A Whole-hearted welcome to the 'hood

Downtown Seattle living has a cozier feel with the arrival of a supermarket that keeps pace with the expected population boom in high-rise living. Whole Foods Market, welcome to the neighborhood.

The gilded grocery outlet opens its doors on Wednesday, nestled in a $200 million condominium/hotel project at Westlake Avenue and Denny Way. Whole Foods is the first major grocery store in downtown Seattle in generations, as Seattle Times reporters Amy Martinez and Melissa Allison reported last week. If downtown Seattle needs a mascot, it might consider the crane. Condominium and apartment construction is adding 920 new units across the downtown core, and another astonishing 21 projects with 5,600 units are on the drawing boards, The Seattle Times reported.

Those folks will need to buy groceries — more than a quart of milk and a Lotto ticket. Whole Foods offers the usual supermarket inventory, but with an eye to top-end products and an environmental ethic.

With a keen sense of the demographic groups it attracts, Whole Foods features a dazzling array of prepared meals for busy lifestyles.

Look at how the neighborhood pieces fit together. A housing boom, a grocery store, a new police station and a private elementary school all within a shiitake mushroom's throw of a trolley line that will stitch downtown urban living together.

Eventually, Whole Foods will have company, but for now it is a welcome pioneer.