A Theme Park Reborn as a Civic Place: Seattle Center in 2003
Written: Jun 28 '03 (Updated Jun 29 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: New theatres, Experience Music Project, and improved landscape.
Cons: Center Court and Int'l Fountain still feel dated.
The Bottom Line: As the city fills in around it, this old worlds fair site is coming alive again. Diverse, inspiring, serene.
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Seattle Center |
The 60s: A Science Fiction Theme Park
When I was a child in the late 1960s, Seattle was the biggest city I’d ever seen. And for a wide-eyed precocious eight-year-old, Seattle meant one thing: Seattle Center. Here in a few streetless blocks was the engaging Pacific Science Center, the Center Court with it’s “bubble-vator”, the monorail, an small amusement park, and the triumphal International Fountain, always packed with local crowds on a sunny day. Laid out for the 1962 world’s fair, it represented the best in 1962 visions of the future, all summed up in its most famous symbol: the phallo-utopic Space Needle, still a dramatic presence after 40 years.
All these things are still there, except the “bubble-vator,” which today would be about as fascinating as, well, an elevator with windows. It was a simple hydraulic elevator connecting the two stories of the Center Court (basically a large food court), but its shape was spherical, like a bubble. Rising in the bubble, as though floating to the surface of the upper floor, actually passed for a sci-fi thrill to me as a kid, since bubble-shaped conveyances seemed to be everywhere in the futuristic fiction that was all I read at the time.
Today, of course, it would be passé, and in an age when any normal kid has gone through hundreds of wormholes and has felt the thrill of warp drive, it’s hard to imagine kids getting off on the 10-second, 14-foot voyage that the bubble-vator made. So it’s gone, replaced by stairs, and Center Court is now the least interesting part of Seattle Center -- just another shopping mall food court.
The 1980s: A Painfully Dated Science Fiction Theme Park
Returning as an adult in the 1980s, I had trouble seeing why Seattle Center had ever impressed me. The Space Needle was unassailable, but everything else seemed shrunken and dated, with the look and feel of a neglected theme park. The Science Center held my interest for 15 minutes, and the limited range of rotating spouts in the International Fountain created an underwhelming impression to someone who had seen more participatory fountains, such as the water stage on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles or the Ira Keller (Forecourt) Fountain in Portland. International Fountain remains to me, now, what it seemed then: a grand splash of water that’s a great relief on a warm summer day, and a safe place for kids to run in and out of the water, but neither as engaging or as inspiring as the many great waterworks that have been built since.
Seattle Center in 2003: A New-Old Center for a World-Class City
Sometime since 1980, Seattle landed on the map as a world-class city on a par with San Francisco or Vancouver. The original 1962 Worlds Fair, for which Seattle Center was built, obviously expressed longings in this direction, but in the 60s, and even the 80s, Seattle struggled with a boom-and-bust economy that relied far too much on the cyclical aerospace business. Since then, Seattle has diversified into software (Microsoft is headquartered in suburban Redmond), but now all these industries are slumped, and Washington leads the nation in unemployment.
But Seattle is covered with cranes, struggling to keep up with the demand for inner-city living from the rising tide of Americans who are fed up with suburbia. As the city has grown denser and richer, Seattle Center has followed suit, with dramatic additions that keep people there day and night for a much wider range of purposes -- a key feature of any great civic space. The city’s major professional theatres and ballet have consolidated here, along with a basketball arena along the western edge. The Science Center, whose graceful signature arches never went out of style, now feels up-to-date on the inside as well.
And then there’s the Experience Music Project, Frank Gehry’s colorful organic building that looks a bit like a complex ice cream dessert halfway through the process of melting. Indeed, if Dali had painted melting buildings instead of melting clocks, he would probably have created something like this. EMP is a museum of popular music that packs in crowds both young and old, and that’s worth a visit just to see the building. (From the deeply buried Liquid Lounge, for example, you can catch a glimpse up through many levels of the museum and out a skylight, where the top of the Space Needle is perfectly framed.)
Perhaps most important, the city has filled in around Seattle Center, so that what used to be an island amid sketchy neighborhoods and parking lots is now bounded by two prosperous, dense residential districts, Lower Queen Anne to the west and Belltown to the south. It is now possible to walk from Seattle Center to the heart of downtown without passing through squalor.
When it was built, Seattle Center was an urban-renewal project that was very common in its time: Take a derelict part of town, tear out everything including the streets, and create an all-pedestrian precinct where you can walk among many attractions without encountering cars. Your city probably has something from the same period, on the same model, though it may be housing, offices, arts, or some mixture of these. Lincoln Center in New York is a fair comparison, with far bleaker architecture and a questionable future. Century City in Los Angeles -- though made of offices and housing -- reflects the same idea. And then there’s the World Trade Center site, where the first thing planners agreed on was the need to reconnect the streets that used to run through the area. In short, big pedestrian precincts like Seattle Center are technically out of fashion now. Today, we’d be more sensitive to what we were tearing down to build such a place, and we’d be much more reluctant to interrupt the street grid.
But to this urban planner, Seattle Center works. It is a joy to have a space of many blocks packed with points of interest where you won’t encounter cars -- much like a good university campus. The place has also evolved into a microcosm of the city, a close-grained mixture of arts, sciences, pop music, amusement rides, greenspace, and water. And it is all united, visually, by the iconic Space Needle, a structure as dramatic as the Eiffel Tower in its own way. Like it’s Parisian counterpart, the expression of another techno-utopian age, the Needle is unapologetically an artifact of its time, yet so distinctive that it will outlast all the ridicule that is commonly tossed its way. Now that thousands of people live within a few blocks, in bustling Belltown and intimate Lower Queen Anne, Seattle Center is the best kind of attraction: a living neighborhood, a monument, and a "livingroom" for a city that grows more interesting by the day.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Mar - May
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Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
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