall that’s probably stuck in place for the long term.
Thanks for the press release link – I hadn’t been able to find anything on the city’s website.
Bell street has a bridge with a beautiful Sound view and a public space on the west end, but no nice way of accessing it. I walked down Bell street from 3rd to attend an event there and found the street going from pedestrian unfriendly to beautiful within a block. It would sure be nice to dress up the area a bit.
It’s like a gleam of sanity bursting out of towering black clouds of depression. At last, a realization that the city doesn’t need to spend millions buying land for parks, it already owns lots of land that is doing very little in the present use as city street.
Roughly speaking, about 25% of the land in the city is street. This is an incredible waste of the highest priced land in the county. Street access needs to be maintained for fire engines and some other service vehicles. Over many decades these vehicles have been tailored to fit the streets and the streets have been tailored to fit the vehicles. Aside from that, however, one might change half the east-west streets in the Regrade to park without any loss in mobility. A large number of them dead-end on First and Fifth in any case.
Being a fairly hilly city, Seattle has a lot of streets that simply come to an end. Try driving down the west side of Queen Anne to reach 15th West to see what I mean.
The first Lake Union renaissance began in the 70s as people realized that the streetends were actually owned by the public and could become mini-parks. Hopefully this view of Bell St will spark a similar revolution of thought across the city.
Ths Slog covered this yesterday and had some drawings.
Here’s the slog article: Asphalt Alchemy: Converting Streets into Parks.
Seems like a decent idea, a lot like the NBBJ project where Yale dead-ends into the Mercer ramps.
This is all true, and I hope I didn’t sound too negative yesterday – I am optimistic that this could be a great thing, provided some specific issues are addressed. For the time being, Western Ave / the Viaduct really do more to disconnect the bridge and public space from the rest of Bell Street than the blocks from 1st to 5th do, but I wonder if that’s something that can be addressed once the effing Viaduct is finally torn down. That would complete this project nicely.
I went to the open house today and got fairly satisfying answers to my questions:
- the plan is to have a fairly regular uniformed personnel (mixture of police & park rangers) presence in the park, especially when it’s new.
- it will be on the North side because it’s sunnier, so likely to be used more of the year. There will be seating, so people can always get take-out from nearby restaurants and cafes (whose on-street seating is always full on a nice day) and wander over.
What would be really great is if the city allowed those restaurants and cafes to actually put seating out into the park on nice days, like in the pedestrian malls in Charlottesville, Boulder, and Burlington:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/allysonk/3497632703/