Five minutes.
I was only inside my daughter’s preschool for five minutes on an already-dark December afternoon when we emerged outside to find our e-bike was no longer locked to the bike rack on the corner of Fourth and South Main. In a brief moment, the routine commute we had established back and forth between our home up the hill and the Nihonmachi (Japantown) side of the Chinatown-International District was disrupted.
While I was angry, I can’t say I was entirely surprised. I had a nagging feeling every time I left our trusty steed, purchased from Ballard-based Rad Power Bikes, outside — even locked up. The decaying state of the built environment felt conducive to street disorder and simply didn’t inspire my confidence that the streets and sidewalks near our preschool were a safe public space.
The José Martí Child Development Center occupies the ground floor of Hirabayashi Place, a building with 96 affordable apartments in addition to our preschool. The blue and gold façade with a Japanese seigaha (wave) motif was designed for InterIm Community Development Association by Seattle-based Mithun, who call the site “a prominent intersection in a neglected corner of downtown Seattle.”
On paper, Hirabayashi Place is a paragon of virtuous urban design that checks all the boxes: transit-oriented development (one block from light rail, streetcar, buses and commuter rail), workforce housing (income restricted apartments, including 14 family-sized units), mixed-use with a social purpose (space allocated to a childcare center) and culturally sensitive to the neighborhood (honoring Gordon Hirabayashi, who fought a landmark legal case against Japanese internment).
While the building itself is a gem—my daughter and many other children are thriving in a bilingual Mandarin-English educational environment—the surrounding blocks leave much to be desired. This corner of downtown Seattle feels as much, or more, neglected as it ever did over the ten years since Hirabayashi Place’s conception. The preschool’s once daily field trips to the Danny Woo Community Garden have been on hiatus for four years due, in large part, to public safety concerns over walking just two blocks with a group of young children.
In a disoriented panic when I discovered the missing bike, I left my daughter inside with her teacher and raced around the block in a vain attempt to catch the culprit. Of course, the bike was long gone. Instead, I received an impromptu tour of a forlorn slice of Seattle—a once thriving Japanese immigrant neighborhood that never fully recovered from World War II-era internment and continues to suffer under the weight of civic neglect. Across South Main, the poorly lit doorways and recesses on the side of the landmarked Fourth and Addison apartment building loomed forebodingly. I rounded the corner onto 5th Ave under the canopy of Martin Selig Real Estate’s more recent 5th & Jackson office building (2002), but hardly any tenants filed in and out of the lobby. So much for eyes on the street. Instead, this sheltered stretch of sidewalk has become a haven for fentanyl users.
The next block, Jackson between Fourth and Fifth, was the worst of all. Both 5th and Jackson and the neighboring Icon Apartments (Clark Design Group, 2016) feature street-level retail spaces that have been empty for years since FedEx and Bartell Drugs went out of business. These half-block sized vacancies leave a blank street wall in their wake that invites open-air drug use, public urination, sidewalk camping, loitering and other types of street disorder. From Jackson, I turned right onto Fourth where the tight street grid gives way to the roar of four lanes of one-way traffic. The 4th Ave bus shelters are pockmarked with graffiti tags, while the railroad tracks that run parallel inhibit the continuation of the urban fabric for 200 feet until the backs of buildings in Pioneer Square, nearly an entire city block of dead space.
To be fair, there is a glowing bright spot: KODA Condominiums on the northwest corner of Fifth and S Main, which opened in 2021 by Taiwanese developer DA LI. KODA brings much-needed entry-level homeownership opportunities as well as leased ground-floor retail spaces. Contrary to anti-displacement protests that dogged the project, in three years KODA has enhanced the pan-Asian character of the CID through an attractive tower suitable to a downtown location informed by the high-rise density that characterizes Seattle’s peer cities on the Asian side of the Pacific Rim. For example, one of my daughter’s classmates, a second-generation Chinese-American, lives in KODA in a multigenerational household. His grandfather walks him the 50 feet to school every day.
Fortunately, more of this type of urban design is on the way: The northeast corner of Fifth and S Main will eventually become Fujimatsu Village, a 28-story tower honoring the founder of beloved grocery store Uwajimaya (these lots, surface parking until construction began, were the store’s original site in the heart of Nihomachi).
These two blocks, then, are a microcosm of Seattle’s fledgling urbanism aspirations and all-too-frequently grimmer reality where zoning, planning and permitting for transit-oriented, higher-density, mixed-use building stock collides with commercial vacancy, a fervent drug trade, untreated mental illness and lax enforcement of public safety basics.
Despite sitting at the heart of the densest web of public transit options and along a protected bike lane, I know of only two other families that regularly bike to Hirabayashi Place. Instead, several dozen parents drive their charges to and from each day—precisely the mode share that Seattle planners seek to avoid. In our family’s case, when I am unavailable to take our daughter to preschool, my wife insists on driving the one-mile distance over taking public transit after several unnerving experiences on Jackson waiting for a bus or streetcar.
In the wake of the June 2023 unprovoked shooting murder of Eina Kwon in Belltown, I can hardly discount her trepidation. If that pregnant Asian woman wasn’t safe even in the passenger seat of a car, then my wife, until recently also a pregnant Asian woman, unsurprisingly feels like a sitting duck when she stands with our daughter on the streetcar platform in the Jackson median — just two lanes of traffic separating her from street harassment.
My wife has since given birth to our second child who, we anticipate, will also spend his preschool years at Hirabayashi Place. My hope is that he will love riding on the back of a bike or in a bus or streetcar as much as his older sister, and that by the time his turn comes for the school commute, our family—and the dozens of others who enliven the CID’s sidewalks with bilingual children on a daily basis—will feel safe and relaxed navigating the city in the ways for which we have designed it.
Gregory Scruggs is an Arcade columnist who writes about the everyday reality of architecture and urban design. He is raising a family in central Seattle, which affords him ample opportunity to experience the city at street level on foot, by bike, via public transit and behind the wheel. He is a correspondent for Monocle and a regular contributor to Bloomberg CityLab, Metropolis and Next City.
