Circling the Square

In the days following 2001's Nisqually earthquake, one of the images that kept flashing across CNN was of fallen bricks on the streets and parked cars of Pioneer Square. One of the oft-repeated video sweeps showed the facade of the Fenix Underground nightclub, its old red brick slashed away, the club in near ruins. The Fenix closed its location at Second Avenue and Jackson Street and moved to a new location on First Avenue South which, damaged itself, underwent expensive renovations and reopened in 2003.

Three weeks ago, the Fenix closed again, quietly, this time the victim of financial distress.

This week, another Pioneer Square club veteran is leaving the nightlife business. Steve Crosier, the longtime general manager of Doc Maynard's, is quitting June 30.

"I've never seen business as bad as it is now," he says. "We're doing maybe one-third of what we used to do."

Business is that tough, for some, in Pioneer Square. Galleries have closed or moved and Mitchelli's, a landmark for 29 years, is for sale. Even the dining spot billed as the city's oldest restaurant, Merchant's Cafe at First Avenue South and Yesler Way (founded in 1892), has struggled. It's currently closed and undergoing a makeover. Carolyn Staley Fine Japanese Prints recently moved from the neighborhood to Pike Place Market, and high rents pushed out legendary book dealer David Ishii, a First Avenue fixture.

The hard times aren't universal, but Pioneer Square is poised for more changes and challenges. The neighborhood is home to about 2,000 people—75 percent of whom live in homeless shelters or subsidized low-income housing, or sleep in doorways. The other 25 percent are Seattle's downtown urban pioneers, more upscale folks who live in the condos, apartments, and lofts of the area's restored old-world brick buildings.

They are about to get new neighbors. Lots of them. The city of Seattle is hatching plans to double the population of Seattle's historic center. It won't be moving 2,000 street people from elsewhere in the region and dumping them in Pioneer Square. Instead, development plans are on track for 2,000 new residents to live in about 1,000 new units of housing to be constructed in and around the Square in the next few years. Think of it as a smaller-scale version of the planned Denny Triangle redevelopment.

The housing won't be cheap. The majority of the units are intended for the urban gentry who can afford $500,000 for 1,100 square feet and up to whatever it is you get for $1 million or more.

The change will be especially profound near the former Kingdome site, now the 500-car North Parking Lot. An official announcement was expected this week from King County that it would be redeveloped as an urban village with two towers, one as high as 24 stories, and about 800 residents.

Development always comes with a price. Million-dollar-condo buyers generally don't mix well with the homeless and nightclub goers, preferring to re-create suburban mores in urban climes. And that's the question hanging over all of this: Can Seattle improve Pioneer Square, revive its economy, keep its character intact, and retain the very urban funkiness that made it interesting in the first place without turning it into Green Lake?

Towers are planned for Qwest Field lot.

Kevin P. Casey

Pioneer Square is literally where Seattle began, after the Denny party tired of windswept Alki and moved across Elliott Bay in 1852. As the city grew, it came to be crowded with shops, saloons, whorehouses, and industries on what was little more than landfill from the Duwamish River. No place else has more dramatically reflected Seattle's boom and bust cycles. There was the great fire in 1889 that leveled much of Pioneer Square and spread north. Rebuilt in the 1890s, it was the jumping-off point for the Alaska and Yukon gold rushes, which kick started the city's prosperity and growth. In the 1930s, Seattle's Hooverville was located just southwest of the neighborhood.

Later, the Square became a blight zone after the city had developed north into downtown proper and the Denny Regrade. Many of Pioneer Square's classic brick buildings were abandoned or turned into flophouses. In 1970, an arson fire at the Ozark Hotel in what's now the Denny Triangle killed 20 longshoremen and forced city officials to require flophouse owners to bring their buildings up to code. As a result, old hotels closed (the State Hotel's old sign still offers rooms for 75 cents a night) and remained vacant. The homeless took over the streets.

In the 1970s, the city declared Pioneer Square—from Columbia Street south to roughly Royal Brougham Way, bounded by Fourth Avenue and Alaskan Way South—a historic district. The idea was that the place would get cleaned of its blight, businesses would flourish, and a new generation of urban dwellers would arrive. In 1974, the Kingdome opened due south of the neighborhood, but Mariners and Seahawks fans never did much for the neighborhood aside from making business for sports bars like Sluggers and the Triangle Bar on First Avenue South.

"It was a curse," says Art Skolnik, the first manager of the Pioneer Square National Historic District in the 1970s. "It didn't provide anything that would help Pioneer Square."