Christopher Goodwin
They are claiming that this will be exactly like New York’s Highline park. In
The proposal is a natural outgrowth of the incompetent architect the city spent $4 million on to create an uninspired “vision” of our new waterfront. James Corner was the architect of Highline Park but hasn’t the least idea about Seattle’s locale, culture or history. Worse yet his design is full of Disney-esque gimmicks but no solution to the essential issue of ties the new waterfront. located at he base os a three story high cliff, into downtown Seattle that sits at the top of that cliff.
1980 a rail company gave the city the Highline, an elevated railroad track running through the city. Facing a massive project to remove the line, it sat unused for 20+ years while a local group lobbied for it’s preservation as a historic landmark. In 2006 the city finally accepted it’s ownership and slowly sections of it were planted and opened to the public. Between 2006 and 2014 sections of the elevated line now planted with shrubs were slowly opened to the public.
The Waterfront elevated park will not be on the viaduct, it will not be repurposed at all, it is considered unsafe and that is why it is being removed. What Initiative 123 is proposing is that after the viaduct is removed, that we build a new one on the same site and make the new one a park. The Highline repurposed an existing structure; Initiative 123 is asking that we build an elevated viaduct IN PLACE OF the Alaskan Way Viaduct through downtown as a park.
The existing plan is to turn the area below the existing viaduct into a park and promenade along the water front revitalizing not only the waterfront itself but all the buildings which have for decades been in the shade of the viaduct, all becoming restaurants and shops along a huge waterfront park with the Seattle Aquarium, Eye of Seattle and the Coleman Ferry Dock as it’s hub.
Initiative is a blank check with no set budget, once approved we will just keep paying into the project until it is finished.
Initiative 123 will form an unelected board with no citizen oversight called the “Downtown Waterfront Preservation and Development Authority”, the proposers of this plan have actually written their names into the ordinance as the interim board granting themselves the power to appoint who they like to the board. Not unlike the “Monorail Board” which cost taxpayers millions and never built anything.
Initiative 123 also required the city to give the board unused or under-used city property to use or sell off as they see fit.
Initiative 123 mandates that the city “Shall” provide funding for the project, although the project scope and budget are unknowns, essentially it is a blank check. Conservative estimates exceed $700 million
I propose Initiative 123A where we agree to build Xanadu, a Stately Pleasure Dome, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns deep and measureless to man Down to a sunless sea and that I am appointed Kubla Khan of the project with an unlimited budget and no oversight!