The Seattle Scene

[EdMc]

The Seattle Scene

At the Westlake retail district in Seattle.

Westlake Park

Amazon’s headquarter’s buildings are rectangular, but, rectangular doesn’t
have to be boring. Adding surface patterns and colors can make them more interesting and attractive.

The Amazon Spheres, opened January, 2018
The Spheres are a result of innovative thinking about the character of a workplace and an extended conversation about what is typically missing from urban offices– a direct link to nature. -seattlespheres.com

Built in 1962 for Seattle’s World’s Fair, the monorail runs one mile from Westlake Center to the Space Needle at Seattle Center.

The Museum of Pop Culture was later built over the monorail.

Space Needle entrance

Pacific Science Center, part of Seattle Center and located near the Space Needle.
The center's original buildings were the United States Science Pavilion designed by Minoru Yamasaki for the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle - Wikipedia

 

[EdMc]

KeyArena is in Seattle Center and is being redeveloped and is scheduled to reopen in June 2021. The NHL officially approved a franchise expansion to Seattle, and the team will begin play in the new arena for the 2021–22 NHL season. - Wikipedia

A view of Lake Union from the Space Needle with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation buildings at the bottom.

A beautiful way to dress up an ordinary concrete garage - Angle Lake Station at the southern end (temporarily) of the LINK light rail system.

Westlake light rail station

LINK light rail is part of the SoundTransit system, service in Seattle began in 2009.

Pioneer Square Station

System expansion
With voter approval in 1996, 2008 and 2016, Sound Transit is building the most ambitious transit expansion in the country, with new service opening every few years.

• soundtransit.org

Entrance to the Rainier Tower

Rainier Tower designed by Architect Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the
original World Trade Center in New York City.

Rainier Square Tower, designed by NBBJ, is a mixed-use skyscraper currently under construction and, at 850 feet tall and 58 stories, will be the second tallest building in Seattle upon completion. - Wikipedia

Pike Place Market, a popular tourist attraction, the original Starbucks location (1971).

5th Avenue

Restaurant design is so much more beautiful and advanced (materials, fixtures) than when I was a kid - The Cheesecake Factory is adjacent to the Washington State Convention Center.

Handsomely beautiful Starbucks Reserve Roastery, the first to
open in December, 2014, here, in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
One of five, with a Chicago store opening soon.

 

[EdMc]

Freshly roasted beans

$5.95 for this Brazilian cup of coffee. Gulp!

Freeway Park

The Cultural Landscape Foundation, tclf.org,
Oct 23, 2016 - Completed by Lawrence Halprin & Associates under the design direction of Angela Danadjieva, the first phase of this 5.5-acre park opened in 1976 and remains one of the most compelling treatises on postwar landscape architecture.
The first park built over a highway, Freeway Park sits perched above Interstate 5 in downtown Seattle, where it uses the air rights of the interstate. The park is defined by a series of irregular, linked plazas that are intertwined and enclosed by board-formed concrete planting containers and walls.
Oct, 2016 - It was, as a recent PBS documentary noted, one of 10 Parks that Changed America, showing how cities can build over a highway to heal the fabric of the city.

According to Charles A. Birnbaum - President + CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, “Larry Halprin changed the profession of landscape architecture. Period.” “He created bold, innovative environments that blew people away. When the Ira Keller Forecourt Fountain in Portland, OR opened, the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable said it was "one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance."

His works include Freeway Park, Yosemite Falls Corridor, Yosemite, CA, Bunker Hill Steps, Los Angeles, CA, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle Public Library, in a joint venture with Seattle-based LMN Architects.
spl.org - The current Central Library opened to the public on May 23, 2004. In its first year of operation, it attracted more than 8,000 visitors a day - double the average attendance in the old building.
With 362,987 square feet and designed with growth in mind, the Central Library has a capacity for more than 1.45 million books and materials. All of those books move around the building in a high-tech book-handling system.
It includes private Skype rooms, music practice rooms, meeting rooms, quiet areas for reading and study, and tables for group work.

 

[EdMc]

The fourth floor Red Hall houses the bulk of the library’s meeting rooms.

St. James Cathedral

University Street Station

University of Washington Arboretum is a 1.2 mile walk from the LINK
University of Washington Station. Open dawn to dusk everyday, free of charge.

You can ride a bike to the arboretum from campus over the Montlake Bridge, a double-leaf bascule bridge that carries traffic over a ship canal.

Husky Union Building, University of Washington

Suzzallo Library

Rainier Vista has been listed by the American Planning Association under its Great Places in America: Public Spaces. Mt. Rainier can be seen 60 miles away in good weather.

The Burke-Gilman Trail skirts around the University of Washington campus.
trailink.com -
Spanning nearly 19 miles between Seattle and Bothell, the Burke-Gilman Trail is as much a thoroughfare for commuting to work and the University of Washington as it is a staple for social recreation and fitness. Built in the 1970s, the trail was among the first rail-trails in the country and helped inspire dozens of similar projects around the nation.
One of the Best 100 Trails in the United States

Gas Works Park, the Burke-Gilman rail-trail runs past it.
It is listed as one of 10 Parks that Changed America, a PBS program.

Colorful Fremont Bridge in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, the Burke-Gilman bike trail runs under it.

The silver-colored Aurora Bridge is a cantilever and truss bridge that carries State Route 99 over the west end of Seattle's Lake Union.

This is the Burke-Gilman Trail running along the Fremont Cut waterway which connects Puget Sound to Lake Union.

The Fremont Troll under the Aurora Bridge

 

[EdMc]

Outside Seattle Art Museum (SAM)

“Hammering Man” sculpture

Harbor Steps at 1st Avenue and University Street

The Henry M. Jackson Federal Building is 37 stories, was completed in 1974, and
won the Honor Award of the American Institute of Architects in 1976. - Wikipedia

Plaza adjacent to the Jackson Federal Building

Two eye-catching skyscrapers, the glass F5 Tower and the black Columbia Center Tower.

Columbia Center is a 76-story, 933 ft high building, tallest in Seattle. Completed in 1985 and designed by Chester L. Lindsey Architects, it has a public observatory.
The building's structure is composed of three geometric concave facades with two setbacks, causing the building to appear like three towers standing side by side. - Wikipedia

F5 Tower, 660 ft tall with 44 floors, was designed by Zimmerman Gunsul Franca and completed in May, 2017. - Wikipedia

Garage in the Pioneer Square area called, “The Sinking Ship”.

Pergola in Pioneer Square, erected in 1909, it served as a waiting area for a cable car. - pioneersquare.org

Pioneer Square is Seattle’s original neighborhood.
The totem pole was carved by the Tlingit Indians in Alaska.

The Alaskan Way Viaduct comes down, August, 2019, a replacement tunnel is already being used. Shades of Boston’s Big Dig.

Smith Tower was completed in 1914 and is 38 stories and 484 feet tall.
Its outer skin is granite on the first and second floors, and terracotta on the rest. The exterior has been washed only once, in 1976, because it remains remarkably clean without regular washing. - Wikipedia

The Seattle Great Wheel

CenturyLink football stadium and T-Mobile Park baseball stadium in the background

St. James Cathedral

King Street Station below

Opened in 1906. The San Marco bell tower of Venice, Italy, served as the model for the building's familiar clock tower. The structure was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. - Seattle.gov

The station is served by Amtrak Cascades, Empire Builder, and Coast Starlight trains, and by Sound Transit's Sounder commuter trains - Wikipedia

 

[EdMc]

Hing Hay Park

International District LINK Station across the street from the Chinatown Gate

Bus convoys on 3rd Avenue (exclusively bus lanes which keeps the buses rolling), from here I rode the Number 2 bus north to the hilly Queen Anne neighborhood.

My destination was Kerry Park which is reputed to have the best view of the Space Needle outside of downtown.

Due to its elevation, this neighborhood has numerous staircases to traverse the slopes. This is the Comstock Staircase, only a few blocks from Kerry Park.

The Center for Wooden Boats on Lake Union

Lake Union Park streetcar stop adjacent to The Center for Wooden Boats.

The South Lake Union Streetcar travels 1.3 miles and connects Downtown Seattle to the South Lake Union neighborhood, passing Amazon Headquarters along the way.

Curbed Seattle, July 16, 2019
Downtown Seattle is full of private-public spaces

Privately owned public open spaces, POPS
The crown jewel among our city’s POPS is easily the seventh-floor open-air garden at the Fourth and Madison Building.

From the Fourth and Madison Building garden,

Occidental Square

The company, UPS, United Parcel Service, celebrated its 100th anniversary by building this waterfall garden in 2007.

A springboard for Seattle’s emergence and growth.

nps.gov -
Gold Fever! Seattle Outfits
the Klondike Gold Rush

Seattle's Pioneer Square, the area of the town's first settlement, welcomed thousands of prospective miners, known as "stampeders."
At the dawn of a new century, Seattle had established itself as the premier city of the Northwest.

Wikipedia - The Center of the Klondike Gold Rush was at Dawson City on the Klondike River, Yukon, Canada

 

[EdMc]

Several buildings in the Pioneer Square neighborhood were influenced by the Romanesque style of architect Henry Hobson Richardson according to a park ranger leading a tour of the neighborhood. He designed Boston’s Trinity Church.

First Hill neighborhood streetcar

Where the Seattle Seahawks football team plays.

The only underground LINK station south of downtown Seattle

Good view of downtown from Jefferson Park, one-half mile from the Beacon Hill Station.

Mt Rainier at sunset from the Angle Lake Station platform, SeaTac, Washington.

If you liked this picture thread, you may like my two Boston picture threads:

1.Boston Urbanism June 2017 (Under Boston Architecture and Urbanism, Page 6)
https://archboston.com/community/threads/boston-urbanism-june-2017.5521/

2.(Under General Architecture and Urban Planning > Coronavirus and its Impacts on Urbanism, Page 2), scroll down to my alias, EdMc, posted May 4, 2020, after selecting the link.

https://archboston.com/community/th...sm.6075/page-2#lg=_xfUid-2-1606631692&slide=0

 

[HenryAlan]

Those Link stations look so much like Silver Line stations. It makes me sad that ours don't have rails in them. Thanks for the pics, makes me fondly remember my visit to Seattle a few years ago.

 

[BeeLine]

Ed, fantastic photolog. I spent severals years, during my youth, in Seattle and a lot of good memories were awakened. May have to pack up the old kit bag and give the place one more look see. Thanks much!

 

[Downburst]

I won't ever live there- too fearful, however irrationally, of a major earthquake- but I adore Seattle, and I would move in an instant otherwise. Thanks for helping me revisit old memories.

 

[EdMc]

Henry, thanks for the reply, yes, the LINK stations do bear a resemblance to the Silver Line stations in Seaport, I hadn’t thought of that.
Beeline, thanks, you and I have something in common - we get around a lot.
citylover94, thanks, I love the best of our cities, too, maybe you can tell.