[Mayor Wilson] I am really excited to be here.
You know, over the past weeks, I have passed this piece of Seattle history.
Many times, and, just really excited that
I get to be part of unveiling it to to the city.
Yeah.
So it is great to be here with all of you
to celebrate the completion of the Bell Street Improvements Project.
Today is about how we come together as a city.
Bell Street now connects Belltown to the waterfront.
And you can feel the difference.
But if you're walking, biking, or spending time along the way.
This is how we build a downtown that feels connected and alive.
A place where people want to be and return to.
This is where you meet a friend
after work, where families head to the waterfront on the weekends,
where someone visiting Seattle starts to understand what the city is all about.
Seattle is at its best when our public spaces bring us together.
That sense of belonging matters, and that's exactly what we are building.
Air spaces that are open, shared
and easy to enjoy with your friends and neighbors.
This project reflects a shared vision.
Neighbors, community
organizations and local businesses helped to shape it from the beginning.
Through design to completion.
Thank you to Belltown United
and to the Belltown Community Council for your partnership.
And thank you to Angela Brady and the entire project team
for seeing this through.
And Seattle continues to grow.
These connections bring neighborhoods closer together.
They support the small businesses that make this area so vibrant,
and they make it easier for people to get around in ways that are simple
and sustainable, and they help to show off what makes the city.
So I hope that you will come down here, spend time here and join here.
And this is what about just infrastructure?
What places that people can return to again and again.
Thank you all for being here today.
I would now like to invite Angela Brady, acting director
of the Seattle Department of Transportation, to share a few words.
Thank you.
Okay.
- Thank you. Mayor.
Thank you all for joining us today.
My name is Angie Brady.
I'm the acting director of the Seattle D.O.T.
and the former director of city's Office of the waterfront civic projects.
We're incredibly excited to be here today to celebrate another milestone
and one of Waterfront Seattle's final celebrations
and the completion of our Bell Street improvements project.
This is the last project in the Waterfront Seattle program.
Cheers.
Alligators here.
But super excited to be here today.
This project is part of our efforts to connect the city's new 20 acre
waterfront park to Seattle's unique downtown neighborhoods,
like here in Belltown.
Our team has worked for many years with, where’s Tom Graph?
You felt the pain? Worked with us.
There you go.
And other members of the community on the scope of work for this project.
I tell people a lot.
Get there.
They're like my heart was built on.
So excited about this is only two blocks.
And I say, no, no, no.
They love this project. So much.
We had so many of you show up and and voice your opinions about what
we should build here.
So it's really great to work with you all on this.
During the public, one of the early public briefings on this
project, in February 23rd, we had 51 neighbors show up.
And that just shows us how engaged the community is in your neighborhood.
Today we celebrate the enhancements to Bell Street between Elliott
and First Avenues with this project.
We've dedicated more space to people
walking, biking, and rolling through downtown Bellevue.
Belltown,
What am I thinking? I was just in Bellevue I was just celebrating.
I can't believe it. Okay.
So what we did was here, we added two, we had a new two way protected bike lanes
connecting the Bell Street Greenway to the east, to the newly built
bike improvements along Elliott Way.
To the west, right behind me.
We widened sidewalks
with more space for pedestrians traveling to and through the area.
We've installed older seating, some of which are being set on at this moment.
For passers by at a pause on Bell Street, steep incline and enjoying
the stunning views of Elliott Bay, Mount Rainier and the new waterfront park.
And we built, curveballs at intersections to calm the traffic.
And something I know
people are really excited about right behind me here, we salvaged, restored,
and installed a historic Alaskan Way Viaduct sign bridge,
which you can see, arching over Bell Street right behind me.
The sign bridge is enhanced with lighting to support nighttime
visibility, and will serve as the gateway to Belltown.
While also providing a really cool reminder of the viaduct that used to be
here, memorializing a unique piece of Seattle's transportation history.
Celebrating this project is especially exciting
because it is connected to several other projects which I now
oversee, and my new role as transportation director.
Earlier today, we held our first public information session
about upcoming plans to pave, modernize and improve mobility on
both Elliott Avenue and Western Avenue all the way from Bell Street up to Thomas.
We'll soon be
starting construction on the Bell's home to Seattle Center Connection project,
which will be completed by next June ahead of World Cup
and, and Pioneer Square to the south of us.
We're wrapping up our work on our way.
The protected bike lane.
Another one of the final pieces of the puzzle is to connect our new waterfront.
Bike lanes to the rest of the downtown bike network.
So super excited to get that done ahead of the World Cup as well.
Thank you so much again for the community members and the Bell
Community Council who helped shape and champion this project.
This group of people care deeply about their community and it shows.
Thank you to the businesses and the neighbors who were patient
and supported this project and the rest of the Waterfront
Seattle program construction throughout, the last several years.
Thank you to the mayor and city council for their support as well.
And a special shout out to
Guy Michelson and Marshall Foster for championing or helping to champion,
the Viaduct High Bridge and also the Gary Johnson.
Thank you.
I know this guy here.
He's usually the tall guy standing somewhere.
And Gary Johnson as well for willingly
teaming up a plan with others on ways to dress that up with new signage.
So that's going to be really exciting in the future.
And many things.
Last but not least to the entire waterfront Seattle team,
especially Barbara Lee, waterfront program director. Now.
Richard Schleicher, our project manager
for Belle Street, who managed this project through construction.
The design team, Jacobs Civil, our engineering team.
Grant, who did the urban design?
Jacqueline Ryan with the borough issues, who work closely with the community
as we designed and built this project.
And Ryan Earthworks, our contractor, who builds our design very beautifully.
And as well as our construction management team, Jody Robinson.
So we got Bo and Matthew, our resident engineers.
I hope they're here.
Thank you all.
It takes a village, small village, but a village to build some of these projects.
So really appreciate your help on this.
And I look forward to continuing to work with the Belltown community
on other multimodal projects that have started spreading.
And to continue to strengthen our city's bike and pedestrian network
and accessible pathways.
So thank you so much.
With that, I'm going to introduce none other than Council member Kettle.
Bob Kettle. Another champion of the project. Thank.
- Thank you.
Director Brady, it is a beautiful view of Belltown here.
And from Belltown you can see the water.
So I want to thank, you know, the entire SDOT team.
They do so much work.
I was down here many times as they were progressing through this project.
And please thank them, for all the work they've done.
Good afternoon everyone.
I just wanted to say, first, a thank you to Belltown United.
We got time for after.
Also, Bell time community council, we got Sandra over here.
Is everybody associated with the bell tower?
I hear bell tower communications with you.
Raise your hands.
Yeah, there's a lot of folks here.
You know, we've been having some challenges here at Bell time.
We've been working on.
Today is a beautiful day, and it's about taking action
to help build sound help the community, to help the neighborhood.
And I want to thank those two organizations primarily, but
also other groups like Cascade Bicycle Club, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.
Now the Streets Alliance.
You know, there's shout out there, neighborhood street Alliance.
I'm still working on that, by the way.
But others, other organizations I want to go by
and I really want to emphasize market to more,
because one of the things that we see in our city,
we basically we've been a North-South oriented city, whether it's I-5 99
even now with the Sound Transit North-South,
although we actually just had a big West connection.
But we've always been North-South.
I think it's super important to really build
those East-West connections, and that's what this project does.
It connects Belltown to the waterfront, but even further beyond that,
that's what I wanted to highlight at the moment, all the work that was done.
You know, again, we need to build this out.
We need to build our neighborhoods for all of these, you know, build,
you know, that do that life, you know, that community well being.
And I think we're doing that again.
We have our challenges, but we're going to move forward.
And this has been a beautiful project site rich and just unbelievable.
And it just has that extra character.
You know, it's also a connection from the Elliot Bay
Connection Park, you know, waterfront Park, Elliot Bay connections.
I'm doing this to shout out sorry there the
to highlight the portal park.
You know, this is so important to really push,
building Portal Park.
I think that would be a crowd pleaser with the Belltown crowd.
This is a big project and a lot of work that we need to do,
and that we have done and moving forward.
So thank you for that.
Second,
sense of applause.
So, again, thank you so much.
I really appreciate the opportunity to be here.
And, and now I'll turn it over to none other than Lee Lambert.
Thank you.
- Good afternoon.
Thanks.
Lee Lambert I’m the executive director of Cascadia Bicycle Club.
And, I'm so thrilled to be here
to see this critical connection of our bike network.
And we've heard what it does and where it comes from.
So I want to have a little about the people it's going to impact.
You know, your bike ride is only as safe as this.
Most of this park and these concrete and bike lanes in this short gap
gap will really make these bikes
really make the Seattle Bay bike network more usable for others.
This one
running like this I saw some amazing things this morning
through the Seattle Bike Network.
More usable.
And so let's talk about a person that this will impact.
And and a little bit self-serving because it's one of our staff members
and but in her bike commute from West
Seattle to Magnuson Park,
this makes her life a little easier.
She was so excited when she found us coming.
And she's like, I've been using this little pathway
and it makes it lowers the stress of her 14 mile one way by commute.
There's some super users, the cascade
that everyone commutes 14 miles on their e-bike to work,
but it's example of if we want more people
to ride bikes in Seattle, we want to do a whole shift.
We need to make these what appear to be small
but high impact connections that connect the other major parts of our bike,
whether it's the waterfront to the Burke, Gilman
or the second or Third Avenue bike lanes for people commuting downtown.
So we're excited to have this upcoming.
We're looking forward to the way
opening and more, as the councilman said, more East-West, connections.
I like to introduce John Kineau
From Belltown United to give a few remarks.
Thank you very much.
- So before I begin,
I have to ask all of you takes you.
I want to take two pictures.
So the first one of this is for my mom.
There you go.
And the second picture, if you know me
already, raise your hand.
Wow. That's a
all right, so I want to say welcome to everybody.
I know that selfie thing, but I'm not,
I'm going out with some index cards.
I want to welcome everybody who's here.
But a few people have already been called out.
But I do have to say that I'm here as a small business owner in Pike Place Market.
I'm active in this neighborhood because I just live a few blocks away.
And when I got here, I got involved in something called Growing Vine Street,
which was a 1990s effort to create a wander through Belltown.
And from the time had growing Vine Street started till now,
Belltown rapidly grew, and it's now Seattle's most densely
populated neighborhood, which means that there are a lot of demands on it.
And the idea about this Park Street
came from the idea that new park land was unaffordable,
and we could have city departments, public utilities, parks.
Seattle Department of Transportation work together
to create a space that would welcome the public.
So here we have this wonderful example of the street.
It functions as a street.
It functions as a pedestrian way, a place to sit down
on the rocks and a place to kind of enjoy your city.
So this was a dream that started in the early aughts,
and community groups got together, and she was seeing,
and remarkably, held the course
until the first part of the, operation was built.
And now, finally, this last two blocks is included in this street.
We're close to a thing that we call Portal Park.
We call it Portal Park because it's a piece of land that is under
the control of Washington first Seattle Department of Transportation.
But our hope is that one day it becomes an actual park, adding only to this.
Is Buster Simpson here?
We should, I do want to make a quick shout
out to an artist who is named Buster Simpson.
Did remarkable things in downtown
to bring arts and nature down to the street level.
He does a lot of work.
Check him out on his website.
Buster Simpson dot net.
But he does a lot of work that makes political statements about climate change.
The current administration, lots of things like that, that
wonderful people here are probably interested in.
We've been through multiple mayors, and in fact, I'm so glad you're here,
because I learned today that Seattle has no term limits for mayors.
So you could serve 8 or 10 terms as mayor.
So hopefully we're back here one day doing that.
So, yeah, yeah.
Bringing art onto the streets really behind a bit of capturing the same bridge.
I don't know if there's a better word toward the sign bridge.
I think the sign bridge is kind of a technical term, but the first person
who brought this idea that I was in the room was Marshall Foster.
And I can't emphasize enough, Marshall, how amazing
you were to persist.
I know that it's journey to be here before
you restored and getting the street and even lighted at night.
It's gorgeous.
It took a lot of turns and a lot of people who were like,
well, let's let's put that into the scrap heap.
But it was saved.
And it also adorns the street, which was, in the beginning, a way to take the
dog park and to change the conversation.
There.
It used to be a drug place, and today it's not.
It's been brought back to life.
And one of the partners in that is the Downtown Seattle Association and the mid.
If it wasn't for their constant care, this part of the street
and that part of the street would look very different.
So I do want to say thank you to them.
Lots of cooperation and I'm not the one to tell the story.
I only arrived here like 15 years ago.
So my understanding that was building the streets took this
remarkable cooperation.
Never heard of before.
Urban neighborhoods, parks, transportation.
And for all of us that don't even realize it's under the streets,
there's like an entirely very complicated system.
And that requires a lot of thoughtful care.
So the groups that worked on it, including Hewitt
and Migg and a lot of other people brought this forward.
So back to the same bridge and I'll start to wind up.
I'm on page six, but any of
we started when,
when we knew that the viaduct was going to be torn down and the tunnel
would be no longer needed, a group of us got about 1200 people together,
and we tried to stop filling in the tunnel.
So we called it recharge the battery.
And the idea was that the tunnel could one day become an art
block or, wine cave, or a place for food and drink and music.
Well, it got filled in, but the group that was behind
that refocuses efforts here on the two acres that you see here.
Right.
We're still very excited that
that can go forward, especially with this symbol of the past
and kind of an optimistic look for the future.
One of the things about making
this space work is definitely to enforce laws.
So laws about drug use, public consumption and camping.
So just 12 hours ago there were tents here.
Now, for a week, members of the community and the city did outreach.
And the people living in this tent said, no, I'm good.
I want to stay here.
So for all of us to be able to enjoy places like this,
we all have to feel safe.
So I guess the message here is we need to feel safe.
And I don't have the answers for that. But I know that
a lot of people here don't feel safe,
and some of the investments here we're lighting sidewalks, which I learned
in the last 15 years, is not the common purpose of street lighting.
It's for the streets, the byways.
So I just want to wrap up by just saying, like this,
where we are today is a result of dreamers,
visionaries and actually people who do work and make things happen.
And I'm really grateful.
And I hope I'm back for your sixth term.
Awesome.
Thank you everybody.
And I want to bring to the podium Amy Tipton, who runs the Wonderful
Slip Gallery, where I hope we'll see all of you after this.
Yeah, yeah.
- Mine’s a little short and sweet, but, I feel like if there's a trend to bring up
Tom Graff.
So, I'm going to do that, and I see my speech.
I've had a business, at Firstand Bell
for the last 13 years, so this is like my commute to work.
And 20 early 2013,
Tom Graff put the daffodils in the beginnings
of the Bell Street Park across from First Avenue.
And, you know, it's all done.
I mean, it took a lot, and there've been lots of changes, but thanks, Tom.
Shout out to Belltown United.
And what a welcome improvement.
And this is a great accomplishment.
And these guys have been working on this for a while.
It looks beautiful.
We have greenery, we have wider sidewalks.
We're now going to have more lighting.
Before this project, people
use these two blocks as a way to get to somewhere else.
But now this is a place where people can gather and linger.
We love you
know, we have places to stay, hang out.
We love seeing the new, wider sidewalk and green plants.
It's bringing more people from the waterfront to slip gallery,
which is awesome.
And I know that our neighbors at Mixed Pantry are really excited about it, too,
because they're seeing more customers come up the street.
As a side note, shout out to the Belltown
Mural Festival because we have beautiful art along the way to the water.
And then
finally, on a personal note, I wanted to share this story.
When my stepdaughter Frankie was young, she would travel between her
mom's house in West Seattle and our house in Belltown.
We always took the viaducts along the way
and exited at Western Avenue.
Frankie called the viaduct the Daddy Highway.
So cute.
Frankie is now grown and living in LA and the viaduct is gone.
But now, on my walk to work, I see families
going to and from the waterfront and creating new memories.
At this same gateway in Belltown,
which is a piece of the Daddy Highway.
Thank you Seattle, we love this.