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He found room for 'Hutch' and neighborhood to grow

By J. Martin McOmber
Seattle Times business reporter

	KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Guy Ott, retiring from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, is seen with a model for future development in the South Lake Union area. The top of the model is due south, with Lake Union boat slips a sliver at the bottom.
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In the process, Ott, 62, who retires next week as director of facilities at "The Hutch," helped change the future of a neighborhood.

Long before Paul Allen set his sights — and a chunk of his fortune — on the South Lake Union area, Ott was among the handful of people that moved the world-renowned research center from its home on First Hill to what was then an overlooked neighborhood north of downtown.

No one guessed at the time, but that decision laid the foundation for today's efforts to transform the area from a hodgepodge of warehouses, garages and aging stores into one of the country's leading biotechnology centers.

"I sit back and chuckle when I see all the press ... about South Lake Union and how Allen is going to create this wonderful center for biotechnical research," Ott said. "Where were they when we were starting? We were the lone wolves."

Facilities directors are rarely bathed in glory, and Ott is quick to praise the work of others inside and outside The Hutch. But he played a key role in nearly every aspect of planning and building the $375 million campus, which at 1.2 million square feet still has room to nearly double in size.

That work started almost as soon as he arrived at The Hutch in 1984. The research institution, created more than a decade earlier, had outgrown its headquarters near Swedish Medical Center on First Hill. Scientists were spread among 13 buildings, a large problem for an organization that depended on face-to-face collaboration.

City zoning regulations at the time made it difficult for The Hutch to grow on First Hill. So Ott and others began looking for enough land to build a campus. There were two obvious choices, Fremont and Beacon Hill.

The Hutch considered the nearly vacant PacMed building on Beacon Hill that Amazon.com eventually leased. But the leading contender was Fremont, where Quadrant was looking to redevelop the waterfront property north and south of the Fremont Bridge.

But that land — now home to offices for Adobe and Getty Images — would leave almost no room for The Hutch to expand without encroaching on the neighborhood.

As Ott began working on a master plan for Fremont, another choice emerged in the South Lake Union area. Developer William Justen had quietly been negotiating with property owners in the rough triangle formed by Eastlake Avenue East, Fairview Avenue North and the Mercer Street onramps to Interstate 5.

Other developers had failed to assemble the land deal, which included some 40 properties and nearly as many owners. But with the tacit backing of The Hutch, Justen got more than two-thirds of them to consider selling.

The South Lake Union site was Ott's favorite, but not for its views and proximity to the University of Washington, where many of the researchers taught. The 14 acres were enough for the center to grow for decades.

"It was just a gamble that we could go ahead and secure these deals," he said.

In July 1988, The Hutch's board of directors voted to try.

"In hindsight, you can say their timing was impeccable," said developer Rick Anderson, now a board member of The Hutch. "South Lake Union was not the community it would become, and if you look at the land prices at the time, they seemed pretty high, but today they would look like an absolute bargain."

The Hutch paid an average of $20 a square foot for the initial land it bought. Today the property is worth $110 a square foot, Ott said.

One major holdout remained on the campus site: US West, the predecessor of Qwest. The company owned a garage that it used for a fleet of service vehicles. Ott said it took nearly a decade of tough negotiations before the company agreed to swap the property for a new garage that The Hutch built south of downtown.

Today, it is clear Ott's gamble on the South Lake Union area paid off. Within a few years of starting construction in 1990, The Hutch became a magnet for other biotech companies.

ZymoGenetics moved into the converted Lake Union Steam Plant in 1994, while the UW began leasing research space in the Rosen Building in 1999. This spring, Allen's company, Vulcan, will finish work on two nearby biotech buildings for Rosetta Inpharmatics and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute.

As the pace of redevelopment picked up in the area, so did criticism that the neighborhood was being overrun with new buildings. But there was little opposition when The Hutch announced its plans in the late 1980s, recalled Mike Foley, a former neighborhood activist. "There were probably some people who, when they heard what The Hutch wanted to do, thought to themselves, 'I will believe it when I see it,' " Foley said. "Well, they can see it now."

Although Ott is retiring from The Hutch, he isn't finished with South Lake Union. The UW has hired him as a consultant for the new 1 million-square-foot research campus it is building with Vulcan along Mercer Street.

But Ott said it will be hard to top the feeling he has when he looks out over the campus he has built.

"It was exhilarating," Ott said. "But I wonder how successful we would be today, because it is a different climate and everyone is concerned about risk. When you are small and nimble and you are willing to take risks, that's when things happen."

J. Martin McOmber: 206-464-2022 or mmcomber@seattletimes.com

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