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Reading for January 30, 2010

  • The Last 20 Years at Second and Pine

    SecondandPine.jpg

    Jerry Garcia has had his eye on the corner of Second and Pine Streets for the last 20 years. He writes about the site in this week's paper:

    The most notable feature of the block between Stewart and Pine streets and Second and Third avenues was a hole. It stretched across the whole west half of the lot, 30 feet deep and gaping. This is where it was all supposed to happen. The 1 Hotel & Residences announced the arrival of a new sensibility, advertised with plants and warm abstract textures on banners adorning the construction walls and the neighboring Macy's garage...

    The site was once home to one of my favorite international-style buildings, with light green terra-cotta tile shaping ribbon windows on its facade. It housed a rather small furniture store aptly named Grand Furniture. Boarded up prior to my arrival in Seattle in the first month of 1990, I was never able to walk into it, but I enjoyed its defiant presence downtown. It felt like some very straitlaced fellow in a brightly colored suit. It was cleared away in the early 1990s, and the site slumbered as a blank piece of land until 1 began.

    Excavation for 1 began two and a half years ago—"and the hole was born," Garcia writes. Now that 1 is no more, the hole has been filled in. It isn't the only huge hole people downtown have walked by lately; City Hall looks down into another one. What is with Seattle's obsession with moving around dirt? Where did the dirt to fill in the hole at Second and Pine come from? And what's going to happen at that corner now? Read all of Garcia's piece HERE.

    (Blame Mr. Garcia for the Soundgarden pun in the headline. He insisted!)

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