For Seattle’s Pike Place, a RM333 million marketing effort
PIKE Place Market has been one of Seattle’s main tourist attractions for much of its 110year history, despite one oddity: It has never been as functional for visitors as for the people who live here.
Sure, travellers saw vendors tossing fish through the air and arranging heaps of foraged mushrooms, but most weren’t equipped with the time or kitchen space to cook them. The market’s crowded indoor arcades, packed with sights and shoppers, offered few places to relax or access the sublime waterfront views.
That’s changed, thanks to the June opening of a US$74 million (RM333 million) addition, the landmark’s first expansion in 40 years and the last piece of the revitalisation plan that saved it from demolition in the 1970s.
With 30,000 square feet of new open space, there’s finally some elbow room at the market, providing new ways to enjoy it rather than struggling through like a salmon swimming upstream. Highlights include an outdoor pavilion with broad Douglas fir counters and room for 47 new farm stands and crafts stalls, plus a new Producers Hall of restaurants and shops. New construction was designed to be attractive without betraying the market’s functional origins, featuring wide windows, tall timber beams and just enough quirks to feel like old-school Seattle.
The expansive public plaza was designed to take in - at least in the clear, warm summer months - a jaw-dropping panorama of Mount Rainier, the Olympic Mountains and ferries travelling to and fro on Puget Sound. The Seattle Great Wheel, a 175-foot Ferris wheel that opened on the waterfront in 2012, provides the vista’s punctuation mark.
“It’s crazy, right?” said restaurateur Bryan Jarr, showing off the view from the waterside windows at Little Fish, the combination seafood cannery, restaurant and deli in Producers Hall that will open in January. Jarr is leading the project with chef Zoi Antonitsas, a “Top Chef” alum who was named one of Food & Wine magazine’s best new US chefs in 2015.
One of Jarr’s requirements when drawing up his plans: “All the bar chairs have to swivel’’ so customers can also drink in the sights.
Seattle is booming, setting the US record for the number of construction cranes at work and grappling with record housing prices even in outlying areas. Still, the market location, with its heavy foot traffic and long history, was irresistible to Jarr.
“There used to be canneries right here,” he said, referring to the city’s historic industries, now more weighted toward tech companies than fishing boats.
The expansion is the latest of many twists for the place known as the soul of the city, a market established in 1907 to provide affordable local fruits and vegetables to the public. Even in the 1920s a tourism pamphlet advertised the site as “famous the world over for its magnitude and year-round unparalleled produce display.”
The market’s influence diminished after World War II, partly because of the internment of Japanese farmers who had manned as many as half of its stalls, partly on the rise of supermarkets and on farmland giving way to suburban sprawl. But in the 1960s, when a proposed urban-renewal plan would have razed the market, the public rose up. Champions such as architect Fred Bassetti, who called the market “an honest place in a phony time,” brought forward a citizens ballot initiative creating a historic district and a commission to save and restore the rundown property.
Any changes to such a beloved spot are bound to be controversial, especially in a city where any significant plans get caught in “the Seattle process,” shorthand for the way that important issues are talked to death in boggy debates. The MarketFront expansion, though, was completed to general public acclaim, despite (or because of) more than 200 public meetings about the historical site, which boasted notoriously strict building restrictions. — WPBloomberg