Waterfront trolley may close

Metro's top officials say they have little option but to shut down the waterfront streetcar indefinitely this fall so the Seattle Art Museum can move forward with building its Olympic Sculpture Park — a prospect that angers at least one of the downtown neighborhoods served by the vintage trolley line.

"We would lose an important transportation link from the waterfront to our neighborhood," said Craig Montgomery, executive director of the Pioneer Square Community Association. "It's as if no one is considering the impacts to the districts along the route."

The waterfront streetcar, a popular Seattle tourist attraction, carries 400,000 riders a year, peaking during the summer. It bears the name of its champion, former City Councilman George Benson, who died last October. The line, which began in May 1982 and cost $3.3 million to build, has nine stops stretching from the Chinatown International District to Pier 70.

The museum's $85 million sculpture park, set to open in the summer of 2006, will be a green space for people to experience art for free. Being built on a former industrial site north of Broad Street, the park would extend to the Elliott Bay seawall and Myrtle Edwards Park.

But the streetcar system's maintenance facility takes up 2.5 acres of the 8.5-acre site, and museum officials have been resolute that the barnlike structure, which is integral to the operation of the streetcar system, does not fit into the park's design. The museum plans to begin constructing the sculpture park in May and figures the maintenance barn would have to be demolished by September.

"It is up to Metro and King County whether it is feasible to move the barn," said Erika Lindsay, public-relations associate for the museum. "We do not want to stop the streetcar from functioning."

Metro would replace the streetcars with buses, possibly dolled up to set them apart from the rest of the fleet. Montgomery, however, said a bus lacks the ambiance and lure of a streetcar.

"In a historic district like Pioneer Square, it is important to have elements that make us different," he said. "When you start tearing those pieces away, we become just like every other neighborhood."

Frustrated in its attempts over the past year to find another site for the maintenance barn, Metro is likely to mothball the streetcars and suspend service — possibly forever, said Kevin Desmond, Metro's general manager.

"What we're running into is a timing problem," he said.

It also is a matter of achieving long-term value for a multimillion-dollar investment because Metro officials believe the life of any new barn could be brief.

Desmond said the streetcar line would have been shut down anyway during construction to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and the streetcar line's fate beyond that is uncertain. If a streetcar system were to remain in a redeveloped waterfront, the four-car vintage fleet could be obsolete if the line extends north and east as part of a modern transit system, Desmond said.

One of Metro's options for replacing the maintenance facility focused on private land on Main Street, between Fourth and Fifth Avenues. But the Chinatown International District prefers those parcels for commercial instead of industrial use and would want the maintenance barn to be part of a mixed-use development.

Desmond said that complicates the project and adds to its $13 million cost. He also estimated such a project wouldn't be completed until 2008 — one year before the city and state hope to begin construction of the viaduct's replacement.

Montgomery said his Pioneer Square constituents are flabbergasted that Metro is making decisions on whether to build a replacement maintenance facility on the assumption that viaduct construction would begin that soon.

"The funding's not even put together yet," he said. "To be basing a decision on that start date is irresponsible and smacks of some other interest. I don't know what that interest is, but it just doesn't make any sense to us."

That other interest may be the Seattle Art Museum. Officials believe there's no place for the streetcar barn in the sculpture park, which they say will have a huge economic benefit to Seattle.

"Our projection is 600,000 visitors in the first year," said Chris Rogers, the museum's director of capital projects. "Based on the performances of really great sculpture parks in other cities, we believe ours will be a top-five destination for visitors to Seattle, not just for the art but also for the open space overlooking Elliott Bay."

The maintenance facility is on land owned by the city's Parks Department, a partner with the museum on the sculpture park.

Metro's other options for a new streetcar barn also included a 2/3-mile track extension to its central bus-maintenance facility, south of downtown, at a cost of $14 million to $15 million. Desmond said that idea also had its flaws, as it would be a "track to nowhere" and would disrupt the Chinatown International District during construction.

Other alternatives were too expensive, Desmond said.

Although 1999 designs for the sculpture park called for tearing down the maintenance barn, King County did not ask Metro to study alternative sites until late 2003. Until then, the park site was seen as a possible location for a tunnel to replace the viaduct — an option no longer being pursued. Metro spent much of last year studying options, but Montgomery said Pioneer Square constituents learned only last week of Metro's conundrum.

"They came to us not to discuss this but rather to tell us what's going to happen," he said. "It came as a complete surprise and shock to the neighborhood."

Desmond said Metro was reluctant to present information without a clear sense of where the project was headed.

"No one went into this study thinking long-term cessation of waterfront-streetcar service," he said. But as it turns out, "there is no good solution to this problem."

Montgomery said Pioneer Square will oppose the demise of the streetcar.

"There should be a solution here where [the museum] gets its sculpture park, the barn is replaced and the streetcar gets to continue to operate until viaduct construction is a reality," he said.

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