She loves the complexities of her job managing a 74-acre, 31-facility urban civic and cultural center with an annual budget of $36 million and nearly 300 full-time and 550 part-time employees. Yet this Queen Anne resident has a soft spot for kids and is a single mother.
Meet Virginia Anderson, director of the Seattle Center for 13 years.
She was brought on board at the Seattle Center in 1988 by then Mayor Charles Royer. At the time, the Walt Disney company had been hired by the city of Seattle to look at what to do with the Seattle Center. What emerged was basically a plan to turn it into an amusement park, according to Anderson.
"This was when Michael Eisner took over (at Disney) and every division had to be a profit center."
Disney was a corporate culture, Anderson said, and its employees did not understand public process and that they had to consider what the community wanted. She took her post in August just as the Disney employees were finishing their report.
"They were recommending that the International Fountain be turned into a duck pond. I thought people were going to pull out guns," Anderson said. "Their drawings were so southern California. It was like they took buildings out of Disneyland and plopped them into a major northern city."
The Disney scheme for Seattle Center did not fly - the seventh failed effort to create a plan for the Seattle Center.
Planning with a vision
Anderson's idea was that you can't put together a plan until you know what you're trying to do. Over 18 months, she said, more than 100 meetings were held to find out what the community wanted at the Seattle Center.
"It was fascinating how much passion people had about the Seattle Center," said Anderson.
Out of the information gleaned at those meetings, Anderson said, came the Seattle Center 2000 Plan that envisioned renovations, new facilities and creating a campus that was more visually open to the community.
Among the themes the public wanted to see were more open space, family activities, arts and a less closed-off campus.
As Anderson stalks, her enthusiasm for the ins and outs of her complicated job become apparent. She explains how appearances at the Seattle Center have been carefully crafted during renovations.
"The visual image should be a direct expression of what you want to say about yourself," Anderson said.
She gave the example of the International Fountain as it was originally constructed. Its steep slopes, hydraulic spikes, sharp rocks and "keep out" signs were off-putting for a landmark that functioned as the heart of the Seattle Center.
After finding out what the community liked about the fountain - particularly its circle within a circle design to reflect the integration of humanity - Anderson said its dangerous and inhospitable aspects were ditched and the favored elements retained in a much friendlier, safer version.
The Seattle Children's Theatre, which is now one of the most complete children's theater complexes in North America, was the first major project in the Seattle Center 2000 Plan and a carefully-watched test of Anderson's management skills.
"There were lots of problems with the Bagley Wright theater construction .... The perception was the city didn't know how to manage capital projects," Anderson said.
A child focus
Anderson has a strong appreciation for children that has influenced her work at the Seattle Center.
She said that one day when her nephew was visiting the campus she bent down to his level and saw a view that was not very inviting.
It was Anderson's idea to put child-sized tables and chairs in the Centerhouse - a message, she said, that this is a place that invites kids. She is proud of instituting the Seattle Center Arts Academy, a two-week summer program for middle school students throughout King County.
A skate board park was built at the Seattle Center to address the needs of teenagers, even though they are not the easiest group of people to work with, according to Anderson.
"At public hearings, the kids were saying, 'There's no place for us to go,'" she said.
Anderson grew up on the south side of Chicago and lived in a series of apartments, attending eight different grade schools.
"The places of beauty in my life were public places," she said.
That background has kept Anderson committed to making the Seattle Center a hub of a wide variety activities available to a diverse range of people regardless of their income level.
"Not many places mix things together like this. We say a lot about our social ethic as a region by not making those divisions."
The Seattle Center is part of the Queen Anne community and the much larger Seattle community, Anderson said.
"For the flower vigil at the International Fountain [following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks], people came from everywhere. They just came," Anderson said.
From a job in planning with King County while she was in graduate school at the University of Washington, she went to work for the city of Seattle as a budget analyst and then a capital project manager for the Department of Community Development.
In 1979, she was hired by Cornerstone, a subsidiary of Weyerhauser, where she learned how to develop and manage large real estate projects, doing everything from buying the land to washing the silverware for a hotel 45 times in her dishwasher at home to see how it would hold up. She also served on the boards of arts groups. Those skills made her an ideal choice as the Seattle Center director.
"The Seattle Center needed a lot of physical development," she said.
Next week: Tough issues and neighbors.
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