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The woman who was in charge of the Seattle Center is stepping down after 18 years on the job. Wait, someone was in charge of Seattle Center? We've always had the impression that it just kind of drifted through life going wherever the tides and winds swept it and if there was a hand on the tiller the captain had died long ago and his skeleton was roped into the cockpit. We were wrong, though. Someone was in charge.
After 18 years as Seattle Center director, Virginia Anderson announced her resignation Tuesday, a departure that comes as the city-owned cultural campus faces an uncertain financial future.During her tenure, Anderson helped transform the Center from the neglected site of the 1962 World's Fair to a diverse gathering place where people can see Jimi Hendrix's guitar, scream for the Sonics and celebrate the Tet Festival, the Vietnamese New Year.
Wow, with one fell sentence the Seattle Times just gave Virginia Anderson credit for the EMP, the Sonics and Tet. We'd rather blame her. To wit: "During her tenure, Anderson helped transform the Center from the neglected site of the 1962 World's Fair to the neglected site of such blights as the World's Ugliest Building and the World's Oldest New Stadium."
Alright, blaming any one individual for Seattle Center is a mistake because it's obviously been killed by a committee. And there have been a lot of highlights: The fountain is pretty cool, Bumbershoot's there, uh, they haven't torn down the Space Needle... Maybe not a LOT of highlights...
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My favorite "Yes, Virginia, there really is a need to get it on paper," moment is the McCaw Hall funding snafu, covered here:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/entertainment/mccaw/story_finances22.html
While fundraising, Seattle Center Foundation announced they had commitments of $17 million from the state and county for the Hall. (Ron Howard V.O.: They didn't.) They got a total of $4 million, the City had to float an emergency bridge loan, the Opera and the Ballet got stuck with an extra chunk of the bill, and ticket prices went up about 25%.
For a bonus round, there's her comment that the Monorail is held together by "chewing gum and baling wire" because of a chronic lack of funds for maintenance-- but is completely safe. This was prior to the sideswiping incident, of course.
Typical "Seattle Way" coverage of someone stepping down. 18 years ago, the Seattle Center was a fun place for the occasional school field trip, civic gathering, or football game.
Now it's bloated out of proportion: trying to be Seattle's Lincoln Center, its Museum Mile, its Madison Square Garden and its Central Park all at once.
Bumbershoot and Folklife are WAY too big for the now cramped 16 acre site, Key Arena luxury suites are sold at 40% capacity, and now there's talk of tearing down Memorial Stadium, which was dedicated to Seattle schoolkids who died in WWII. Thanks a lot, greatest generation, have fun as Memorial Corporate Hotel.
Do we even WANT Seattle Center anymore? Does the model of a entertainment supermall within an urban environment even work? Maybe we should turn it back into the neighborhood it was when my great-grandfather had a store there.
I will put a positive word in for the Pacific Science center, ever the quiet gem of an otherwise schizophrenic Seattle Center. It is small, but really wonderful. I forgot about it when I did a recent post comparing our offerings to that of San Fran's Exploratorium, which is PacSci on steroids, but that is a model I wish we could/would go after. The Exploratorium is right on the presidio, but they haven't tried to jam 15 other "community" attractions in with it. Our city's obsession with jamming all that crap into one place seems foolish if we want tourists to get around and explore, and if we don't want the traffic around there to get any worse than it already is.
I think you're right Seth, the model of an entertainment supermall fails in an already dense city. We should sprinkle it around and not obsess over the one-stop shop concept.
The only problem seems to be that whenever the city DOES try to "spread the love" event-wise, the NIMBY's in whatever neighborhood said event lands in (cit ref: Summer Nights at Gasworks, extended parking for the Woodland Park Zoo, more sports fields at Magnuson Park, etc., etc.) get all up in arms about it.
So long as Seattle continues to hang onto it's "neighborhood centric" model of growth and density, the Seattle Center is going to remain our civic dumping ground for cultural events that nobody else wants to happen where they live.