NY Times Wonders About Wonder Bread Sign
Seattlest had avoided reading our favorite national papers over the past few days because we feared what stupid conclusions they might reach about Saturday's shootings, especially since the stupidity was so present from the beginning with our own damn local papers. However, the New York Times, of all places, instead recently printed a short article wondering what we're going to do with our homeless Wonder Bread sign, now that the property is slated for Nickel's-style urban assault development.
This Seattlest contributor lives just a few blocks from the now-defunct bakery (we're actually closer to Gai's, and over the weekend while working in the yard we distinctly smelled jelly donuts being made, and oooooh we hope that never goes away). That aside, our quiet little neighborhood has undergone massive change in just 3 years since we bought our house there. While questions about the sign abound, we've got more nagging concerns. Ironically, in a Seattle PI article about this very same subject a little under a year ago, Mark Faulkner, the VP for a local development firm had this to say: "We're getting more interest for the sign than for what we're doing there." Exactly. Time to stop worrying about the sign, people. That property is slated for street-level shops topped by at least 300 apartments.
Along with the Wonder Bread development, there is another planned just a few blocks away by the Central Area Development Agency (CADA), and a huge re-development of the Goodwill building and associated land is already well into the planning stages. Earlier this month, Mayor Greg Nickels released the Preliminary Recommendations (PDF) for his heartbreaking work of staggering hubris, the "Livable South Downtown" project. The project has a lot of vision statements and bullet points, but Seattlest fears that our little neighborhood, which is on the eastern edge of Nickels' blast zone, will fall prey to this frighteningly vague goal: "Identify the desired character of areas currently lacking clear development direction." We wonder how local businesses, some of which are owned by neighbors of ours, might feel about that statement.
The preliminary recommendation was made based on 9 meetings conducted by a committee comprising 25 "community members", nearly half of whom are architects, construction firms, or real estate development companies. Shockingly, this committee is recommending height increases in nearly every region identified--in some cases they advocate at least doubling the current limits in areas such as the waterfront west of Qwest Field and in Little Saigon.
Personally, Seattlest doesn't worry about losing views (we don't have one), but we do worry about what will happen over the next five years to our quiet, diverse little neighborhood which we actively chose to move into over more homogeneous options. We can hear the bulldozers rumbling in the distance, and in their wake we fear we'll have only indistinct block after block of condos and townhomes strung together by infectious sores of StarBuQFMcSubWalgreen complexes at every third intersection.
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