David Brewster has plenty of new ideas of what to do with Seattle Center, the city’s rundown civic space. Skip Berger, who once suggested a biodiesel factory be built on the current site of the Olympic Sculpture Park, has got to be pissed:
The three alternatives all take out the Fun Forest, including the drab building housing bumper cars and video games. And they all dramatically remodel Center House, a former armory, by putting in a large glass roof and blowing out the east and west walls for lots more transparency, better restaurants, and improved theaters. The committee had some serious debates about demolishing Center House and putting its uses in a new facility closer to the perimeter of the campus (as FROG urges) but decided to keep the old building in place as “the center of the Center.”
The Green Window scheme, option 3, gains eight acres of new open space by lidding the stadium and also creates a more open feeling in the area around Broad Street and the Space Needle. The East-West Axis plan, option 4, opens up the areas around Key Arena, creating long promenades and vistas from the lower Queen Anne area all the way across the campus to Fifth Avenue North, where the new Gates Foundation complex will be built. August Wilson Way, a new walkway to the south of the theater lineup (Rep, Intiman, Ballet, Opera) would also articulate this promenade and might even have a slow streetcar along that stretch, linking South Lake Union to the waterfront trolley.
There’s so much for a anti-density guy to hate!
More amenities means more growth. We’ll see condos filled with people who weren’t born in Seattle. People will stop driving their Subarus and ride the streetcar. Without the Fun Forest, how will we keep property values down?
Maybe a biodiesel factory…
Where they gonna get the money for all this? Isn’t the Seattle Center’s only paying tenant on the way out? I smell another tax increase.
Funny how taxpayers never get out of debt. Seattle Center is 45 years old. You’d hope the mortgage was finally paid by now. There seems to be an organized conspiracy among politicians and developers to keep us taxpayers in perpetual debt.
My burrow was built a couple years after the Seattle Center. It’s over 40 years old. I wish the city would throw a couple hundred million at a makeover of MY place. How come those who pay the taxes don’t get the money, and those who pay no taxes get all the money?
should read, “and those who pay no rent get all the money”
I’ll go ya one better…
Why not transform Seattle Center into a giant global warming exhibit. You could show algore’s goofy film over and over on a giant IMAX screen. You could have bathrooms with only one piece of terlet paper. You could have kiosks where you could buy carbon credits. There could be a giant conference center where “scientists” from all over the world could get together to predict certain death. This would give all you gullible kooks a place to go to practice your nutty religion.
They’ll be able to squeeze at least three good sized Starbucks into a new Seattle center. Throw in exhibits for Boeing, Microsoft, Nordstroms and the other corporations that have made this area great, and we’ve got us a theme park.
The more I think about it, the more I like it.
First, Joel Horn and Cindy Laws need a new scheme to bilk the taxpayers of Seattle. This is perfect. They could both be paid $250,000 per year, plus a staff of 50 who all are paid between $100,000 and $150,000 per year. They could put together a really exciting web page, and have lots of really neat events.
In addition, space could be constructed for “scientists” to perform actual “research” on global warming. There could also be some space setup for small pilot production of alternative energies such as cow farts, windmills, solar panels, and corn squeezin’s.
It’s amazing being me sometimes… this is definitely one of my better ideas.
What do you moonbats think?
5 “Nutty religion”? Hey, worshipping Gaia’s looking a hell of a lot more sensible than that characature of Christianity that so many righties seem to be so fond of.
Redneck,
I actually think your idea is excellent. At a center devoted to global warming education and action, those of us who are capable of thinking analytically and who are sane would have a place to go where we would know that we could be free of neanderthals like you. You freaks have places where you can go and know that no rational thoughts will intrude, like an NRA convention or a family values gathering, but we don’t have anywhere to go to get away from rightwing nutcakes. Kudos on your idea.
Here’s some more great ideas…
You could have a car lot where people could buy little shitbox cars that are overpriced and underperform, but make a powerful “statement”.
You could setup a place to send chern on school field trips to indoctrinate them.
You could turn up the heat inside the buildings to simulate a hot earth. I think 0.3 deg F is about right.
You could build a moat around part of it and have people walk around, and then suddenly flood it to simulate rising oceans. People could slosh around in a few feet of water and become “alarmed”.
You could have concerts too I suppose, but they’d hafta be all acoustic ones. Although I think it might be OK to use Sharpton style megaphones as long as it’s powered with a cow fart powered fuel cell.
Fart – Ummm… there’s a pretty strong “consensus” in the world about Christianity and Jesus. Certainly stronger consensus than for religion of global warming.
Or does consensus not count for our religion?
Sorry Can’t help myself
Roger Rabbit says:
Funny how taxpayers never get out of debt. Seattle Center is 45 years old. You’d hope the mortgage was finally paid by now. There seems to be an organized conspiracy among politicians and developers to keep us taxpayers in perpetual debt.
Right Stuff commentary
It’s called liberalism. Where taxes never die, just keep getting bigger and bigger…
Stuff – Hell, they pay millions for stuff that doesn’t even exist.
They still pay for repairs on the kingdome roof. If I remember correctly, the tab for that was 70 million. That worked out so well that they decided to pay 100 million for a non existent monorail.
12 and 13
Ah, but no one can spend public money like Republicans. That little conflagration in Iraq, for instance, is a sterling example of profligate spending on your side of the aisle. Yeah, you guys seem more enamored of deficit spending than you are of prayer in schools. If the Democrats are the party of tax and spend, the Republicans are the party of tax-cut and spend. Now, which seems to be the more responsible approach?
11 Consensus? Of whom…over what? Oh, yeah….that’s why there are so many different religions, right? Even all the ones that have a cross out front.
There are a lot of people calling themselves “Christian” but it’s debatable how many of us are actually following in Christ’s footsteps. When he does come back and looks at all of us fools, he’s going to be either highly amused or terribly disappointed.
12 I’d say that over the years, the people of our fair city have gotten their collective money’s worth out of the leftovers from a world’s fair. At least, it’s a hell of a lot better than this country’s ever going to get back from a certain boondoggle of a war.
How about bulldoze everything and make our own Central Park?
14 The theory, as we keep being told, is that no matter how much money the government spends (as long as it’s on “essentials”, like killing people in some faraway land), cutting taxes, especially cutting tax rates for the wealthy, will eventually cause the economy to surge into robust growth and produce such gobs of wealth that even at minuscule rates, actual tax receipts will rise to pay off the debt. Apparently we’re also supposed to have faith in this principle, and contribute to this great experiment by stretching our personal credit as far as we possibly can to borrow funds and fearlessly go out and buy stuff. Might also help if we close our eyes and wish real hard, and put out some milk and cookies every night for the Money Fairy.
18
Don’t you, sometimes, envy the true believers on the other side for their inability to ever think they might be wrong? If they think something is true, then, by God, it is. Their unwavering faith in whatever fantasy they envision must be comforting. By the way, do you have any idea what kind of cookies that Money Fairy prefers?
Since the wealthy are the only ones who pay taxes, if ya do a tax cut who the fuck else is gonna get it? You can’t cut lower than zero, and the bottom 50% only antes up 4% of the total.
How many fucking times do I need to tell you this? Dumshits…
@5 Gore’s film is not goofy. You are goofy. Alpine glaciers are, in fact, melting. The polar ice cap is, in fact, thinning and shrinking. Weather patterns are, in fact, changing. Gore is right; you’re full of shit. Pay your fucking gambling debt.
@7 I agree that’s one of your better ideas, Redneck — relatively speaking. Relative to your other ideas, that is. This idea is merely full of shit. Your other ideas are, well, beyond full of shit. Pay your fucking gambling debt, welsher.
@9 I have a better idea. Let’s turn Seattle Center into a concentration camp and put all the wingnuts in it before we execute them.*
* Just kidding! Ann Coulter humor.
@11 Roughly 2.1 billion people say they believe in Christianity. About 15 actually practice it.
@12 “It’s called liberalism.”
Hate to pop your bubble, Wrong Stuff, but 99% of the corporate panhandlers, developers, and sports team owners are Republicans.
@13 That’s nothing. Capitalism made us pay hundreds of billions for Iraqi oil we don’t get.
@20 “You can’t cut lower than zero”
Sure you can. It’s called “crop subsidies” and “oil depletion allowance.”
I’m with #17
And while I’m pro density and all that I have to say that I liked Seattle a heck of a lot better back in the day when the street people were dangerous and the air was safe to breath. I’ve never gotten used to having it the other way round.
Since some of the issues from the last thread have spilled into this one and are in fact relevant to it, I’ll mention here that Sheryl Crow is off-base with regard to paper products. The extensive cultivation of those hybrid cottonwood “toilet paper trees” is likely a positive because they slurp up carbon dioxide. Crap wrap doesn’t come from old growth Doug firs anymore–they’re for building McMansions.