Mayor's committee unveils new vision for Seattle Center

With a new look for Seattle Center still very much on the drawing board, a mayor-appointed committee released its preferred vision today for the 74-acre campus, proposing 10 more acres of open space than is currently there.

The Century 21 Committee's master plan will go next week to the City Council, which will use it in the coming months as a launching point for adopting a blueprint for Seattle Center's future.

The committee calls its plan "Drawn to the Center." Committee member Bryce Seidl said it would transform Seattle Center into the first place people go, instead of a place people visit occasionally.

"It will become more active than it has in the past," he said. "I really love the openness this plan has created on this campus."

The openness is most apparent at Center House, which the committee proposes to gut. A glass-roof atrium would be installed, giving Center House the feel of an indoor-outdoor space and connecting it to the grounds that surround it.

The renovated Center House also would bring back the Bubbleator — not the old one from the 1962 World's Fair but a newly designed spherical elevator to bring people up to a new covered rooftop deck and upscale restaurant.

The committee also proposes:

• Transforming Memorial Stadium into a hybrid stadium-amphitheatre venue for prep sports during the school year and concerts in the summer. Much of the old stadium would be lawn that forms a lid over a new underground parking garage and transportation hub for buses and service vehicles.

• Replacing Fun Forest with a new children's play area featuring a splash pool in summer that would become an ice-skating rink in winter. The committee also envisions outdoor movies playing there in summer. Closest to the Space Needle, a new forest of trees and lawn would connect to a relocated and redesigned Mural Amphitheatre.

• Repositioning Mural Amphitheatre so the Space Needle can serve as its backdrop, and setting the colorful mosaic stage in a reflecting pool with choreographed flame effects.

The plan also proposes adding new exhibition space to KeyArena, tearing down the Northwest Rooms at First Avenue North and Republican Street in favor of a new building with retail and meeting space, and demolishing the two-block Mercer Garage for an unspecified, likely commercial redevelopment that could help pay for the Center makeover.

The price tag for the Century 21 Committee vision is $676 million. But Robert Nellams, Seattle Center executive director, said that amount should not be cause for sticker shock.

He said the mission of the committee was to develop a bold and broad plan with the understanding that each element of the redesign could be done in phases and with significant private investment to balance public money.

Nellams said that since passage of a 1990 levy for Seattle Center, $700 million in private investment has helped pay for changes to the campus.

He also pointed out private-public partnerships currently in the works, such as Pacific Northwest Ballet taking over the moribund Exhibition Hall space and last week's proposal by a group of businessmen to invest $150 million into KeyArena in a contingent offer to keep the Sonics in Seattle.

As early as this fall, the City Council could approve a ballot measure to begin paying for a first phase of Seattle Center redevelopment. But that won't happen until the Council approves its own master plan — a process that just now is beginning.

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com