Build

January 4, 2018 9:18 PM

Seattle 3 Year Time-lapse Video from the Space Needle - watch lots of buildings go up.
posted by Artw (34 comments total)

Smithers, are you certain this is Capitol Hill?

/MrBurns
posted by mwhybark at 9:42 PM on January 4, 2018

And that's only the 360° view from the Needle itself. The backside of every hill, and everything just beyond focus is going through the same growth. It's a bit scary how fast this city is changing around us.

On preview: Capitol Hill is where I live, not far from the underground station, and the growth, though not visible due to to distance from the Needle, is just as profound.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 9:44 PM on January 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Additionally, of course, one (not Mr Burns) is put in mind of Boccioni, who would have burned a thousand canvases to see this film, but has problematic, shall we say, prescient, political entanglements.
posted by mwhybark at 9:57 PM on January 4, 2018

I've lived across the lake since mid 2014 and, yep! It basically feels like this.
posted by potrzebie at 9:59 PM on January 4, 2018

I love the ghost ships
posted by not_the_water at 9:59 PM on January 4, 2018

lpdm, I lived on 12th for fifteen years and worked nearby. Mr Burns upthread not knowing where he is? It me.
posted by mwhybark at 9:59 PM on January 4, 2018

Paul Allen and Vulcan is responsible for a significant part in the redevelopment of Seattle, including South Lake Union. Capitol Hill will just be a bunch of box condos in a couple of years, but I f you really want to see some major changes keep an eye on First Hill.
posted by P.o.B. at 10:18 PM on January 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Paul Allen and Vulcan is responsible for a significant part in the redevelopment of Seattle, including South Lake Union. Capitol Hill will just be a bunch of box condos in a couple of years, but I f you really want to see some major changes keep an eye on First Hill.

We'll be lucky if they actually start building more condos in this town, far more efficient than all those townhouses that are 2-3 stories over a garage. But Washington doesn't do condos cuz something's screwed up about the legal liability for builders.

RE: SLU - it's funny that all the current soullessness/Amazonia complaints could have been what we're getting out of Capitol Hill now (nice place for everyone ruined b/c it's full of young techies, biding up the prices, crowding us out). According to Knute Berger, aka celebrated local grump Mossback, it's cuz Paul Allen was too cheap to pony up for the Seattle Commons.
posted by cult_url_bias at 11:50 PM on January 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

This would be sort of beautiful if it weren't so depressing. The Seattle of my childhood is essentially gone.
(I own my feelings here, I know other people may feel differently, but change... it's hard sometimes.)
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 11:53 PM on January 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

As Knute knotes, cult_url_bias, we did defeat it at the polls twice, and it's actually our buddy Dan Savage who points the finger at Allen. Knute is far too passive-aggressive to cast blame when he can give the impression of doing so via quoted citation, and besides, Dan is wrong: Allen is actually just building the project anyway, only without the Commons part. When I look at the numbers my impression is he makes more money this way anyhow, and we did pretty clearly tell him to go fuck himself.
posted by mwhybark at 11:58 PM on January 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

I LOVE cities. cities are the best. the most diverse, crowded, anonymous, beautiful, dangerous, insane places on earth. fuck the countryside, where you have to know someone or else be that one crazy hermit. fuck the suburbs, where you have to "belong" or fit in. cities are where it's at. the epitome of the human experience, where you can at least TRY to be whoever you want, without anyone's approval, even if you flame out in the end.

i can just envision the next 47 years of this timelapse, and it is terrifyingly wondrous.
god help us all.
posted by wibari at 1:14 AM on January 5, 2018 [9 favorites]

But Washington doesn't do condos

The condo canyons of Ballard disagree.
posted by Artw at 2:10 AM on January 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

i can just envision the next 47 years of this timelapse, and it is terrifyingly wondrous.

Pretty soon we're going to reach a point where all the places downtown that could have tall buildings in have them, and I'm not sure what happens then - they get knocked down and extra tall buildings get put in?
posted by Artw at 2:13 AM on January 5, 2018

I left Seattle in 2004 and would hardly recognize the place today. Especially the changes to Reservoir Park on Capitol Hill, which they had just started to renovate when I left, and the whole area is apparently completely different. And I was only there about three years, kind of a transient myself.
posted by zardoz at 2:33 AM on January 5, 2018

So, it seems Seattle architect's primary 3d-modelling tool is Minecraft.
posted by adept256 at 3:58 AM on January 5, 2018 [5 favorites]

Still bitter about Cyber Dogs closing
posted by oceanjesse at 6:13 AM on January 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

Still bitter about Bailey/Coy closing.
posted by palomar at 6:14 AM on January 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

My wife and I got priced out of Seattle. Everything was getting more expensive while our wages stagnated. We did the math and decided that if we wanted to have a child, we would have to move. We sold our house in 2005 and moved to the Atlanta area. I go back occasionally to visit friends and every time it's less and less recognizable. I still miss the Pacific Northwest, though.
posted by Fleebnork at 6:42 AM on January 5, 2018

the epitome of the human experience, where you can at least TRY to be whoever you want, without anyone's approval,

I mean, whoever you want except poor and/or a person of color but hey, whatever floats your 19th century pastoral view of big cities
posted by runt at 6:57 AM on January 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

The condo canyons of Ballard disagree.

No one's saying there's no condos in Seattle, but the ratio of apartment construction to condo construction is skewed hard to apartments in Seattle when compared with similar cities. 60% of new housing construction in Vancouver, BC were condos in 2016. Seattle had no new condo construction over the same period. That's significant.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 9:05 AM on January 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

"Still bitter about Cyber Dogs closing."

I loved cyberdogs as well, but honestly the moment I walked in, I was like 'wait, so your business model is a vegetarian (vegan?) hot dog place, and you are paying rent at the convention center in the heart of the city? good luck with that.' Oh, right, with a cybercafe so there are shitty computers instead of comfortable seating...

I did love the place though, by far the best veggie dogs I've ever had. Yum.
posted by el io at 9:57 AM on January 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

and yet still no additional space needles. why does the city of seattle fail to obey the most simple and elegant municipal goal ever proposed: CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS SPACE NEEDLES
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 10:40 AM on January 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

When I was living in Belltown during the peak of SLU construction around 2011 to 2015, walking to the QFC (grocery store) in Lower Queen Anne was a total clusterfuck of closed sidewalks. If I followed all of the directional signage and detours it essentially added an entire mile to what was barely a mile walk to begin with.

I did a lot of jaywalking and walking in the streets.

I left Seattle in 2004 and would hardly recognize the place today.

I go back every couple of months to visit friends and my defacto nephew, and every trip so far I'lll be at some intersection and have no idea where the hell I am becauseso much has changed. One of my first trips back and I was taking the 2 over Capitol Hill to the CD and I didn't recognize Union between Broadway and about 12th at all and was so confused I thought I got on the wrong bus.

"Still bitter about Cyber Dogs closing."

Wait, Cyberdogs finally closed? I guess I haven't been on that stretch of Pike under the Convention center in long while. Argh.

RIP: Cyberdogs, Uncle Elizabeth's, Online Coffee Co.

That place was quirky, and was one of the only places open that late in the downtownish area. I used to hit them up pretty regularly for late night coffee, water or a snack when walking home from a show.

Uncle Elizabeth's outlasted Online Coffee and I would argue they were one of the last functioning cybercafes in Seattle. I did some tech work for the owner.

I also spent a whole lot of time in Online Coffee. They had so many desks, a great bathroom and essentially endless refills on drip coffee.

These cybercafes nay have been unfashionably outdated to a lot of people at any point after around 2002, but they were still a lifeline for a lot of low income and older folks. Most of the people checking out the rentable desktops seemed to be people on disability or otherwise very poor or marginalized. I saw people doing things like keeping in touch with family, doing research on medical issues, researching how to start small businesses and more.

Sure they could go to the library and use their computers, but those tend to have waiting lists, and the library was often a lot farther away than the nearest cybercafe. And the prices were surprisingly reasonable and non-exploitative, too - especially when compared to the prices at, say, a FedEx/Kinko's computer lab. I think Uncle Elizabeth's only charged a couple of bucks an hour.

As far as I know, there aren't really any places left like it in Seattle. Metrix:CreateSpace used to be another great place to go and get some hotdesking and work done and have about a dozen cups of coffee, but they apparently closed to the public and the owner flipped out or something.

I still hear a lot of people asking "What's open late that's quiet and has coffee where I can study/work?" and there just isn't anything like it any more.
posted by loquacious at 11:09 AM on January 5, 2018 [2 favorites]

60% of new housing construction in Vancouver, BC were condos in 2016. Seattle had no new condo construction over the same period.

Ah, yeah, definitely leaning apartments and rentals in new construction, that's true. And probably a big problem, along with buying as investment. Vancouver tax model sounds like it would help a lot but who knows what kind of support that would get.
posted by Artw at 11:19 AM on January 5, 2018

still bitter about Andy's Diner closing
posted by mwhybark at 11:38 AM on January 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

Still missing the Last Exit, though it has a Facebook group that occasionally organizes reunions.

CONSTRUCT MORE SPACE NEEDLES

AND HANG THE ROUTE 8 TRAM FROM THEM

MERCER IS BEYOND HOPE
posted by clew at 1:04 PM on January 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

People hanging out drinking coffee didn't pay the overhead for a hackerspace. (Don't know how Starbucks manages, I am guessing a lack of lasercutter overhead helps.)
posted by clew at 1:08 PM on January 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

My favorite cafe to sit and write in literally blew up. I still miss it.

(I wrote a lot of explosions into comics in that cafe, so feel obscurely guilty)
posted by Artw at 1:19 PM on January 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

We should have a meetup in the Allegro.
posted by clew at 1:55 PM on January 5, 2018

Love seeing the sealant going up on Saint Mark's Cathedral.
posted by dancing_angel at 3:15 PM on January 5, 2018

Spine and Crown was the best bookstore I've ever been in, bar none.

Amazon blew them apart like a depth charge of course, not a direct interaction but a hole created in the matrix a bookstore lives in. I believe I lauded S&C in the past and people were like "yeah but on Amazon I can find my own books and it's cheaper" which is true. And then other people were talking about serendipity and that's not wrong. And then the smell of old books and I really do not care about that, so.

But really it's about giving people like Kris Minta money to create a curated community. He mentored people, he knew people on the block and people who were there for interesting books, he could facilitate a little world that discusses ideas in books in a dynamic active and interactive way that cannot be found in Amazon. Deep cuts from minds that respond to what you say, that can bring in visiting authors to talk to you if they see enough interest.

I'm really glad tech companies wanted to move into the urban core, rather than existing in the suburbs. It seems like a necessity for the future of humanity. It is the city itself that is responsible for what's resulted. Our lack of will and imagination when it came to responding in ways that preserve what we need to preserve environmentally is what I think has doomed so many here. Human cultural environment, and ~natural environment suffers.

There are groups like Welcoming Seattle or whatever, and various pro-housing groups that get accused of being shills, and various ethnicity oriented groups that sometimes clash with pro-housing. I think they are not enough. I think we need more institutional progressive organizations to aggressively champion intelligent growth in part by celebrating and improving what we already have. People with the strength to say "our policy is more housing full stop, so don't go crypto-conservative on us with complaints about building height. And that said what can we do to make this a place that families and the marginalized can live in and feel secure and lucky to live in so lets make this work."

Change keeps coming. I've talked to people who claim there are simple solutions, but even if you could solve things the way they want you'd still end up with latent change. With a situation frozen in a way that isn't sustainable.

#wordvomit
posted by tychotesla at 3:30 PM on January 5, 2018

AND HANG THE ROUTE 8 TRAM FROM THEM

Trams? Ziplines. Ziplines and bike lifts. Maybe some of those Alpine sleds, too. And water slides in the summer.

But, no, seriously, how awesome would it be to be able to zipline from Denny/Olive all the way to Seattle Center? So awesome.
posted by loquacious at 4:54 PM on January 5, 2018

We should have a meetup in the Allegro.

Café Racer, surely, unless my mind misinforms me that the spot dodged its' own end recently. I mean, that's a space where people actually died in gunfire, and they kept the doors open. (Yelp thinks they're still closed, and Slog maybe has the deets on what most likely is my mind misrepresenting things.)

So, yes, NM, move along!

Still bitter about Playland closing
posted by mwhybark at 4:56 PM on January 5, 2018

Wrong video? Pretty sure that's a one-day timelapse.

Feels like it, at least.

I recently got disoriented while navigating (previously) familiar streets in South Lake Union (AmazonLand). It had been a few years since I last visited a particular block near the REI flagship store, previously quiet and desolate one-story brick industrial buildings. It was a shock to the system to turn onto the street and find myself in a high-rise condo canyon lined with retail shops and restaurants named "[random noun] & [random noun]". My brain froze: Did I make the wrong turn? Am I in the wrong neighborhood? Where the hell am I? "Progress paralysis" is how I tried to describe it later.
posted by prinado at 4:56 PM on January 5, 2018 [2 favorites]