Going, Going, Gone: Columbia Plaza

The dizzying changes in Columbia City are most obviously reflected in its buildings.

Literally hundreds of buildings in the 2 square miles surrounding the CC business district have undergone major change in the last decade: reoccupied, reworked, renovated, torn down, built up. Consider the massive undertakings of Rainier Vista and Light Rail construction, the "tall skinny" architecture of infill development, the tri-level townhouses that have sprouted everywhere around the business district, the infinite variety of fixer-uppers great and small.

The buildings, they are a-changin'.

For-sale signs show no sign of disappearing. Property owners feel a great temptation to take the money and run as the neighborhood swells to its zoning limits. Some real estate listing agents don't feel the need to say more than "Call your builders." These places are going to be gone before you can say Alaska Street Mini-Mart.

Going, Going, Gone will be a regular feature of this blog, documenting and discussing the streets of Columbia City before the wrecking ball hits, and pondering and processing what the future will bring.

One of the seismic changes in Columbia City's near future is the redevelopment of the Columbia Plaza building. The building itself is a squat former supermarket surrounded by a sea of asphalt. The site on which it sits is zoned NC3-65, or "neighborhood commercial" permitted to be built up to 65 feet. Six stories! It is perhaps unsurprising that, as our urban village undergoes such a massive increase in density on the side streets, towering new development would come to the main thoroughfare as well.

HAL Real Estate group bought the site for $6.6 million dollars in June. Other projects that the corporation has enacted in similar situations in Seattle are the remarkably upscale, six-story Braeburn building on Capitol Hill and the even more chi-chi Site 17 in Belltown, (though the latter is probably a bit too "edgy" and "industrial-inspired" for our little burg).

If these are any indication of the shape of things to come, the skyline along Rainier Avenue is about to undergo some serious changes. Not to mention the median income. And the density of Zen gardens.

The story in the PI portrays company president Dana Behar as a local boy with fond memories of the neighborhood, and the tenacious Landmark Preservation Board as a formidable guardian of local character...but with time, money, and persistance the Landmark committee can be overcome (witness the demolition of the landmark Pink House building a half-block off Rainier on Angeline, with 9 townhouses currently under construction in its place). Notice also that Behar himself has served on the Landmark Board, and still does policing Belltown. Now there's a neighborhood that has perserved its historic character.

Looks like we are going to be the next Fremont, whether we like it or not.

Most media coverage of the sale and redevelopment has focused on the displacement of the Farmer's Market, which meets in the parking lot to the south of the existing building, and on the presumed banishment of the persistant lowgrade crime in the parking lot (punctuated by the appalling mid-day shooting last March). Virtually nothing has been written about the displacement of the legitimate and largely aboveboard businesses--clothes, portrait photos, music, car stereos and alarms, taco truck--that currently operate in and outside the building. The fact that minority-owned businesses and clientele are being sold out so rich (and of course, predominantly white) people can move in their businesses and expensive homes is by now so familiar that it doesn't even merit a mention.

Readers, what do you think? Will you miss the Plaza, the mural, the Market? Are you glad to see it going? Who'll occupy the penthouse of the new building? What would you like to see in the ground-floor retail?