August 2007

Families Living Downtown:
Growing up in the Shadow of Hammering Man

By Linda John

“Where do you buy your groceries?”

Perhaps not the most riveting of questions, yet that’s what comes out of my mouth each time I talk with parents who are raising their families in downtown Seattle. The answer (Trader Joe’s on Madison Avenue, Uwajimaya, occasionally Whole Foods and, of course, the Pike Place Market) isn’t as revealing as the fact that, to some of us, the mundane aspects of daily living are front and center in our minds. If we think about moving downtown with children, we anticipate roadblocks instead of the richness of urban living.

George and Marina Woodall see the payoffs on a daily basis, living on First Avenue and University Street, just on the edge of the Market. Their 7-year-old daughter Greta’s weekday routine starts with a walk through the Benaroya Hall corridor, under a Dale Chihuly art installation and out past the Hammering Man sculpture at the Seattle Art Museum. She knows the vendors at the Pike Place Market, visits the Central Library several times a week and knows that the dock on Pier 56 is a great place to be at the end of the day. Downtown is her neighborhood, just as other families within the city limits identify with Madison Park, Columbia City, Wedgwood, South Park or Ballard.

An incredible sense of community is what Bellen Drake, a photographer, and Charles Mudede, an editor at The Stranger, found for their family soon after moving into the Tashiro Kaplan Building on Prefontaine Place three years ago. Seventeen children then lived in the 50-unit building, known as TK Lofts, that houses affordable live/work spaces for artists and their families. Today, a newborn baby lives next door to the Drake-Mudede family; upstairs a preteen and teenager practice their violins. With spaces as large as 1,800 square feet, the TK has room for families and, more importantly, the residents have an attitude that welcomes them.

Tricycles cruise down the long, wide hallways and Nerf or soccer balls bounce off the walls. The artful common courtyard offers lovely private and quiet outdoor space that is, in fact, much larger than many Seattle yards. A resident dancer once offered weekly classes for families in the building. And each December, families bake together and exchange cookies.

Drake and her two children, 6-year-old daughter, Delphi, and 11-year-old son, Eben, walk nearly everywhere and, like other families living in the downtown core, are experts at Metro bus routes. On sunny summer days, Waterfall Garden in Pioneer Square is a top choice for cooling off close to home; a direct bus to Lake Washington makes it easy to play at the beach. On rainy days, the garage in their buildings has safe space and an ideally smooth surface for riding bikes and scooters. And no matter what the weather, a swing inside their large loft beckons.

Still, with as active as the Drake-Mudede family is, the question Drake hears most often is: “Where do you go so your kids can play outside?”

Her reply: “Where do you go so your kids can see art?”

“People have a lot of questions about how we get around and how we do things,” says Lisa Lukas, a Montessori preschool teacher who lives with her husband Neil, a photographer, and their two children on the top floor of TK Lofts. “Then they come to our place and the questions stop. They totally get it.”

In addition to museums, varied music venues and the convenience of being downtown, Lukas wants her children, 11-year-old Nicole and 15-year-old Michael, to be comfortable. “Living comfortably wherever they want to be in the world means being aware of the people around them,” says Lukas. She’s noticed that some of their friends who visit them downtown have “no idea that there are other people around them.”

“It’s not hard to live in the country,” she continues. “You have to think more to live in the city.”

Where Do You Go to School?

There isn’t a public elementary school in downtown proper, but Seattle Public Schools provides yellow bus transportation to Bailey Gatzert, Orca, Lowell, Summit and other elementary schools families may choose. The lack of a “neighborhood” downtown school has been an issue for some adults in the past few years, but it isn’t actually any different than dozens of other areas in Seattle. You can certainly find children on the same block in North Seattle going to three or four different elementary schools.

The Lukas family’s two children go to Washington Middle School and Garfield High School, both of which are all-city draws for public school placement. Their friends are from all over Seattle, but they’re in the center, with direct bus routes going to outlying neighborhoods. Michael has a 10-minute bus ride to Garfield, much more palatable than the more than hour a day he spent on the bus when the family lived in West Seattle. He rows after school at the Mount Baker Rowing and Sailing Center on Lake Washington, then hops on Metro bus No. 39 to get home.

Lisa Lukas and Bellen Drake gave up their cars after their families moved downtown. Both have tried Flex Car, but rely mainly on Metro, walking everywhere and occasionally calling a taxi. Drake walks her children a few blocks to catch their buses to school before she begins her own work day.

Looking Out for One Another

Eben and Delphi are regulars at All-City Coffee downstairs from their apartment on Prefontaine Place. (Eben often says “My mom will pay later,” and the owners know his word is good.) In fact, the siblings are regulars at many downtown and Pioneer Square shops, helping create the sense of community that parents crave. “People are respectful of the kids,” Drake says. “They’re known as individuals, not just as ‘Bellen’s kids.’ You get the sense that everyone’s watching out for everyone else around here.”

The children are watching out for others, too. During a snowstorm, the gorgeous southeast window wall of the Drake-Mudede apartment displayed a magical winter view, but just down the street homeless people huddled in doorways seeking relief from the cold.

“It opens up conversations on real issues,” says Drake, who works at a shelter. “We talked about what we could to do to be helpful and what you can do to make a difference.” Sharing hot tea and warm clothes were an immediate answer.

Can You Afford to Live Here?

The cost of living downtown can seem prohibitive to families who read newspaper headlines about condo development downtown, in Belltown and in the South Lake Union neighborhood. The average price per square foot for a downtown condo was $489 in 2006. Some places, such as the hotel-condominium Olive 8, are selling at more than $700 per square foot; the Four Seasons near the Market, another hotel-condo combo, has prices on the top floors exceeding $2,000 per square foot. These aren’t exactly the kind of prices that attract people raising children.

“For whatever reason, people are afraid to try downtown living,” says Lukas. “Maybe they’re afraid of giving up their yard or of not having two cars.” She points to lack of apartments designed for families as another roadblock. “There’s lots of talk about family living downtown, but many of the buildings going in are studios or small one- bedrooms, making it difficult for anyone to live downtown – even a single person who would need a roommate to share expenses.”

The south end of downtown, near Pioneer Square, and the older buildings around the Pike Place Market are more in line with apartment rentals throughout the city.

Anyone working in downtown Seattle will notice that there are more children – and dogs – out and about before and after work than there were a few years ago. More yellow school buses maneuver the streets than in previous years. More kids are on Metro buses, running errands with their parents. Seeing children downtown brings a vibrancy to Seattle that we may not have realized we missed. It also reaches us on a different level, reminding us that downtown is a community.

“The city needs to know they have children to take care of,” says George Woodall.

Only 20 percent of households in Seattle have a child under 18, according to the 2000 Census. That makes Seattle second only to San Francisco for the fewest number of children living in a metropolitan area. In Seattle’s urban core, which includes downtown Seattle and South Lake Union, that number dives to only 4 percent. For King County, outside of Seattle city limits, 37 percent of households have a child.

Clearly, Seattle is no mini Manhattan or Brooklyn or Boston, and is not even on par with Vancouver, B.C., when it comes to living in an urban core. Yet the working families interviewed for this story are forging the way, giving the rest of us a glimpse of the richness of downtown living.

Several years ago, after a particularly full and lovely day spent downtown with her two children, Drake visualized living downtown and, like many of us, attached “someday” or “if things were different” to the daydream. “I wondered, do I have to wait for my children to be grown before I can enjoy this every day?” Drake says.

The next day she heard about affordable live/work spaces and a movement to bring artists and their families downtown. She realized that not only did she not have to wait for her children to grow up, but that she and Mudede wanted that vivid urban experience to be shared with their children. They moved downtown within a year.

I’ve long fantasized about urban living in a city like New York or Chicago or San Francisco or, more recently, my hometown of Seattle. I’m letting my mind wrap around it while I look out Drake’s magnificent downtown windows, up toward Yesler Way. Her daughter, Delphi, and a friend are playing in the living and dining area of the family loft.

“What’s your favorite thing about living here?” I ask Delphi, realizing as the words come out that “here” can mean many things.

“Sapphire,” Delphi immediately answers, with a nod toward the family cat. It’s the perfect answer from an astute 6-year-old.

Family should always be the best thing about wherever you live.

Linda Johns is a parent and a librarian at the Seattle Public Library’s Central Library. She is the author of Hannah West in the Belltown Towers (Penguin Young Readers, 2006), a children’s mystery set in downtown Seattle, as well as Hannah West in Deep Water (Penguin 2006), set in the Lake Washington houseboat community, and Hannah West in the Center of the Universe (Penguin, 2007), set in Fremont.

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