Twenty-seven years ago, the City of Seattle hired artist and ex-musician Jack Mackie to stick some cast-metal diagrams of dance steps into Broadway's sidewalks.
Late last month, Mayor Greg Nickels announced a new set of improvements for Capitol Hill's beleaguered main street.
Some of the proposals seem modestly practical: Helping to fund a re-launched Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce, cleaning up some graffiti.
But as far as more ambitious efforts, the recent announcement seemed lacking. It mentions, as this paper has noted, "replacing street signs on Broadway; painting crosswalks, curbs and fire hydrants; replacing decrepit trash cans; complete the transition from parking meters to pay stations; improving the visual appearance of vacant storefronts; and improving tree maintenance."
The skeptic in me immediately says it's not enough. How are a few new street signs and a fresh coat of lane-stripe paint supposed to drum up more retail business than the dance steps?
Perhaps I was expecting a more elaborate plan, along the lines of what the city did on University Way. Foot traffic and sales there are up these days, at least compared to the long months (nearly two years, with time-outs for U District Street Fair weekends) when the street was torn up and closed off, block by block, for the reconstruction. During that time, several U Way merchants suffered and a few closed up altogether, in spite of city-assisted promotional campaigns.
In one sense, it's good the city didn't announce a more extreme makeover. Parts of Broadway are going to be construction-crazed in the next few years anyway.
Sidewalks near Mercer Street will likely be blocked off during construction of the big condo-retail projects planned on the former QFC and Safeway sites. Some time after that, Sound Transit's light-rail line will churn up to a passenger station at Broadway and Denny, then plow north toward Husky Stadium and perhaps beyond. The tunnel's likely to be dug with an underground boring machine (such as Sound Transit's currently using on Beacon Hill), rather than the more disruptive "cut and cover" technique. But there'll still be disruptions off and on during the process, including temporary road-lane closures.
(Some old-timers may remember the messes downtown in the late 1980s during the initial construction of the Transit Tunnel, whose Third Avenue portion was dug by a machine. It wasn't as noisy and traffic-stopping as the cut-and-cover job done then (and again now) on Pine Street, but it still made driving and even walking down Third a living heck for a long time.)
So it's only practical that we're not going to dig up and resurface the whole street now, only to dig up and resurface part of it again during the light-rail construction.
But let's start planning now for how we'd like the street to look like when all that's finished up. Let's make sure the disruption's legacy includes more attractive sidewalks to encourage strollers and shoppers and diners.
Mind you, Broadway's not as wide a right-of-way as University Way, so not everything that was done there can be done here-even if we knocked out half the curbside parking spaces. That's something neither the city nor any revived Capitol Hill Chamber might like.
What they would, and do, like is to stuff the neighborhood with more residents.
Between the two aforementioned big projects and others planned or already under way, Capitol Hill could gain as many as an extra thousand people. That's more than the whole population of the Eastern Washington town where my mother grew up. And it's a lot of mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, feet to shoe, hair to cut, lips to gloss, windows to clean, floors to wax, gas tanks to fill, packages to ship, pictures to frame, etc., etc.
If the merchants of Broadway can capture even a moderate slice of that future business, it wouldn't be called a blighted area anymore.
Clark Humphrey's column appears in the first issue of each month. He can be reached at editor@ capitolhilltimes.com. His long-running Web site on popular culture is www.miscmedia.com.[[In-content Ad]]
