Seeing a street festival take over University Way NE through the heart of the U District is a common sight throughout most of the year. But this past Saturday, the attraction wasn't food vendors or craftspeople – it was the street itself. Visitors to one of the city's most beloved shopping districts were treated to a fully pedestrianized street as part of "The Ave for All", which continues this upcoming Saturday, October 17 for a second weekend.
An idea advanced by the placemaking group U District Advocates, The Ave for All gives pedestrians breathing room to enjoy a leisurely Saturday without being crammed onto University Way's narrow sidewalks. Tables and chairs turned the periphery of the street into a patio that wasn't tied to any specific businesses, prompting more folks to stick around and linger...but also grab a bite nearby.
Games, including a large chess board, provided activation and a pair of buskers livened the mood. It didn't hurt that storm clouds, spitting rain in the early afternoon, cleared away and left a beautiful autumn day.
For event organizer L. Harrison Jerome, the Ave for All is a glimpse of how a neighborhood like the University District can better use one of its biggest stretches of real estate – the street.
"In this neighborhood, you see how thin the sidewalks are. Now people actually have the ability to move out into the space, and they're actually filling it,"Jerome told The Urbanist. "They're doing chalk art, they're hanging out with each other, they're playing games, they're having off street dining. It's really, really nice weather today, and people are just enjoying the street in a different way than they had before."
As a broader city, Seattle is taking small steps toward creating more pedestrian-oriented spaces out of underutilized stretches of roadway, with the Seattle Department of Transportation's People Streets and Public Spaces program at the forefront of that work. Potential public plazas are being eyed in the Admiral District, Delridge, and on Upper Queen Anne, projects that will ultimately be demonstrations of the idea of creating a pedestrian plaza at the heart of every neighborhood.
But The Ave for All is presenting a bolder vision of how a street at the heart of a business district can truly transform.
U District Advocates has pointed out that they are not the first group to dream of a fully pedestrian-oriented Ave, with storied Seattle architect Victor Steinbrueck putting the idea forward in 1955. The idea got closest to becoming a reality in the early 1970s, with the University District Development Council established specifically to advance the idea.
"The plan basically calls for a pedestrian mall on University Way NE to run from NE 47th to NE 42nd streets," a February 1972 story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted. At that time, outgoing UDDC Executive Vice President David Rowlands touted the proposal for a U District pedestrian mall as creating "what Ghirardelli Square is to San Francisco, what the French Quarter is to New Orleans and what George-town is to Washington, D.C."
The year before in 1971, UDDC surveyed participants at the U District Street Fair finding 90% general support for the idea of a pedestrian mall (sound familiar?). But the proposal fell apart when property owners on the Ave were required to provide their stamp of approval. An alternative proposal put forward by neighborhood real estate broker Don Kennedy included a pedestrian plaza in front of what is now the UW tower connected to a "tremendous" parking garage with shops on top. That idea never came to fruition either.
Everything old is new again. Earlier this summer, the U District Advocates had a false start after the City of Seattle declined to approve an initial request to open up the Ave in late May and early June, with a number of nearby business owners opposing the plan.
As the Seattle Times reported at the time, the push back was orchestrated by Lois Ko and Emily Scully, owners of Sweet Alchemy and Shultzy’s Bar & Grill respectively. But after other business owners in the neighborhood found they'd been added to a list of opponents of the event without their knowledge, a cloud of animus and uncertainty grew up around the entire project that threatened to sour the spirit of The Ave for All.
While that's not exactly ancient history at this point, it did seem to be put in the rearview mirror this weekend. For the autumn re-do, U District Advocates was asked to jump through a few more hoops to show they'd conducted community outreach, a bar they were ultimately able to clear.
"One thing I learned from that it's sort of difficult for community groups to do things like this," Jerome said. "We know that there's a huge amount of support for reprioritizing a ton of our streets back toward people rather than cars, but it's really difficult for people to voice those those wants."
What the future holds for The Ave is impossible to know. But based on the turnout this past weekend, there's clear demand for something to draw people out into the street, even without a food festival.
"We'd love to do this event again," Jerome said. "We want to work with the City and the businesses and the local community, the residents, the students, get everybody in the conversation to actually talk about what a city pilot of this could actually look like, where we do it day-to-day or on weekends, sometime in the spring or the summer."
U District residents and visitors will have one more chance to visit The Ave for All this Saturday from 11am to 8pm.
Rebecca Bear
