The mother of the Capitol Hill Superblock is hoping she has left a lasting final gift to the neighborhood’s pedestrianization dreams.

Seattle City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda says a portion of $600,000 carved out of the city’s 2024 budget with revenue from the JumpStart tax on its largest employers will go to creating “public space activation concepts” including a $300,000 pedestrian and bike friendly effort on Capitol Hill.

“I’m very excited about the $600,000 in Jumpstart economic revitalization funding included in the 2024 budget for public space activation in Capitol Hill, Mt. Baker, and Rainier Valley,” Mosqueda told CHS in a statement on the earmark. “This funding will build on the years of community organizing and advocacy in Capitol Hill and beyond—led by organizations such as the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict—for healthy, activated, pedestrian-oriented public spaces, to begin to actually implement public space activation concepts inspired by leading cities like Copenhagen.”

Mosqueda, who will be leaving Seattle City Hall in the new year to take the seat she won in the November election on the King County Council, has been supporting the efforts around a so-called Capitol Hill Superblock for years and sponsored the budget amendment this fall “to build momentum and lead to tangible improvements in these neighborhoods.”

“This is exactly the type of investment we envisioned for the JumpStart economic revitalization dollars to create healthy, safe, vibrant spaces in our neighborhoods that support small businesses, and provide places for the community to enjoy,” Mosqueda said.

The most recent push for a Capitol Hill Superblock concept that would create a pedestrian and bike-focused, no-car core took shape in 2019 as Mosqueda joined city officials and a handful of representatives from neighborhood organizations and businesses to shape a concept around a six-block area of Capitol Hill they said would be an ideal testing ground for its proximity to multiple transit options and Cal Anderson Park. The area’s cramped streets were already naturally “calming” traffic.

By 2022, pushback from the business community including some of the neighborhood’s most prominent merchants like the Elliott Bay Book Company had officials backpedaling on any plans.

The new $600,000 spend is a compromise with enough cash for planning and limited execution spread across three areas of the city. It joins $1 million already planned by Mayor Bruce Harrell to spend downtown on “investments in the public right-of-way to support businesses, residents, and workers” that will include “physical improvements to the public right-of-way as well as street festivals and other temporary activities to attract visitors to Downtown and encourage them to support nearby businesses.”

The additional $300,000 earmarked for Capitol Hill $300,000 will go to the Office of Economic Development to shape a plan in consultation with the Seattle Department of Transportation, the Office of Planning and Community Development, Office of Sustainability and Environment, the Department of Neighborhoods, and the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict “to identify uses for this funding.”

That’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen with the newly re-focused EcoDistrict as the leading non-City Hall entity representing the neighborhood. CHS reported here on the move of the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict organization under executive director Donna Moodie to focus on equity and growth under the umbrella of the Seattle Urban League.

In the Central District, a planned “superblock” around Garfield High School is already taking shape. The $8.4M plan for a Garfield Super Block includes a Legacy and Promise Promenade, art work, a water play area, and playground improvements in an effort to create a new community resource on the important core block. Construction has been expected to begin in the summer of 2024.

It’s not clear how the plan will take shape on Capitol Hill. There’s no fixed way of going about implementing superblocks. On streets within the concept, you can reduce traffic to one lane, narrow the roadway, or limit car traffic to residents, taxis, police, emergency, and delivery vehicles only. Or it could be as simple as just reducing speeds.

A 2013 Park(ing) Day installation

In 2019, Mosqueda touted the economic benefits of the changes. “In Barcelona (…) what they saw was an increase in overall sales for small businesses and an increase in foot traffic,” Mosqueda told CHS then. “And that is true of what we’ve seen when we’ve gotten rid of parking spots and reduced traffic and lanes in front of small businesses across our own country. So I think it’s a win, win, win: a win for local business, a win for safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, and a win for the environment.”

The area has already seen its fair share of fizzled enthusiasm and experiments. In the mid 2010s, the city experimented with closing E Pike to motor vehicles on a series of summer Saturday nights. By 2018, that experiment came to an end after the city said it would pull back on the effort and only offer technical assistance and no funding if neighborhood groups around the city wanted to try to continue the program. Before that, as far back as 2010, leaders like Seattle City Councilmember Sally Clark were evoking International examples like La Rambla as a model for rethinking Pike/Pine. Other, smaller efforts from local businesses also ran into neighborhood opposition from other merchants.

But the tide may have turned. Last summer, Pike/Pine’s Elliott Bay Book Company, its most well-known retailer and maybe most listened-to at City Hall, got new ownership, joining the Queer/Bar family of businesses.

And, along with the modest funding opportunity, the city has been slowly transforming the traffic flow on both Pike and Pine including a series of 4-way stops through the area’s core and the under-construction transition to one-way Pike and Pine between downtown and the Hill below Bellevue Ave. Meanwhile, the pandemic has also helped reshape the streets where the era’s proliferation of outdoor patios and tents appears to have become a permanent part of the streetscape.

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