Bellevue's Downtown Park, seen after sundown, offers 21 acres of grass and a huge fountain—home for ducks. The park appears very safe to people walking its gravely paths, even after dark.

But then John Henrichs began preparing to retire from his job as a pilot in 2002. He and Sandy planned to spend more time sailing. They worried about who would keep the plants watered and make sure no one broke in. With no kids, they didn't need all those bedrooms. Paradise was beginning to feel a little like too much of a good thing.
 

Multimedia slideshow A look at downtown Bellevue and its residents. Recorded by Ken Lambert; produced by Tracy Cutchlow. Get Flash Watch slideshow [1:50]

So John and Sandra went shopping. Maybe something in the city, they thought; a condo perhaps. They looked in downtown Seattle, then started fanning out. Finally, they found what they were looking for : a big place on the 36th floor with a view of the setting sun and a quick walk to shopping and restaurants. If they want to go to Europe for a month, they can just lock the door and go.

And they only have to move a mile away.

"I just enjoy Bellevue," John says. "I can't even put a finger on it. There's just something about the Eastside."

While "Bellevue" is often shorthand for "affluent suburb," evoking images of cul-de-sacs, super-sized homes, manicured lawns and shopping malls, more people like John and Sandra are choosing to live among the parking lots, office towers and malls of downtown.
 

	ALDO CHAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Urban homesteading People are setting up house in downtown Bellevue, searching for the convenience and activity of urban life while preserving the sense of safety and community of suburban life.

In a circuit of action and reaction, developers are putting up condominiums and apartments to tap into the demand, bureaucrats are trying to nudge them, and retailers and restaurants are opening at the prospect of a nightlife.

The influx began in the late 1990s, as the economy boomed, amenities like the grassy, 21-acre Downtown Park materialized, and baby boomers became empty-nesters.

In 1990, 1,182 people lived downtown — barely more than 1 percent of Bellevue's population. Today, there's an estimated 4,150, and that's expected to rise to 14,000 by 2020, 10 percent of the city population.

In the daily bustle, the pending changes give parts of downtown a ghostly quality as aging buildings stand marked for destruction, partly to make way for more of these urban homesteaders. A Safeway, still open, is destined for demolition. A sign outside boarded-up offices promises a 25-story building. A drawing on an empty Main Street store spells out plans for a massive face-lift.
 

People relax and visit in downtown Bellevue's version of café society. Seating is offered at Bellevue Galleria, across the street from another mall and yet another being built.

City living in Bellevue is still in its infancy. But the first signs suggest a cross between the suburbs and the grittier urbanity of a place like Seattle's Belltown. Call it urban lite.

IN THE UNCERTAIN world of prognostication, Richard Florida is popular among some shapers of downtown Bellevue.

The Carnegie Mellon University professor has achieved national prominence in recent years championing the rise of a "creative class" in America. Cities will prosper by appealing to computer programmers, researchers, lawyers, doctors and artists, he contends.

Those people gravitate to cities with cultural diversity, an arts and music scene, and a high tolerance for different lifestyles. Places where body-piercings mix easily with business suits.

The Bellevue Downtown Association, which represents business and property owners, has twice brought Florida to town to speak. The covers of its quarterly magazine often glow with images of hip, 30-something people, frequently people of color, dining or holding a drink at a bar. Prime creative-class fare.
 

	Stacy Dacus touches up the finish on a '96 Cadillac Fleetwood at Roger's Auto Salon, a small business on leased land in busy downtown Bellevue.

But so far, the person who's coming to live downtown is more likely to have gray hair than a nose ring. On average, this new urbanite is older and whiter than people in the rest of Bellevue. In 2000, the median age was 57, compared to 38 citywide. Downtown, 80 percent are white; citywide, it's 72 percent.

John and Sandy Henrichs bought into Lincoln Square tower, a project that, while it exists mostly on paper, is widely seen as a benchmark for downtown Bellevue's rise to cityhood. The 450-foot-tall combination of condominiums and hotel rooms is expected to feature 42nd-floor penthouses, a fancy fitness center, shopping, a movie theater and a skybridge leading to the Bellevue Square mall. In theory, someone living there probably would never have to touch pavement.

"Life will be an elevator ride away," says Bob Rennie, the Vancouver, B.C.-based marketer promoting the development.

The project, which is supposed to be finished in early 2006, is catching on. So far, 101 units have been reserved, roughly more than 60 percent of them by people already living on the Eastside. Emigres from Seattle account for another 20 percent. Most are retirees or folks whose children have grown up and moved out.

That wasn't originally the plan for Lincoln Square.
 

Bellevue Police officer Curtis McIvor, part of a three-officer bike patrol downtown, checks a car he suspects may be riding too low. The car was up to correct height regulation, but McIvor gave a bald-tire warning. "It gets real boring for us, but we get through it," McIvor says of his often sleepy beat in a city that hasn't had a murder in years.

Conceived at the height of the '90s boom, it was meant to cater more to the young, wealthy tech workers employed at burgeoning Eastside companies like Microsoft, Drugstore.com and Expedia. But with the recession, the building changed owners and focus.

Veteran local developer Kemper Freeman, Jr., whose family built the hugely successful, upscale Bellevue Square mall, bought the project last year at a steep discount. Granite floors and metallic blues and grays are out. Now, shades of brown dominate the mock condo built as a showroom. Carpets are wool, floors are cherry, countertops are marble. Prices start at $540,000 and top out at $3.1 million.

A billboard at the construction site shows an energetic, gray-haired couple laughing, above the word "LIVE."

Freeman, a 62-year-old with two grown daughters and a penchant for motorcycle road trips, has bought one of the condos and is considering whether to move out of his Bellevue house. "Kemper," says Rennie, "is the profile."

THERE'S A LARGE, immovable obstacle to turning downtown into a place where people want to live: streets.

Downtown Bellevue wasn't built for living. It was built for driving. When founders mapped downtown shortly after the city's incorporation in 1953, they made the streets wide and the blocks long — twice as long as a typical city block.
 

	Kurt Hester, right, brushes off 5-year-old Sammy Salkind, of Bellevue, during a haircut on Main Street in Bellevue. Sammy's mother, Lisa Salkind, admits having an Eastside urban center gets addictive. "We stay too much on this side and don't know why," she says. But then she recalls all the cars that were broken into when she and her husband lived in Seattle.

Life was supposed to be segregated into neat parcels: work and shopping in one place, people in quite another. Cars would connect the dots.

Downtown Bellevue was mostly fruit fields and dirt roads at the time, giving planners a virtual blank canvas to work with. They drew the boundaries along what is now Northeast 12th Street to the north and Main Street to the south, 100th Avenue Northeast to the west and Interstate 405 to the east.

Evidence of their thinking remains. Downtown is a neat square ending abruptly at the edge of neighborhoods. While shiny skyscrapers spear the clouds in a row along 108th Avenue Northeast, there's a far greater abundance of aging one- and two-story strip malls with vast aprons of asphalt for parking.

It's hard to deny this autocentric thinking has been a boon to business. Witness the supremacy of Bellevue Square, with its acres of parking.

It works less well if you want to lure crowds who like to get around on foot — an essential of a livable downtown. Now, crosswalks come at daunting intervals, and when they do appear, walkers often brave six lanes of traffic.

City planners and developers are trying to temper this hard, asphalt edge. Regulations reward developments that put street-front shops on the first floor. The city requires nearby developments to pay for a brick-colored walkway cutting through town east to west. Besides building Downtown Park, the city has spent $26 million buying property on Meydenbauer Bay to create another public park. Freeman's latest renovation of Bellevue Square for the first time turned storefronts to the sidewalk.

So they're building it, but will the people come?

THE UTILITARIAN ATMOSPHERE and the drought of downtown residents have helped make nightlife something of an oxymoron.

When it took 17 police officers to corral an unruly crowd at the Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery last December, one city official half-jokingly welcomed the news as evidence that people could actually be found partying in downtown Bellevue on a Monday night.

The best place to find nightlife is at the mall.

On a spring Saturday night, the Cheesecake Factory, along the edge of Bellevue Square, was hopping. Among the restaurant's faux ancient columns, antsy kids tugged at their parents as they waited for tables. Girls stood in shimmering prom dresses. People in their 20s and 30s filled the bar. Want a table for two? Wait 50 minutes.

Inside the mall, a steady stream of people strolled along street-wide walkways in climate-controlled, artificially-lighted comfort. Rows of storefronts beckoned. Trees in a central courtyard rose 20 feet in the air.

It's the longed-for downtown street life, except it's largely hidden behind brick walls.

A few blocks away things grew decidedly more quiet.

Three in-line skaters in baggy pants spun lazy arcs on the plaza outside the Bellevue Galleria outdoor mall. The Rock Bottom was fairly full, and a band was setting up on the second floor. But many storefronts stood dark.

Farther north, the Ascada Bistro sat largely empty in the heart of an area that has become a residential hub. It's an improbable place to find downtown. Troy Wright opened the bistro a year ago. A former employee for the Jimi Hendrix estate, Wright has assembled a small, club-like restaurant. Framed albums of Hendrix's music hang on the walls.

A band including a keyboardist who once performed with Santana and B.B. King plays blues Thursday evenings, the music blaring over the people gathered on the patio. But the early-evening clientele was just three women.

Across the street at Andiamo, an Italian restaurant, half the tables were taken. No reservations needed. When asked about where to find the Saturday-night life in downtown Bellevue, waiter Lubos Szabo put his hand over his mouth and shook in mock laughter.
 

Dr. Ingvild Lane, 32, with pager on, works out in her condo's gym as part of her daily early-morning exercise routine. Pregnant, Lane is unusual because she and her husband, Bryce, plan to raise their first child in downtown Bellevue. At least for a while.
Marilyn Isham, 71 and recently widowed, holds her poodle, Molly. Isham, who has lived in Chicago and Cape Cod, loves Bellevue for its blend of safety, ease and urban pulse.

Marilyn Isham knows all about living in a big city with plenty of nightlife. She and her husband, Jerry, once lived on the 56th floor above Chicago's Miracle Mile, a street filled with skyscrapers housing apartments and offices and shops catering to the well-heeled.

But when the couple moved from Boston to be closer to their daughter, they landed in the most neighborhood-like part of downtown Bellevue, the southwestern corner.

They first looked in downtown Seattle.

"We could see that Belltown was an up-and-coming place," Marilyn says. "However, we have a dog. We had a dog when we were 56 stories up. But it was easy because there were little parks. We could not find that in Belltown. So we set our sights over here in Bellevue."

Known as Old Bellevue, commerce took place there years ago in a strip of buildings on Main Street near Meydenbauer Bay, where whaling ships once wintered.

The rise of Bellevue Square shifted downtown's center of gravity farther north, leaving Main Street to a tailor, barber shop, clothing boutiques, a furniture store, gas stations and the occasional restaurant. Then, within the past decade, condos started going up.

The Ishams arrived to find a fledgling community. Jerry became a fixture in the neighborhood as he walked their poodle, Molly, to nearby Downtown Park. When Jerry died last year from Lou Gehrig's disease, friends had a plaque placed on a park bench in his honor.

Isham, a spry 71-year-old, finds this part of downtown easy to navigate by foot. She can walk through the park and into Bellevue Square. She doesn't encounter the aggressive panhandlers she did in Seattle.

But she longs for the one-of-a-kind restaurants she found in Chicago, "for something that's totally upscale and different."

That desire for distinctiveness underscores another of downtown's challenges.

As a relatively new city, it lacks the historic quaintness or defining personality that attracts people to live near places like Seattle's Pike Place Market. Chains are more evident than unique shops.

So how to give parts of downtown some sense of personality without it having an artificial feel?

City officials and the downtown association talk of a project to give different downtown neighborhoods distinct identities, possibly with a nod to history. But that can prove a challenge.

Take Ashwood, an area in the northeast corner where the main Bellevue library sits on the former site of Ashwood Elementary School. City planners came up with the neighborhood name, but it's rarely heard among people who live or work there. Many of the apartments and condos show off faux Italian architecture and names like Verona, Firenze and Palazzo. Little Italy might be a more apt name for the place.

Developer Stu Vander Hoek, whose family has owned parts of Old Bellevue for decades, sees older buildings giving way to the multistory condos-with-shops and gets right to the point: "How can we imply there is a history worth celebrating?"
 

	A display at the Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art in downtown Bellevue shows one of more than 3,000 dolls in the museum's vintage collection. This may not be high art, but at least it's a museum that survives in Bellevue. The new Bellevue Art Museum was forced to close after falling into a financial crisis. Still, some see Bellevue as a prime location for art and culture, especially if more affluent people decide to make downtown their home.

DESPITE THE CHALLENGES, younger generations slowly began infiltrating in the 1990s, dropping the median age from roughly 68 to the mid-50s and bringing some of the diversity and energy many hope will push downtown toward 24-hour-a-day cityhood.

These are people like Tanja Sokic. At 25, whip thin, with long hair and sculpted eyebrows, she calls herself the "Paris Hilton of Seattle," a reference to the celebrity party girl.

Sokic moved into her apartment a block from the Ascada Bistro three years ago, chiefly because it was close to her job at a transportation logistics company.

Every Friday she heads to Seattle's Belltown to club hop. But she's grown to like her neighborhood.

"I thought Seattle would be so much more fun to live in when I moved to Washington. But you know, Bellevue is so new and clean, and it's safe," says Sokic, who grew up in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro. "It's so nice to just go and go for a jog and go for a walk."

She's found little nightlife niches. She waitresses a few nights a week at Ascada. Sometimes she goes to Daniel's Broiler or Seastar Restaurant and Raw Bar.
 

Originally from Korea, Hyonsuk Kim, 66, has had her alterations business on Main Street for 21 years, but she plans to leave and join her son's drycleaning shop in Redmond. Her reasons: higher rents and a desire to slow down.

Bryce and Ingvild Lane have found niches, too. They both grew up in suburban Bellevue homes, but when they got married and went house shopping, they wound up with a condo downtown.

The 32-year-olds work long hours — she's a doctor, he's a consultant to Internet companies. They can walk to a movie or a Thai-food dinner without facing the crowds of downtown Seattle. Both would rather be out in the woods than mowing the lawn.

The couple is expecting their first child in November, which will make them one of the few families with children in downtown Bellevue — just 87 at last count. They see benefits — the acres of close-cropped lawn, and the playground of Downtown Park is a few blocks away. Grandparents are close by.

But city living may have its limits, especially if they have more children.

"In a couple years," Bryce says, "we'll probably move into a place with a yard."

Of course, they may still come downtown to go shopping.
 

	Chris Perkins-Lurie, 45, shops for furniture, under wraps against the rain. She has lived in Bellevue for 15 years with her husband and says she loves downtown for its ease of getting around. The two plan someday to split their retirement between Bellevue and Scottsdale, Ariz.

That is what business people like Freeman want to ensure. While he's banking on those who are buying into Lincoln Square, he relies much more on the 500,000 people throughout the Eastside to fill his mall.

When he looks at Bellevue Way, he has visions of the Chicago block where the Ishams once lived — what Freeman calls "a great retail street." He expresses little concern about losing historical charm. After all, he's built his empire on household brand names: Nordstrom, Hyatt, Cheesecake Factory, Crate & Barrel.

"Our success," he says, "has involved spending a lot of time thinking about what people want. Not what they say they want, but what they want."

He's part of a broader effort to counter downtown's dull reputation by boosting the arts, music and theater scenes. Freeman is the driving force behind a private effort to build a performing arts center two blocks from Bellevue Square. The downtown association has begun putting on lunch-time and after-work concerts.

Those efforts took a major hit last year when a financial crisis forced the Bellevue Art Museum to close its distinctive new downtown building. Hailed at its 2001 opening as a sign of Bellevue's coming of age, now city leaders are working feverishly to revive the museum.
 

At Bellevue's Downtown Park, a man with a past may offer a vision for Bellevue's potential future as a retirement mecca. Like others, retirees are attracted to downtown Bellevue's safety, convenience and the 21-acre park's gravely paths, fountain and benches.

Freeman's biggest concern is that as downtown becomes more of a city, it will lose the qualities that have drawn people to shop there as well as live there, like low crime and little congestion.

A skeptic of mass transit, he fears the city isn't doing enough to keep things flowing. He and other downtown property owners sparred with the City Council last year after the council turned down recommendations to widen Bellevue Way. Business consultants have warned that any whiff of urban crime could spell problems for businesses. Freeman has a security force of 60 to police his sprawling properties.

Those concerns underscore the tension between urban and suburban living in downtown Bellevue's evolution.

People say they move there because they like the convenience and buzz of a city. But they also talk of safety and cleanliness. They welcome a nightlife, but they like the quiet. Freeman says he doesn't want to create a "police state," but is looking for a balance between safety and a sense of freedom.

"Somewhere in that balance," he says, "is a very pleasant world."