Ben Franz-Knight was born in Pullman, graduated from the University of Washington and spent a decade in Southern California, where he served for seven years as executive director of the Santa Monica Pier Restoration Corporation. He returned to Seattle to become executive director of the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA). In this 2023 interview with HistoryLink's Dominic Black and Jennifer Ott, Franz-Knight discusses the 2017 MarketFront expansion at Pike Place and how the demise of the Alaskan Way Viaduct created an opportunity to connect the Market to Seattle's waterfront in dramatic and unexpected ways.
Pike Place Market PDA
Ben Franz-Knight: So the PDA is ostensibly the property owner and landlord for a majority of the Pike Place market from Virginia on the north end, halfway to Union on the south end from First Avenue to Western and also operates and owns some properties on the west side of Western Avenue. So they provide all the management for all of the commercial spaces, residential properties, manages all the farmers and base all artists and crafters about 110, 120 employees, about 18 to 20 million annual operating budget and running everything from the parking again to the commercial spaces, day stalls, events, all the things that keep the market going.
Dominic Black: I was thinking about that name, I mean the Preservation and Development Authority. There's a kind of interesting sort of push-pull in there definitely with those.
BFK: Definitely, definitely, and it's a unique, basically a non-profit creature, and I'm a big believer in these types of entities because they're allowed to be a little more entrepreneurial in managing very special assets or neighborhoods in this case on behalf of the city. So when the market was saved in the seventies, they put in place this very complex but very purposeful governance structure. So the PDA – Preservation and Development Authority – was intended to be the entity that would manage and develop out the market over the ensuing decades. And one really interesting nuance in there and I think it's being hotly debated right now actually in the papers and at the city council, they withheld some key authorities for the PDA and placed them in the hands of a market historic commission. Most principally, while the preservation and development authority owns most of the properties and is the landlord and enters into all the commercial leases with each of the operators and businesses, the PDA has no authority over use.
The use of the individual lease spaces – what is sold there, the signage, the mix of merchandise, all the look and feel of the business – all that approval resides with the Market Historic Commission, and it's one of several really intentional checks to make sure that tension you mentioned, right, that tension between preservation and development really is maintained. So the PDA is landlord can never, at one single instance, default to economics as the primary driver for any business. So you won't see a McDonald's, you don't see any chain operations that power and authority be invested with the historic commission is that really fundamental check.
DB: That's fascinating. So I’m tempted to ask it, was that ever frustrating as a structure ...
BFK: So you bet, it actually goes deeper than that and so you have a PDA council and that's who the executive director serves and it's composed of 12 members, four that are appointed by the council itself – or that are appointed by the mayor or the city council – and then four that are appointed by the constituency. So the constituency is yet another group. To be a member of the constituency, you need to be a resident of the state of Washington, you need to be over the age of 16 and you need to pay a buck a year. So if you want to be one of the bosses of the Pike Place market, you can check those three boxes. You can help dictate the course.
And so that's another layer. And so to answer your question, yes, it was at times incredibly frustrating, but also really purposeful. I mean, this is a very precious neighborhood and if you had any one entity vested with all the authority to do whatever they want, I believe they would ultimately wander off in probably the wrong direction sort of one way or the other. And so to have that very significant commitment to democracy and then the sort of allocation and balance of powers, it's more Congress than anything, the way the market really functions and operates.
DB: Yeah you know it's interesting. In the course of this project, we've a lot of discussion about the term Seattle process, which I've always been in two minds about that because I think process is a good thing and careful process is a good thing. This seems a sort structure that almost represents that perfectly, right?
BFK: And you live it every day. I mean, I think every single conversation that we had at the staff level, we're always thinking about what would the market historic commission say? What will the constituency say? What will friends of the market say? Right? That's the group that really ... They're the representatives of the ones who saved the market. That's the legacy of that organization. So you're always ... The Daystall Tenants Association, there's other subsets that fall within it. So you're always thinking about that. And in the case of any development, I mean for the MarketFront project we had over 200 public meetings. So that's a public meeting where that development was one of the primary topics on the agenda. There was a presentation, there was public debate, there was direction. Right – over 200 of those.
Jennifer Ott: Over what period of time?
BFK: A four-year period. So pretty intense, about a meeting a month at least.
The Waterfront Opportunity
BFK: For the Market – and I think I shared this in an interview, one of the very early interviews – I just wanted to make sure it didn't get messed up. You want to make sure that it ... You don't want to come in and, "I have these grand visions of how I want to change this or change that." I really actually didn't want to change anything. I wanted to make sure that it was future-proofed to the extent that it could be. The waterfront development was clearly an opportunity and so I was very excited about that and the potential to do the right things on behalf of the Market to meet this new reality to the West where it had really been the backside of the Market for almost its entire life, although not completely. I mean there used to be much stronger connections between the waterfront and the Market in its very early years.
But that was really the focus was to make sure that the market is preserved and celebrated and continues to stay strong, that it emerged from that major renovation as largely unscathed as possible - which was no small task - and then to meet these external changes in a way that, again, further preserved the essence of the market itself. And not let those external changes change the place, if that makes sense.
If you're sort of passive about what happens around you, then it's going to change you somehow and the Pike Place Market as a whole – and I think it's sort of built into the DNA – is fiercely protective. And so watches everything that happens on its borders to make sure that it doesn't disrupt the place.
DB: So then can you just clarify for me then: so in 2010, the renovations are underway but the viaduct is obviously still there. Has the MarketFront expansion, the sort of expressly developed at that point? Can you just talk me through the beginning of that?
BFK: If you studied the history of the market, development on that site, it's PC-1 North, so Parking and Commercial North, and there was PC-1 South, which is where Heritage House and the original market parking garage is. Those have been studied for years and PC-1 North was the most difficult site to develop. It's on a significant slope. It has a Burlington Northern Train tunnel that was built in the early nineteen-hundreds that runs underneath it and it has development to the south, and Steinbrueck Park or Native Park to the north, so severely constrained sites. So there'd been multiple ...
DB: And this is just on the west side of Western Avenue.
BFK: This is on the west side of Western Avenue. It's really the last parcel in the historic district to be developed. So it had been on the radar for decades but it had never penciled. And so the proposed demolition of the Viaduct and then the waterfront plan – in 2010 there were the broad brush strokes. I think James Corner field operations – so James Corner from JCFO had done his initial sketch of what, starting to think about what might happen there. And so I think the Market knew that there was another window here, another cycle if you will, where they may be able to realize the vision for this space but they were in the middle of a major renovation that they had to get through first. Right? And that was a major undertaking just to do that. But when I applied for the job, the notion of the waterfront and how to respond to that was certainly front and center. In fact, I talked about it in my interview with the board at the time.
DB: Yeah, it's really fascinating that the way that the physical topography of the city is reflected in that disjunction between the back of the market and the low-lying terrain on Western Avenue – I mean that's such a perennial aspect of the development of Seattle is trying to figure out ways around those challenges, you know?
BFK: And if you go back and look at early photos, there was a series of bridges and ramps and trestles that went from the warehouses and the trains on the waterfront and brought the produce and all the supplies up to the market, and I don't know Jennifer how many there were but there were a number of them in the neighborhood.
DB: And was that site, did you call ...
BFK: PC-1 North was the – Parking and Commercial North One was literally what it was called in the development plans – and it was called out in the original plan when the market was saved in the seventies. So you can go back and you can see PC-1 South and PC-1 North, along with all the other market buildings all sort of mapped out.
DB: And was that privately owned at the point?
BFK: That's a good question. I believe it was owned by the Goodwins, transferred to the Desimones and then the city bought it.
DB: Okay.
BFK: Fifties or sixties, somewhere in there, somewhere in the sixties. So it was city owned. In fact, I had an embarrassing moment. I was at an event – I think it was a downtown Seattle Association Event or Chamber of Commerce event, I can't remember which – and I was presenting the initial concept for the market, what became known as the MarketFront, and council member Tim Burgess was in the room and he raised his hand and he said, "Ben, I just want to point out that you don't own that property yet. The city still owns it." We had already spent a fair bit of money because the market was going to do this, but it was sort of this great moment where I was like, “Thank you council member. I understand we still have a lot of negotiating to do, but we're excited.”
Working with the Mayor and the City Council
DB: How easy was it to work with the council and the various parts of the city administration as you're trying to articulate this vision and then make it come into reality?
BFK: You know, that part surprisingly was fairly easy. At the time this was being developed I had a really good relationship with the mayor, Mayor [Mike] McGinn. We both rode bikes and he and I got along and still get along very well, and I would frequently meet him at City Hall and just ride home with him. So, conversations at the highest levels of the city went really well as it related to funding commitments and expectations around what the development could and should do and equally, relationships with key council members were good. At that point we had the two Sallys, Sally Clark and Sally Bagshaw, both deeply committed to the market and in regular communication; Sally Bagshaw, of course lives just down the street, and so they were super supportive.
Interestingly, the council at that time and the mayor really understood that the market was not theirs, that the market was governed by this very different structure, and they really respected that. And I think for very good reason, they understood we had a lot of robust public process. We had a lot of open public meetings. And quite frankly, if they had to take up that level of market business at City Hall, they wouldn't have time to do anything else and they knew that if they tried to chip in there and tried to make it theirs, that they would be overwhelmed.
So they were more than happy to have the PDA be the one, along with the market historic commission, running through this process, which was really helpful. They were not interested in micromanaging it. And so I had singular points of contact in the city that we negotiated all the major agreements with and then of course there were key presentations and touchpoints with key council members and with the mayor's office, but in large order they understood we had a robust public process and trusted that.
DB: So as I understand it, then, when you come into position, the James Corner vision exists, as you say, in a broad brush sort of sense. How do you go about figuring out the nuts and bolts, the components of how you going to actually make that happen on the physical terrain, and what are the key elements that you wanted to have in there?
BFK: Yeah, fortunately the program for the MarketFront was pretty well defined. It’s embedded in the name: you knew you were going to have parking and commercial space. You knew that it had to have some connection to what was proposed for the overlooked walk. And then we also knew that we needed housing. We wanted to build as much more, as much affordable housing as we could, primarily for low income seniors. That's a core part of the charter for the market itself. So those are the four main components: public open space, commercial space, parking and housing and so we knew right away what the core of the project was going to be. The biggest question was, how are you going to pay for it? And that's where the changing landscape with the waterfront vision, the demolition of the Viaduct, became significant opportunities.
The Viaduct, The Plans, and Other People’s Money
BFK: I recommended that the council and the market be really proactive in its response to the viaduct. That the viaduct demolition represented an opportunity to seek some level of mitigation. So ultimately some money. And that money in theory could help support either managing whatever impacts there – were dust and loss of access and all those sorts of things – or more fundamentally the potential to provide some funding for the project.
So that was ... you look at when you have a project and it struggled for many years because it had no path to pencil, incredibly expensive site to develop. So you know you need a lot of OPM, you need a lot of other people's money to make it work.
DB: OPM?
BFK: OPM, Other People's Money, it's not your money. I mean, the market has a fair bit of its own money in that project, but there's a lot of other people's money too, both in the public and private side, a lot of donors that helped make that happen. But the viaduct demolition represented an early opportunity to help with the fundamental components of that project. So … all of the historic waterfront, I think that organization, they had sued the state and the city and they'd gotten a settlement. That settlement included a number of things, including a bucket of about 30 million dollars.
The primary purpose of that money was to offset the loss of parking. A bunch of parking underneath the viaduct that was going away was never going to come back, and their goal was to build new parking. They had a couple of sites on the central waterfront that they were looking at, but it became clear to us that we were going to build parking in this project and so we engaged in a process with the state, which started with a very strong comment letter to their EIS for the demolition of the viaduct that made it clear we were seeking some level of mitigation for impacts to the Market, and ultimately that resulted in a six million dollar contribution from the state. The financing nuts and bolts of that are fairly complex, but ultimately those were dollars that we were able to use to support development of new parking, on PC-1 North, so that we started to fill the bucket of other money we needed to come in to make that project, to make that project pencil.
So it was coming at that: instead of just looking at the demolition of the viaduct as a threat and only a threat, it was trying to think, how do you flip that and turn it into an opportunity? How do you make that a winning scenario instead of just, "Hey, you're going to demolish the vid duct, pay us some money so we can board up our windows and we can clean the dust off." How do you really leverage that to make it work? And it just so happened that the central waterfront folks were desperate for an actual parking structure to be built.
So that was an initial piece. And then James Corner and his team at JC gave us a huge gift that I don't think, again, that Jim Corner realized it was a gift until we got deep into the process, but if you go back and look at the initial sketches of the Overlook Walk, he drew it all the way over the top of PC-1 North and all the way over the top of Victor Steinbrueck Park and Native Park to the north, and all of it was new.
So he sort of drew right over everything that the market had intended to develop, and the park named after Victor Steinbrueck, who led the effort to save the place. So in doing so, right, it was almost immediate, the sort of rally cry from the Market. Everybody hated this idea. It was a threat to – literally – threat to the legacy, threat to the future. “Who's this guy from New York?” And James Corner's amazing guy, by the way. He's a brilliant, brilliant landscape architect and he was just looking at the landscape and saying, “Hey, this is how it all needs to flow,” but what he drew, people are like: "Oh my gosh, you can't ... That's our site. That's the Market’s. You can't take that and you certainly can't take Victor Steinbrueck Park, and Native Park."
And so that was a major catalyst for the Market to engage very quickly and then ultimately to make those early financial commitments. So I talked about being in this meeting with Councilman Burgess, "Hey, you guys don't own the property.” We'd spent about half a million dollars on design at that point. The Market Council had done that consciously because they knew they had to say, "This is our site. We have a vision for this and we are serious about making it real." When James Corner rolls out this whole plan, we're almost step-for-step responding to what he has done and incorporating some of the public open space and thinking about those connections, but to make sure that this is preserved for the Market.
At the same time, the whole Waterfront program is being developed, and so you have this master plan in process. JCFO's part of that. You have all these waterfront stakeholders, and you have a committee that's focused on the partnerships. Two primary public-private partnerships emerged out of that effort, the Pike Place Market and the Seattle Aquarium, as a key player in the connection between downtown Seattle and the Waterfront. And both partners in that original funding plan are allocated significant money. Somewhere in the range of thirty to forty million dollars each.
Now you see that bucket of other money, right? There's six million from the state, thirty four million from the city. The land comes for free, which is what we ended up actually getting because we are now part of this partnership with the Waterfront. We are delivering part of that program. We're delivering assets that everybody needs in the form of parking. And you know there were definitely, early on, a few really, really tough moments, but once we got all that rolling and we got through negotiation of the first few agreements, then we were in good shape. That threat to Victor Steinbrueck Park was significant.
Market Resistance to Initial Waterfront Plans
DB: What were some of the other challenges early on? The ones that kept you up at night?
BFK: Well, there were a number. One of the biggest ones, and I don't think Peter would mind if I shared this, was actually his perspective on the Waterfront program. I think he was deeply offended, rightfully so, at the architectural gesture. I learned the hard way that you don't draw on architect's drawings. I actually drew on James Corner's drawings once, and that's how I learned. I didn't know. Everybody was sort of like, "Ooh.”
DB: Did somebody slap your hand away?
BFK: That's another part of it. But anyway, Peter was pretty offended, along with a lot of folks in the Market, that there was this gesture to, "This is our site." And the plan was getting ready for approval by the City Council and the Market was pretty riled up, that that design needed to change. I had confidence that it would because I knew that we had a significant amount of control. Even though we didn't own that parcel we were operating it. We had parking agreements. We had some, if they weren't explicit, we had some implicit rights to that space. I knew that no one was ever going to be successful in dramatically changing Steinbrueck Park or Native Park. That's proven now. They're still trying to just do modest repairs there. So I knew that we had a lot of leverage there, but the community was pretty pissed off. We were in the midst of negotiating. I think it was the initial MOU for the development agreement. So you negotiate these complex development agreements in stages. You have an initial, "Hey, we're going to get along and we're going to try to co-design some things."
And then you have, "All right, now the money's going to come in and this is how the money's going to come in and we're actually going to build the thing." So we were in the initial stages of negotiating the first part. That first part would've brought thirty-four to forty million dollars to the project.
But the city was only going to approve that MOU if we were on board as collaborators in the design process. If we were saying, “The whole Waterfront design has to start over and what you have proposed is a non-starter,” which is where a lot of folks were, we wouldn't have gotten that initial agreement approved. It would've been significantly delayed or they would've just moved on without us. And so there was a couple of things that happened. I remember standing at the base of the Hill Climb, and interestingly, there may actually be a photo of this somewhere, I remember talking to Peter and saying, "Peter, the future of this project," and these are almost my exact words, "The future of this project's in your hands if you decide that this is unacceptable." People are really looking to him to say, I mean, he studied this. "If you decide that this is unacceptable and there's no possible way for us to work with JCFO, then I don't think PC-1 North gets developed. And I think this is our best shot, but really, you have to decide. I can't make your mind up for you."
Then we had a dinner. That was Peter and Jim and just a couple of other people. I think we were at Café Campagne, actually. It went quite late and Peter and Jim were able to really speak architect to architect and establish some trust and rapport. We got to a point where I think Peter was much more comfortable, and I think the Market community as a whole understood that there was a real path here to be collaborators. But that was a tough one. And it's not just Peter. Peter was really the focal point but there were a whole bunch of people around Peter that were equally upset. And so he was a key diplomat in this whole thing at the end of the day to make it happen. And I'll never forget standing at the base of Hill Climb and he was like, "Thanks Ben, I've got a lot to think about." And I was just like, "Oh, my gosh. Hope we get to do this."
Yeah. So that was a tough moment. But it came down to building trust and relationship. And James Corner was willing to listen. He understood and articulated that that was not his site, he was merely trying to express a sense and gesture and had zero interest in developing the Market's property.
DB: How did that meeting play out? So you go in and you're sitting down. Are you seeing yourself there as a bridge builder? Are you making this small talk or is it fairly relaxed – is there tension in the room?
BFK: Yeah. Mean we all know there's a lot at stake. There's four of us at this dinner. And it starts out fairly tense. I mean, Peter's not shy. He lays it out pretty clearly what he's hearing from the Market community, what he knows about the history of that site and the Market's responsibility. And again, that sort of implicit commitment to develop it. And James Corner's already a very accomplished, world-famous landscape architect. And so you kind of walk into it and I think I was probably more nervous than either of them, because you just don't know. Are these two guys going to get along or is this going to be the worst dinner you ever go to? And so Peter sort of lays out where he's at in that moment and James Corner was very receptive. He was also in that same moment, very confident in his vision, which is why he and his team were selected for the Waterfront.
So he was very clear that he felt this was the right idea of these sort of connections and the connectivity between Steinbrueck Park and PC-1 North and the Waterfront, that if it was going to connect to downtown, that's where all the magic had to happen. I think dinner came and at some point about midway through dinner and they started sharing obscure architecture jokes. And I ... at that point, Dominic, I just sat back and my friend and I, we just sat back and we were like, okay, these guys are like, we're good. They are now, I don't know, I don't what they were. I can't remember if it was like Miami Beach architecture or something they were making fun of. And then they were talking about something else and then we were good. And then now we had a trusting relationship and they communicated quite a bit. And then David Miller, who was the architect for the MarketFront, worked very closely with both of them on the design for the project.
Construction Challenges
BFK: There's this Burlington Northern train tunnel that runs diagonally right under the site, and it was built in the early 1900s and I think somewhere around 1912 or 1913, a whole bunch of buildings downtown started to settle. And I think we lost our public library at that time because the settlement was so significant.
And they had built the tunnel with wood framing around it at the top, and all that wood framing had rotted away, and so there's this huge void on top of the tunnel. And their solution to fixing it was to go in and fill that void with as much concrete as they possibly could, which meant … we had drawings from the early 1900s that told us what the tunnel shape was and how it was engineered, but we had no idea how thick this crown of concrete was over the top. And it's Burlington Northern, so they own the air rights over this thing in perpetuity and so at any one point Burlington Northern could have told us to stop. And if they told us to stop the project was over. If they didn't have confidence that we could build this building over their tunnel, and this is the only north-south line feeding from Portland to Canada through Seattle on the waterfront – it was a major challenge.
So we did extensive potholing, very carefully, to go down – we had this, I want to say it was 60 or 100 potholes to determine exactly where the top of this tunnel was. We had monitors in the tunnel itself. Some that were there so long, they grew stalactites or stalagmites, the thing that grew off of the monitors. And if the tunnel monitors move too much, we get a purple alert or a red alert and all the work had to stop. So we're working through this whole process, and at some point we actually don't need Burlington Northern's explicit approval. We just need them to not stop us. We just need them to basically stand back and say, "We're comfortable, you're doing what you're doing, we're not going to ask you to stop. We're not going to exercise our rights for this air over the top."
And so we're working with a couple of Burlington Northern engineers and had a very smart Project Manager, Justine Kim, who's actually at SOJ. She's at the firm that I joined when I left the Market. I just loved working with her so much and was so inspired by how they helped to project. That's what I wanted to do for my second career or third, whatever the next career.
Anyway, she was like, "Look, there can only be a singular point of contact with Burlington Northern. Only one person talks to this engineer so there's no confusion. There's absolutely crystal clear communication, and it's very consistent. So all that backdrop: we have tunnel monitoring equipment in place; we have spent several hundred thousand dollars understanding exactly where the tunnel is; we've engineered this significant structure over the top of the tunnel to make sure that the building never settles on the tunnel itself; there's no loading on the tunnel. There's these eight-foot wide beams that bridge over the top of that tunnel along the length of the building with massive amounts of rebar. You couldn't even put your fist through the rebar to make it all work.
So all this is in the background. Burlington Northern has never said no. We are about to start excavation, which is … once you put in all the shoring, you're into excavation, you're going right now. You dug a hole, you had better ...
Majority of the funding is in place, not all the funding. There were some other challenges on the funding side that we overcame, but enough of the funding was in place to start. The state had approved us building just the parking garage and, in the original agreement we had to stop when we built the first full level of parking so they could use it for staging for demolishing the Viaduct. So all of the planning's in place and we're ready to go. And I think we’re probably just days before groundbreaking there was increased concern about oil train cars coming through urban areas. Some folks in the Market community organized a protest of oil train cars in Victor Steinbrueck Park and Native Park. They got a lot of news coverage.
I get a call from the government relations director for Burlington Northern that I won't quote, but let's just say was a little bit frustrated that the Market was protesting their trains. At the same time the Market was asking for a major concession and easements, literally over their air rights in their tunnel. I can say that kept me up a little bit because if you piss off Burlington Northern, they're like their own government – they could have shut down the project and they were pretty pissed off. So I had to explain that that was members of the Market community, that was not the Market's official position. And then I had to go have a conversation with the folks that had put this all together just to explain, "I understand you want to protest this, but this is the potential impact to what we're trying to accomplish here." That was a really unexpected moment that posed some significant peril for the project.
DB: I do remember those protests. I remember that. And how did that play out when you went to the Market folks who were involved in the protest and said that. How did they react?
BFK: There were some that were like, "I don't give a rip," this is much bigger than any one thing. I think there were enough folks that were in that effort understood this was not a Market issue and that it shouldn't be presented as something that's specific to the Pike Place Market. There's this much bigger landscape of oil trains traveling all over the country. That's, I think, where people could land and say, "We get it. This is not the Pike Place Market protesting any of the trains going through here." We were able to clarify that. I can't remember if there was another protest in Steinbrueck Park or Native Park or if the protest moved to another location. I can't remember at that time, but I was able to report back to the government relations person at Burlington Northern and we got through it. But it was a tough moment.
DB: How do you manage your own stress level in a moment like that, cos you got somebody on the -
BFK: I probably lost years of my life doing the job here at the Market. I probably took it too seriously. Some would say that. But I felt a deep commitment to the place and really meant I didn't want to screw it up. So I rode my bike just about every day, and I would ride anywhere from eight to 12 miles, even when there were meetings that were late. And that was a significant stress reliever. If I didn't have that daily, fairly vigorous exercise, I don't think I could have managed it. It was pretty intense.
But at the same time, you know you try to tackle those issues straight on. Right? You don't try to play a game over here or play a game over there, you just go straight to it. I didn't hide from the guy that called from Burlington Northern. I didn't hide from the community either. Here's the deal, here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm saying. I'm going to tell you what I'm saying, I'm going to tell you what I'm saying. It's the same darn thing. That eases a lot of it. And then, you let it fall where it's going to fall, right? I think where people can get really wound up is when they try to play to a whole bunch of different people with a different story, then you get chewed up because they're going to talk, eventually.
Acknowledging Tribal History
BFK: I think there's an important part of the relationship and landscape that also came into play and was a significant part of the project, was engagement with the urban Native population and the tribes in Seattle. I knew Steve Trainer, who was the founder of Seneca Group, fairly well. He and his wife were founding members of the Chief of Seattle Club Board. Chief Seattle Club is this organization in Pioneer Square that's grown tremendously over the last few years. And as soon as I started talking about this project, Steve Trainer said, "Hey Ben, you have to talk to Colleen Echohawk. She's the new executive director at the Chief Seattle Club. And just so you know, it's not just Steinbrueck Park, it's Steinbrueck Park and Native Park, and the Urban Native community really holds that as a very special place and a gathering place."
I was able to go down and meet Colleen. And she and I to this day are very, very close and have worked on a number of really complex projects. But she was really helpful in us understanding the importance of acknowledging the land, and this was years before land acknowledgement was kind of a thing.
So we actually had, oh my gosh, I'm blanking on his name, Suquamish Tribal Chair, Leonard Forsman. We actually had Chair Forsman at the groundbreaking for the MarketFront Project. There was a blessing of the site. And at the grand opening, we actually had a drum circle that kicked off the grand opening of the MarketFront and there were nine members of the Chief Seattle Club that moved into our housing. So just an important part of this story. There's sort of history and then there's history, right?
And I think it's important for us to acknowledge that a lot of the near-term history is history built on lands that aren't necessarily ours. They were taken or stolen, and we need to acknowledge that and bring forward both that reality, but then also make sure that we acknowledge and practice that the tribes in our region aren't history. They're present. They have incredible knowledge around community and ecology. I think that's just an important piece that flows through this project, and you can still see the benefits of it today.
Excavating and Preserving Historical Artifacts
BFK: With that, we get into groundbreaking, we start excavating, and a couple of really interesting things happened. I took Peter Steinbrueck out on a tour of the site in excavation and he says, "Hey Ben, you find anything in the dirt? Any cool old signs or anything?" "Oh yeah, yeah." I said, "They got some stuff in the job trailer." So we go into the job trailer and Peter takes some pictures and he goes home and he posts it on Facebook. Monday morning I get a call from the state's historic preservation officer saying, uh, "I understand you have found some artifacts on your PC-1 North construction site." And I say, "Oh, I don't know if we found any artifacts. We found some old garbage," which was like old can and an old boot or something. I mean garbage. I literally hear her fist hit the desk. She says, "Mr. Franz-Knight, this is not garbage. This is our state's history." I immediately realized I'm in a bit of trouble because I have completely misunderstood what's going on here and I must correct course right away.
I apologize and I say, "Please let me know what I need to do. I'm sorry, I did not mean to offend you." She says, "I saw Peter Steinbrueck's Facebook page." I said, "Oh great, thank you." This is going to be expensive, for all the right reasons, but this is going to be expensive. So we had an archeologist on call. We had not yet deployed them. They were part of the team that did some initial environmental analysis on the project. So I got them under contract to monitor excavation every hour, every inch of dirt, starting the very next day and then put together, they had to draft a whole plan, then had to go out and get approved by the state historic preservation officer and the tribes to make sure that we were compliant with all the laws.
I think our attorney, at the time, made me feel a lot better because he said, "Hey Ben, don't worry. I'll send you a toothbrush, if you end up going to jail." And I was like, "Thanks. I want to just do the right thing. I'm not interested in going to jail. I really am sorry. We're going to make sure we monitor this." And we literally, all we'd found to that date was a couple of cans and a bit of some kind of sign or something. Anyway, we get the archeologists in place. The state historic preservation officer comes out on site, is pleased with our program and our plan. The tribes have signed off on everything we're doing and we have these archeologists monitoring every inch of soil.
Well, about a week later, they uncover a shell midden on the north side of the site. So they're digging in the dirt and a shell midden can be significant. It can be a treasure trove of something serious ... You could find some real serious stuff now. So work stops and they're sort of slowly going through this stuff and we're pulling out more and more things. We start, we're going really, really slow in the excavation. We're finding boots. We're finding some old utensils. We're finding bits of plates, bits of medicine bottles, bits of alcohol bottles, all sorts of things are starting to sort of ... bones, not human bones. We're finding animal bones. And on Halloween ... you cannot make this stuff up. On Halloween, a ceramic doll head rolls out of the dirt and rolls face up in front of the archeology team.
And we come to learn that this doll head, the model name is actually Bertha, which is the name of the tunneling machine going underground. You can't make this stuff up. I mean, this is just amazing coincidence. So we get through all this now, very, very detailed excavation process. The archeologists are processing everything.
We ended up with 417 some odd artifacts. The archeologists were able to learn that there were two groups living on the site in the early 1900s when the train tunnel was built. One was a group of engineers and foremen for the actual construction of the tunnel and they were fed quite well. And they lived in little tents and huts that were on the slope. The other group was most likely homeless and were living there in more ramshackle accommodations and they were eating scraps and bones.
They could tell because the sort of animal bones that were coming from the north side were from traditional cuts of meat, but they were rat gnawed, and the ones on the south side were more of a finer cut. So it was a sort of fascinating thing that we learned. And we learned that the doll head was named Bertha. So all those artifacts now live at the Burke Museum and I'm sure they were really happy that we gave them a bunch of chipped bits of plate, but that's what you do. I mean, you keep it all and they document it and they wrote a several hundred page report. And I don't know, I only spent $250,000 or something like that on that whole effort, but preserved our state's history in the process and I think learned some interesting stuff, particularly about ...
DB: And you didn't go to jail –
BFK: And I didn't go to jail. No, that was really ... I was personally grateful for that.
DB: That's also an upside –
BFK: The attorney still owes me a toothbrush, I guess.
Connecting the Market to the Waterfront
BFK: The relationship between designers was critical. So David Miller, James Corner, and along with Peter Steinbrueck, all got along really well. And I remember a moment when David Miller and James Corner were standing, they must have been standing on Western Avenue sort of at the top. And they were articulating the view corridor that needed to be visible to the Overlook Walk and the mouth of the Duwamish. And you can actually stand in that breezeway on the north end of the MarketFront today, and you can see the mouth of the Duwamish. And that's not an accident. Those architects worked really hard on those components. And then when you look at the development agreement with the city of Seattle, we took the work of the various design teams and we created an exhibit called the “Waterfront Related Elements.”
And the Waterfront Related Elements captures the key components of that connectivity. So 16 foot wide sidewalks, walkways, stairs in this location, connections at this point, way finding and signage here, this amount of public open space, all of that, these kind of plantings, this is all to be integrated so that it flows through while still preserving the unique identity of, certainly in this case, in the MarketFront. And we can talk a little bit about the aquarium as well. But that exhibit was the distilling of all the work our design team had done.
Now that wasn't always easy, and there was a moment when I think we were at Miller Hall's office and there was, oh God, yeah, like sixteen, eighteen people in this meeting. There were people from the city I was there. So you had representation on either side. The architects were at the table, and I can't remember what they were arguing about, but it was getting kind of heated. They were not finding a path to solve one of the design solutions, and I can't remember if it was the walkways. I think that's what it was. I don't think it was the plantings. I think it was something to do with the orientation of the walkways. And everybody was starting to lean in and tell the designers what to do. And …
I'm a big believer that, you know, you hire great designers and then you let them work their magic. Right? That's why you hire great designers. And so I stood up and asked all the bureaucrats to come with me and everybody that wasn't core to the design team to come with me. And we were going to go have another conversation and just let the designers work it out. And I think you see that in the Overlook Walk. You see that in the MarketFront. You see that in the aquarium where, look – we invested, we the Royal we, we everybody, the city, the aquarium, the Market invested in the best local design minds and in JC one of the singularly best landscape architects in the world. And then allowed them to do their thing. And we imposed as much as we needed to in relation to budget realities and the political relationships around this thing.
But we were really conscious, and I talked to Marshall Foster a lot about this in the Office of the Waterfront, it's the conversation we had in the hallway after it was clear we were all at loggerheads. I was like, “Look, we got to trust our designers to solve this.” And that was a principle that we all embraced within some edges. If you let them just run completely, they're going to spend gazillions of dollars you don't have. But to really empower those brilliant designers to find the solution and they delivered. So there's a photo where you can see James Corner and David Miller standing in the breezeway looking out at the mouth of the Duwamish and knowing that they got it right. And so when the Overlook Walk is done, that whole connection, there's a flow through all of that.
Reflections on MarketFront Opening Day
DB: When you go through that now, obviously you don't go through every day and go, ”Oh, I built this.” But what do you take from that space when you're there now?
BFK: You know it's funny. So it's not done yet. And so I feel very fortunate to be working for Bob Davidson on the Aquarium Ocean Pavilion to see that across the finish line. I've told, and I think Marshall Foster agrees, he and I are both likely to cry when we're standing on top of the Overlook Walk and looking at the rooftop of the ocean pavilion and back at the MarketFront, right? It'll be well over a decade of our lives or more, lots of difficult negotiations. So that'll be the moment. When I go to the MarketFront today, though, I feel certainly super proud and I think about all the people that were involved in it. I can't help but think about the individual negotiations. I think about the businesses.
I actually still stop in and talk to the artist residents. And there's Rob and Bill Benjamin, Benjamin Bill that live there and are artists, and they have these little art studios. And once the Overlook Walk opens, they're going to be just on the main parade of people from downtown to the waterfront. And so those are the sort of things I think about.
Interestingly, there's only one place where my name shows up on the project today, and it's one of the little charms, and it's not quite what you'd expect, but you can't do a project like this without some people off. And so I actually have a charm. I didn't make it myself, but it says “F-U-B-F-K” and it's hanging on the fence. I can show you where it is today. I'm pretty sure I know who did that. But for me, Dominic and Jennifer, it's a great reminder of the importance of humility in the midst of all of that project, there were certainly a few conversations and a few relationships I didn't manage quite right.
You talked about the pressure. I think the pressure comes out in certain places. And so for me, it's a great reminder of the humility. In fact, I discovered this because I had bought five charms and I'd always wondered where my charms were. I had never found them. And so I happened to have a free evening, this was a couple years ago. I'm sort of looking through the fences and I found this one, and I sit down and at first I'm just like, “Oh fu -- this is,” and then within a few moments, I did exactly what you did. I started laughing and I realized it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. It was this gift because it was a reminder of – you're just this, you're not some great thing. You're not always perfect. And when I was director of the Market, I was always wondering when I was going to have my moment of infamy.
So Shelly Yapp's moment of infamy was, I think she had a Horsey cartoon, I don't know if it was David Horsey here or if it was like whoever Horsey – she had a cartoon of herself in The Seattle Times, mocking her for being the landlord. And I was always wondering when I was going to get my moment. So I took a picture of that charm and I emailed it out to all of my former board members and I shared this. I finally had my moment of infamy and it's forever memorialized in a charm on the MarketFront project.
JO: That might be the best Market story I've ever heard.
JO: It encapsulates the Market that you do this thing. It's all in the -
BFK: That's the only place it shows up.
JO: It's kind of perfect.
BFK: Yeah, no, that's what, and that's, I mean, I love it. I actually, I show it to people. I tell them the story because I think it's important.
JO: Yeah.
DB: Doesn't actually though. Is there deep down, beneath the laughter? Is there a little tear? I mean ...
BFK: I would say no. I will tell you, on opening day of the MarketFront, I had worked really hard to preserve core jobs. And so fifty percent, sixty percent of the Market workforce is union. Their local Teamsters Local 117. So you have very tough union intense negotiations. And I wanted to make sure that the MarketFront wasn't a distraction from the core of the Market itself. And we happened to be in the midst of negotiations. And the union printed a flyer that said that I had taken money from union workers to build the MarketFront and that the workers were regularly exposed to syringes and other dangers because I was not investing in their work or their wages appropriately. And they handed those flyers out at the opening of the MarketFront. And my daughter, who was six at the time, picked one up and wanted to know why I was hurting people with syringes. And Dominic, that was, I teared up, that one hurt, that one sucked. The F-U-B-F-K I think is a gift. I mean, it's just a ... I wasn't perfect. There were relationships I could have managed better. But that one, the flyer that sucked, but also out of the, I get off the stage with the mayor and my daughter's like, dad, why are you ...
Yeah, the same moment. Right? Wow. Yeah.
DB: What did you say to your daughter when she asked you about that leaflet?
BFK: I told her what was going on, and told her we were in the middle of negotiations and they're leveraging that, and what they said on the flyer is not true. And in fact, I had added not only security jobs, but increased salaries in that negotiation, so, and she, daughter took that. But it's not a great moment really. It still hurts.
And I never got, it's funny, I realize sitting here, I never actually got an apology from the union rep for that. And I think I should have.
DB: But I'm curious as to, and this is probably revealing a bit much about my own struggles. But how do you not carry that stuff with you? You do carry it obviously in some ways, but how do you ...
BFK: Most of it, you just try to, it's not you, right? So if you try to internalize everybody else's angst and anger, then you're carrying their stuff. It's not my stuff. My stuff is my relationship with my daughter. That's not harmed, although she's seventeen so I'm not the smartest guy on the planet from her perspective right now, but it's a good relationship.
You just can't carry it. You learn – I think in fairness, when you're in that position and you are constantly the target of public animosity, whether it's justified or not, you learn not to read the comments in The Seattle Times articles. You can build up a little bit of a flak jacket. You build some strength around you.
The trade-off, and this is why I'm so glad I'm not the director of the Pike Place Market anymore, the trade-off is that you end up inevitably shielding who you are from a huge amount of people, so that who you really are never gets targeted, if that makes sense. So you build these walls, this professional wall and this private wall. And when I was here, I took this to ludicrous levels. I kept a little credenza. It's a little cabinet in my office, and I kept all my clothes, my suit slacks and my shirts, here at the Market. I didn't iron them, so they were a little bit wrinkled. They smelled like the Market. I left them all here. And I took a combination of something my mom taught me when she was a kindergarten teacher and Mr. Rogers, right? I'd come in and then I'd put on my outfit and it'd become the Market director. And then I'd put what I'm wearing on to put my bike clothes on and then I'd go home and I never wore a button down shirt or slacks at home.
So I'd create those spaces where I'm leaving that and – the wrinkled clothes, my mom, when she was a kindergarten teacher, the first week of class she would wear the same clothes every day so that the students wouldn't get confused and they would know who she was and they didn't have questions. And I figured, Market's a pretty unique place, so I'm going to keep all the clothes here and I can't come out too pressed and dapper, because it's not really going to work.
And then the last piece of it is that Mr. Rogers transformation value. I had ...
The president of the Tennis Association in Santa Monica at the pier was a pretty tough lady. Still super tough. If my phone lights up with her number, I still get a little bit of a like, oh God, what does Chris want? But love her. She's just an amazing, amazing woman. And she told me this story about her grandfather who was a sheriff in the south. And he would stand outside the house, and I don't know if this story is true or not, but the message behind it, I think, works.
And he would stand outside the house and he would rub the leaves of this tree between his fingers before he came in. And as Chris tells us, she asked him once, "Papa, what are you doing? Why do you stand out there?" And he says, "I'm letting go of all the things I had to face today so I can come in and be present with my family."
So leaving the clothes at the Market, putting on my bike clothes, riding my bike home, all of that is very purposefully part of that to let that all stay where it needs to stay. It doesn't always work. I mean there's certainly times I'd get home and still be pissed off or still processing something, but at least trying.
Pike Place Market Bond Issue
BFK: We … as with any project that you have your eye on a certain number of funding sources and you always need a little bit more than you ever thought you needed, and so we had a little bit of the pie to fill in funding. And this needed to be Market funding. There was already a philanthropic campaign underway. We had the city and the state money locked in. We had new market tax credit deals. We had low income housing tax credit deals for the housing component. But we got to issue our own bonds. And the PDA, one of the unique authority abilities they have is they can actually issue bonds.
And the Market had only issued bonds through the city. So the city had issued the bonds and then the Market would, actually the PDA would get the money, but we actually issued our own bonds. So we tried to negotiate with the city for the balance of the funding and the terms of the deal were just too rich. And I can still remember, I think I was on a conference call, and I remember a couple of the council members saying, "This is way too expensive for the money. Let's go issue our own bonds." And I was like, "Holy crap, we've got six months to do this. We have to get this done in six months."
So working with Sabina Proto, who's the finance director, working with some great attorneys and financial advisors and key members of the council, we issued bonds, Pike Place Market bonds, for the first time ever. It was a hugely successful sale. We were able to … retire some existing debt that was higher interest, pay it off at a much lower interest rate, and so the annual debt, this is a miracle, I don't know how we managed to do this, but the annual debt payment for the Market actually went down, and we had every penny we needed to finish the MarketFront, and a little bit extra for some additional capital projects to make sure we connected with the Market completely.
So it was like this, that was an incredible experience, and these are the things I was hoping I would learn when I came to the Market. I learned about the levies, I learned about new market tax credits and if you tell me you want to issue bonds, I can pull the team together and we can do it. I know what it takes.
DB: That's amazing.
BFK: Yeah, and we did it in record time, and we had to go down to S&P in San Francisco. And I remember Sabina was very, very nervous. First and foremost because she rarely would travel without her family. I was incredibly nervous. I'd never been in front of Standard and Poor. And they grilled us about all the Market finances and the stability of the Market and our revenues and our projections on the commercial side and our parking and what would happen if one of them failed, because a pro forma is only as good as, well, what the reality is when you opened. And yeah, it was a great experience.
Why the Market Matters
BFK: I love this neighborhood and what's so great, I'm far enough away from being the director and nobody can get anything from me. I can't do anything for anybody. And I really enjoy this neighborhood again. I can walk around and I can get something to eat and it's one of the greatest treasures in our country for sure. It's such a unique place.
DB: Let me ask you about that. And this is honestly my last thing. Why does the Market matter, and why does it matter to you?
BFK: I think for me personally, and the Santa Monica Pier is the same way. They're venues that are incredibly democratic. It doesn't cost you a single thing to enjoy the Market. Sure, you can come and you can go to the restaurants and bars and you can buy the arts and crafts, but the cost of entry is just your feet, or the wheels that get you to the street here. And I think that's really important, and it's truly authentic.
It is a wild, wild neighborhood. But that commitment to access means – and I've shared this many, many times – you can walk down Pike Place and you can be next to a billionaire and a homeless person. The billionaire is the CEO of Starbucks. And in fact, Howard Schultz carried the key to store number one, even though we know store number one's not really store number one, it was around the corner, but it's store number one in spirit.
Had the key to store number one on his key chain, and he would go to that store sometimes late at night just to recenter, in where Starbucks started, and he handed that key off to his predecessor. So you can be walking next to a billionaire. The homeless person is going to the medical clinic. They have an appointment. They also have business in the Market. So they're both here, they belong. And that's the experience on the street. And that to me is, that's what makes it so amazing. It's not overly sanitized. I actually, I hate Disneyland. My wife and daughter love to go to Disneyland. I will go once every four years or five years maybe. I love that the Market has, the garbage is on the street in the bins. The business is being conducted. It's all right there. It's just an amazing place that way. I think it, was it Mark Toby, was it Mark Toby that said it? "The Market is an honest place in a phony time." Was it Tobey, or who was it that said that?
JO: That wasn't Tobey, but I don't know who said that.
BFK: It was part of that group though. It was Mark Tobey was the painter and maybe it was Victor Steinbrueck who said that.
JO: Maybe, yeah.
BFK: I don't ... One of the, and that, it still is. It's an honest place. It's real.
DB: That goes to, that does go to the tension though, that you must be aware of this yourself, of just having a place that is this draw for tourists and how do you maintain it in a way that is livable for quote unquote, normal people, not, tourists. How do you keep it as a living place that isn't a museum piece, that isn't an exhibition. It's not – where you strike that balance? Because obviously that homeless person is, there's a human tragedy playing out.
BFK: Yeah. Well, that's why the senior center, I think is still the single largest meal provider by meal than any restaurant in the Market. I think the senior center provides the most dinners and lunches and breakfast.
You know it's the perpetual existential crisis. The tourists feed the beast. They feed the Market. They buy a lot of the artwork and patronize a lot of the restaurants and bars. And I think you have to be constantly vigilant when you look at the arc of history for the Market. We had up until World War II, we still had hundreds of farmers in the Market. And with Japanese internment and Executive Order 90 ...
JO: 66.
BFK: 66, thank you. We lost hundreds of farmers overnight. And those things can never be forgotten. There's a mural that talks about that right under the clock and sign. And so you know for decades now, the Market has had that challenge of maintaining itself as a farmer's market. But underlying that, I think one of the things that keeps this place really as that truly democratic and honest place is the charter of the PDA, that separation of powers, if you will, between the Market historic commission and the landlord.
And then the mix of housing. Stewart House is low-income senior housing. End of the Market is the most expensive boutique hotel in downtown Seattle. Same view, same street. You can't ever lose that. It would be a horrible tragedy, horrible tragedy, if the Market were ever to take the low-income housing units and turn them into market rate units. That would be the single thing that I guarantee would destroy this neighborhood. And so the fact that you have over fifty percent of the units by charter that are low income housing units, either SROs or dedicated low income senior housing, that's where the magic lies.
