The Georgetown Steam Plant is nudged against the north end of Boeing field. Planes make their way over top every few minutes. You can see it from Ellis Ave S, and S Albro Pl—but it’s invisible enough that you can pass through Georgetown for years without noticing it.
Recently the Steam Plant is hosting more events, tours, and open houses, making its presence known to the neighborhood and beyond. After years of relative stasis, the Plant is now being managed by a nonprofit with a big plan: Making the Steam Plant more accessible, safe, and fully open to events and educational programs.
The Georgetown Steam Plant Community Development Authority, charged with caring for the Steam Plant by it’s owner, the Seattle City Light, hosted 75 events and tours, many of them sold out—such as the Sound of the Machine event hosted by Atlas Obscura and Modular Seattle. This show transformed the 50-foot boilers into textured, speckled, colored giants, filling the 80-foot walls with sounds coming from three different stages, and 17 different artists. Additionally, The Northwest Water Color Society hosted several plein air groups for their members, and several drawing nights were hosted by Kelly Froh and David Lasky, resulting in a wide range of colorful, black and white, realistic and abstract captures of the recognizable space. Leveraging the plant’s slightly dystopian vibe, Friends of Georgetown History (Foghi) organized several sold-out screenings of classic 1927 silent epic, Metropolis, with a live score by local bands. The Plant has also been the background to some quality cosplay, such as shoots by a Seattle-based Batman impersonator who uses the handle @batman.in.seattle and has fallen back onto the Steam Plant as a dystopian, moody background of Gotham. These and the other happenings at The Georgetown Steam Plant show a need to access the plant, and highlights the versatility of the space to be used in many ways-by many different people.
But there are limits to how the Plant can be used; it was built in 1907, a good 64 years before Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and OSHA was formed. It wasn’t built to keep workers especially safe, and it shows. Many parts of the plant are especially steep, sharp, or uneven. The plumbing doesn’t work and it has no heat. But the plant is a rarity, even among steam plants. It's one of the first examples of reinforced cast-in-place concrete construction on the West Coast. Two of its three boilers are the last surviving historic boilers of their kind in terms of completeness. This steam plant was built to serve the local community by powering about 10,000 houses in its heyday, and it was put in the current location due to the proximity of the Duwamish River (before it was straightened to allow more industry traffic in 1913). In this way, it’s an important historical marker of the mudflats of the Duwamish where the river used to run. Today, the plant stands remarkably complete, down to minute details like tools left by workers, dials that still show a tiny bit of current; giving a sense that one day workers simply put their tools down and went home. It is a hauntingly tactile place — very easy to fall in love with.
This love is why in 2018, Seattle City Light put out an RFP for its adaptive reuse. The goal was to reinforce the triple-landmarked building, making it safer, more accessible, and more functional as a space for art, education and community. SCL can’t spend ratepayer money on things that don’t contribute to the generation of electricity, but it wanted to find a way to preserve the Steam Plant. Enter Sam Farrazaino. Over the last 20 years, Farrazaino was the catalyst of 619 Western in Pioneer Square, helped convert the INS Building to artist studios, and founded Equinox Studios, a series of buildings offering affordable space to artists in Georgetown. Farrazaino is the team lead on the Steam Plant adaptive reuse project, which includes Signal Architecture + Research and SHKS Architects, plus a broader project team that includes Historic Seattle, Arup, Sellen, and of course Seattle City Light. Farrazaino calls the Steam Plant an “industrial cathedral,” referencing the building’s 80-foot concrete walls reinforced by long spines. After discovering the Steam Plant years ago, he half-jokingly pleaded with Seattle City Light to let him live in it. That never got very far, but in the end he did sign a lease and today,the nonprofit created to run the project holds a 60-year contract to manage the Plant.
At 117 years old, the Steam Plant is older than most of us will live to be, so the project is less about ownership, and more about stewardship — setting the Plant up for the next organizers, community members, and local needs. “I don't want this to be Sam’s Ludicrous Adventure Club," Farrazaino says. "The first phase of this project is about building relationships, not only inviting but empowering the community to reinvent the Plant with each other. We want to make it easy for people to collaborate with this project and co-create the approach for what needs to happen here.”
The same layered texture that makes the Plant so attractive makes the project complex — the Steam Plant is a National Historic Landmark, a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark, a City of Seattle Landmark, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Each designation comes with rules and protections. Plus, the thick walls reveal century-old techniques and best practices that aren’t best anymore. Ironically, the plant has very little electricity, no heat (the steam boilers generated plenty to keep the Plant warm), and no working plumbing. The concrete has aged, and though it remains strong, it needs to be reinforced to be resilient to earthquakes and to withstand the next century of musical vibration and dance.
“The most interesting spaces within the Georgetown Steam Plant are currently exclusive and difficult for many to access,.” says David Strauss, an architect on the project working for SHKS. The project will, at the very least, seek to “safely invite all people into the upper areas of the building, including the coal bin and upper electrical mezzanines.”
“There is an authenticity to this place that we seek to emphasize," says Mark Johnson, an architect with Signal Architecture + Research, "machines that are full of oil; gages, levers, switches, and walls that show the wear and tear of a loud, dirty, and hot life, and the smell and echoes of the past permeate the place. The design team’s challenge is to maximize the outcome with minimal--or invisible--modification.” Design work is kicking off this year, in conjunction with fundraising. A project of this scale has to be a multi-year effort, carried by the community, the city, the nonprofit running the Plant—but throughout, the Plant is set to remain open to the public as often as possible.
