What would the Pike Place Market do?
The model for a walkable, vibrant urban neighborhood for rich and poor is right under our noses. The Market is about more than flower stalls and history.
Sketch: Victor Steinbrueck, Courtesy of Peter Steinbrueck
The new Museum of History and Industry has an exhibit that focuses on the "Seattle that Might Have Been." For over 150 years, people have come to Seattle with big ideas, and more of those ideas haven't happened than have. One thing that never came to pass was the plan to tear down the Pike Place Market neighborhood and replace it with high rises and parking garages.
The destruction of the Market has been proposed more than once over its 100-year history. It has also been saved more than once, most famously in the early 1970s, when the citizens of Seattle voted to protect it from an urban renewal scheme.
But let's play the "what if" game for a minute. Look at the picture to the right. It is a drawing by Victor Steinbrueck, a sketch of an architectural model of the Pike Place Market make-over that was exhibited at City Hall in the early ‘70s. This was to be the Market of the Future. Note the tall buildings, the skyscraper hotel, the eight-story parking lot and the high-rise condominiums.
The argument was made that the vibrant Pike Place Market was blight, that its neighborhood needed to be destroyed in order to be saved. You can see that the proposed redevelopment even preserved a tiny wedge of the old Market just to prove they were being helpful. Of course, the market was saved, but what would have happened if Save-the-Market activists like Victor Steinbrueck had been defeated?
That could well have happened. The city government, the mayor, the planners, the downtown business community, the newspapers and many of the Market's own merchants favored this plan. It was clean, urban and forward-thinking. And so was the Kingdome, which was built around the same time by many of the same interests. Seattle wanted to be a 'big league city' — and who wanted a bush-league farmer's market in the 21st century?
The funny thing is, the future has a way of surprising you. Seattle bucked the trend of massive '70s-style urban redevelopment and went another way: It committed to saving an entire neighborhood. Not simply a market for farmers and craftspeople, but an entire urban ecosystem. The renewal project would have killed an ecosystem in order to give Seattle the trappings of a big city. It would have substituted infrastructure for people. And I bet if it had been built in the 1970s, we would have already torn it down by now — just like we blew up the Kingdome.
Right about now some other big developer would be planning to make everything all over again. People would be decrying how quickly it had became obsolete, how ugly the concrete Brutalist structures of the '70s were, and they would be touting the importance of a mixed use, mixed income, thriving, diverse, urban downtown neighborhood and trying to make one from scratch.
By saving the Market then, we saved ourselves forty years of wandering in an urban wasteland. We skipped the tragedy and hard lessons-learned phase. But we didn't stop there.
We did the hard work of making something wonderful and complex work. Instead of simply saving buildings, the Market looks after people. It has written in its charter that its mission is to protect and serve low-income downtown residents. In their wisdom, the Market's saviors knew that we were not just saving buildings, but people.
They started a health clinic to look after the sick and the homeless; they created and preserved low- income housing; they made a senior center; they started a food bank. Most Seattleites don't know much about this part of the Market, but they should.
According to the non-profit Pike Place Market Foundation, the Market’s food bank provided over 4,000 families with enough groceries to produce 444,186 healthy meals in 2012. Its medical clinic provided healthcare to 4,879 uninsured patients, 90 percent of them low income. What’s the largest restaurant in the Market? It’s the senior center, which serves over 47,000 free meals per year to low-income and homeless seniors. The Market also provides 350 units of low-income and senior housing and its daycare and preschool served some 90 children from low- and moderate- income families in the last year.
Tourists come and say that the Market is the "soul of Seattle," but entertaining as it is, the soul is not found simply in fruit and flower stands and tossed fish. It is the spirit that drives the place, that has cultivated a community about community. The irony is, the neighborhood that the urban planners wanted to flatten is now the model of what developers are trying to accomplish, from SoDo to South Lake Union, from Yesler Terrace to the Denny Triangle. How do we give our neighborhood soul? How do we generate street life? How do we get rich and poor to live together?
The model is here. That is part of the genius of the Market: The answer to growing and renewing the city is to create and manage neighborhoods with the goal of taking care of people — all kinds of people. It is not about promoting tourism or saving history, but about creating a just city that empowers the little guy, that cultivates community for all generations, for the craftsman, the farmer, the busker, the homeless senior, the toddler and, yes, the tourist.
You want to develop a neighborhood in Seattle? You want to preserve the essence of a place? Ask yourself, what would the Pike Place Market do?
A neighborhood's soul resides in its residents and managers, in the values that pervade, in the commitment to living well and helping everyone to live as well as they can through good and tough times. It is a neighborhood that cultivates the entrepreneurism of the market without being driven only by the free market. To be a great city is also to be a fair city, an open city, a diverse city, an embracing city.
The success of the Market isn't that it has survived, though we're glad it has. It is how it has survived. It is because the people actively support its missions. The Market wasn't saved by a vote and left on its own. It thrives because of generations of engagement, management, planning, protection, expansion, evolution. This is the work of the Market Foundation over the past 30 years.
It has become a place that embodies the character of Seattle and all Seattleites, one that appeals to our highest aspirations of fairness and opportunity. It is the urban place where one can most enjoy a complete immersion in our Seattleness, and what it means.
This story was adapted from remarks given at the Pike Place Market Foundation’s annual “Care for the Market Luncheon,” March 12, 2013 at the Seattle Sheraton Hotel Grand Ball Room.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Mar 18, 7:54 a.m. Inappropriate
Another good piece from Skip, though it doesn't quite go far enough in explaining why the Market works. One reason he doesn't mention is that a chain or franchise operation is not allowed there. Yes, Sur la Table and Starbucks are there- BUT they started there (even if the place touted as the first Starbucks actually sits a block south of where the first Starbucks store began in the market). That was the idea- if chains were kept out, the Market could/would serve as an incubator, which it has done exceedingly well.
If zones could be created in places like Capital Hill, wherein chains were not allowed, it would allow a much more interesting mix of shopping and dining experiences to be sustained. Such places as Wall of Sound, which has to move because a developer is taking down the building. The developer will of course jack up the rents to pay for the new building, pricing the retail space essentially only for chains with deep pockets. The irony, which the success of the Market makes clear, is that it is small-scale operations, even funky ones, that make places worldwide interesting. Who wants to go to a place in Rome that is just like the one in Tacoma? And in fact, thousands of young people have moved to areas like Capital Hill because of those unique places, which of course as soon as the developers take over, are priced out. Funny thing is, that if like at the Market, the playing field were legislated to be more equal, the developers of the upscale housing would still benefit, because people, even wealthier people, like being around uniqueness. The property right freaks always scream and yell that its un-American to limit what can be built where. What they really mean is that greed should always be allowed, even encouraged. But the Market has proven this narrow view wrong for many many decades. The Market is not about making the most for a few, but for the many.
Posted Mon, Mar 18, 10:54 a.m. Inappropriate
You're leaving out a major piece of the Pike Market story, and it undermines your premise.
Yes, the people saved the Market in the 70s, and yes, the Market Foundation does incredible work to fund the social service agencies located there. (I was the Food Bank manager for the last 2.5 years before starting graduate school.)
But the Pike Place Preservation and Development Authority (PDA) was not charged with maintaining the Market as a museum. It was charged simultaneously with preservation and development. The Market has grown and changed and will continue to do so.
It actually has grown to look quite a lot like the sketch you posted. The core Market has added a parking garage (on Western), a multi-story hotel, and is now bounded by large buildings on all sides. You may also know that the Market is currently working on development of new housing, retail, parking, and public space in the lot behind the Desimone bridge.
The hard work was not in saving the market, it's in the year in and year out management of it as both an historic artifact and an evolving urban center. It's this tension which leads to the kind of great conversations and public involvement that in turns spurs good development.
The master stroke was setting up this productive conflict, and trusting future generations to hammer it out.
Posted Tue, Mar 19, 12:43 p.m. Inappropriate
If yourecommend a have and have not model then the market is for you.Once a haven for low and moderate income people the market these days is for tourists, the well employed or the subsidized poor. Very few of the Market workers who are not working for social services or the PDA can afford to live in the Market. The market has been a success for retailers and high end food but its not a place where locals go to shop for groceries on a regular basis. It's a have or have not society.
Historically speaking a couple corrections; the craftspeople showed up after the vote and were given a special status by way of the Seattle City Council Hildt amendment. It was in a sense a payoff to the counter culture people who had worked so hard to save the market and were great appreciators of the markets funky romantic nature. The hippies of the era started the market newspaper, the market street festival, the famous soup box derby down post alley and were the instigators of many popular elements of the market. Because these long hairs were ofter in disagreement with the new bosses of the market they were pushed out of the market and any credit for there participation pigeonholed as crafts people which in fact very few were.The markets contempt for the activists and romanticists fo the 70's was such that during the 100 year Market celebration of 2007 that era...the very era that the citizens of seattle voted to save...was repeatedly referred to as sleasy and the market hippy taverns as biker bars. Only Sol Amon of Pure Food Fish speaks clearly when he says how hippies were instrumental in saving the market. Crafters and buskers came later.
The housing situation to the pedestrian eye seems good but there is a big difference in subsidized housing rules and regulations and private sector operations. Someone caught dealing drugs or smoking in bed can be kicked out of private housing; in subsidized housing it takes for ever to right the ship.
No one voted in the save the Market renewal to turn the Public Market into an entertainment district with all sorts of live music and heavy drinking til 2AM in the morning. The impact of the market nightlife is negative for any of the myriad housing units in the market. Security is an ongoing issue, drug dealers use the market now to make their buys and drops. We are talking crack, not pot. if one takes the time to talk to the shop owners off the record, or the residents or the security details or the janitors one gets a very different picture of the market than the one commonly portrayed. Yet it is hard to argue with success. The Market is a cash cow employing more than 100 people in the PDA staff. Yet its the kind of place where a hardware store is evicted in favor of an expansion of an expensive eyeglass frames shop.
And heaven forbid if this hybrid model called a PDA which is part public and part private catches on. It's anti-democratic and designed change colors depending on necessity and legal issues. When its beneficial to itself a PDA is private; other times especially in legal matters its public. Really a PDA answers to no one.
Posted Tue, Mar 19, 7:57 p.m. Inappropriate
Over 10 million people visit the Pike Place Market each year. Visitors always find the history of the market, as outlined in the story, quite interesting, but the highlight for many is the “souls of Seattle” that make the market community so quirky and unique. Merchants, buskers, and artists…visitors genuinely want to get to know the people that give the Market life. Some liken Pike Place Market to places like Faneuil Hall in Boston, or Reading Terminal in Philadelphia. But there is really nothing like the people of the Pike Place Market.
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