Doing The Ave -- Quirky U-District: The Good, The Bad And The Bell- Bottoms - All In One Place

THE UNIVERSITY DISTRICT'S main drag is no sanitized shopping mall. The Ave is a walkable, somewhat wacky street with loads of potential. Now it needs fresh thinking and bold leadership to remarket, restock and reinvigorate itself as a city hot spot.

MEANDER down University Way, from Northeast 52nd to Campus Parkway. Buy a book, criss-cross the street, consider the panhandlers' pitches, catch a film, have a decent, cheap lunch. If Disney built truly realistic theme parks, this is what Urban Universityland would look like.

Within these seven blocks is all the stuff, good and bad, that's part of a retail district piggybacked on a city's university campus. The Ave, as University Way is known, is a scruffy spot; appealingly free of trendy bistros and tourist lures. It's got the oddball energy of a place where Safeco suits and poets with pierced eyebrows pass on the street; where you can order a beer with your bran muffin, pay for it all in nickels and dimes, and no one will blink.

The Ave's weathered a lot of ups and downs in the last half-century. Right now business is not booming. This makes no sense.

It's minutes off Interstate 5, located on several Metro bus routes. It's a long meander with no hills, lots of storefronts, and 100,000 square feet of an excellent university bookstore. Seattle Police Department crime stats show the area has less in the way of theft and violent crimes than much of the city. There are 50,000 students and staff at the University of Washington - and many of them need books, muffins and beer.

So what's the problem? Ask a dozen people, you'll get the same list: no parking, dirty streets, too many kids panhandling, not enough nice retail stores. These are not fatal flaws. Help is already on the way for some; now what's needed is some unquenchable leadership and a bit of creative thinking.

Myth-busting and problem-solving

First, the ubiquitous list:

Parking: Call the myth busters - The Ave needs a hot marketing campaign to hype the good stores that are still there and to correct the perception that parking is nonexistent. There are thousands of parking places within walking distance of The Ave. (At least 1,100 are owned by the University District Parking Association, local business people who had the foresight in the late 1940s to begin buying up land for parking lots.)

Lots of merchants validate parking, with generous rates that would make some of those cheapskates downtown squirm.

Next, get more shopper traffic with a "circulator bus" traveling frequently between University Village, the major campus parking lots and The Ave.

Of course, Metro will pay for this sort of service right after it adds latte bars to all inner-city buses. Until then, how about a corporate sponsor? The company name in neon atop atop your spiffy bus that allows shoppers, workers and students to park at University Village or in their campus space and carry out errands. Or maybe leave their cars home entirely. (Oh, jeez. What was I thinking? Forget I said that.)

One major problem with The Ave is the shortage of UW people. Many do their shopping elsewhere. (A study done by the UW Office of Community Affairs confirms this reality, says director Christine Knowles.) An easy-to-use circulator service could change that pattern in short order.

Dirty Streets. Litter always hurts business, even in New York City, where small dogs frequently disappear under a sea of used condoms and gum wrappers. Here, where people willingly sort their trash into 15 color-coded bins, it kills business. The Ave area's 270 property owners and businesses have started paying for daily street cleaning via dues to a Business Improvement Association. Flower baskets will come out of BIA funds as well.

Besides the BIA projects is an effort to get the city to cough up money to repair and widen The Ave's jagged sidewalks.

Involving all the locals - not just business people's wallets - would help too. When the Denny Regrade got fed up with trash, the neighborhood's business group organized a trash-container painting contest. People will walk half a block out of their way just to throw garbage into a bin painted to resemble a hot-pink cactus. Whatever works.

Young loiterers and panhandlers. This is the tough one. But it's also the issue where the most progress has been made with business-citizen-university-police cooperation.

Businesses don't like the young loiterers, who usually can't spend much money but may scare off the people who can. Police and private guards (the new BIA pays for part-time security on The Ave) can keep troublemakers moving, but the underlying problem of a young homeless population isn't solved by shifting kids from one corner to another.

The Partnership for Youth, started three years ago by a handful of people worried about street kids, is now a far-reaching group drawing from the UW, business, housing and social-service programs. The Partnership got a county-funded "street school" for kids up and running at the U-District Youth Center. And Partnership coordinator Nancy Amidei says it's gearing up to offer respite care for kids who need bed rest but who are not ill enough for hospital admission.

An old argument still surfaces - that offering more services will just attract more kids. If you hear anyone floating this logical-sounding but faulty theory, set them straight. It's wrong. As Amidei likes to point out: "The kids were here before the services."

Plus, the city's youngest street-dwellers are concentrated on Broadway and The Ave for two reasons: Hanging out near city campuses is de rigueur for teens, and they are easy places for homeless kids and runaways to blend in with the crowd.

One thing that can be forgotten in the kids-are-bad-for-the-neighborhood discussion is a terrible reality: Many of those kids are on the street because they have no other choice; for some, the street is safer than their own living rooms.

People who've spent years working to get kids off the streets will keep at it with various street-level programs, and they rightly see the need for bigger changes as well.

"We have about 500 kids in King County who call the street home," says David Cousineau, director of Seattle Children's Home and founder of Street Links, a late-night mobile service that brings necessities and support to kids. "We've accepted that there must be a certain number living this way. Now we need to say, `In our city it is totally and absolutely unacceptable for a child to live on the street. Period.' "

Cousineau and many of his ilk believe it's possible for philanthropic, education, business, police and citizen communities to come together and back a big-picture solution: creation of small group homes in as many as 50 different neighborhoods.

This approach makes sense - morally and economically. Cousineau has been pushing the idea to business leaders, and smart people are listening.

More and better retail. Doubling the number of good retail establishments on The Ave would interrupt the Catch-22. As things stand, without all the nice touches that bring in more shoppers, top retailers aren't likely to move to The Ave. And without thriving retail, all the improvements will be slow in coming.

Someone has to cross the dance floor first . . . and there is some movement going on: new condo complexes underway within walking distance; a public-private partnership with Lorig Associates (the firm that turned schools on Queen Anne Hill and in Wallingford Center into cool apartments). Lorig will reopen the Commodore-Dutchess Apartments just off The Ave for married graduate students. These are the sort of housing endeavors that will create a market for more, better retail.

A long-running tussle about what to do with the eyesore Arcade (formerly J.C. Penny's) on The Ave is finally sorted out. The top two floors are UW office space and the main floor will open soon as a Wizards of the Coast gaming center for the local company's popular computer games.

Too much time was spent arguing over how best to use the space, which gathered dust and graffiti in the meantime. Whether the outcome was worth the wait is debatable, but at least the office and upscale gaming will add traffic for local eateries and other businesses.

At the same time, more serious wooing of attractive retailers is needed. The Ave has a good core group of longtime merchants. Some, such as La Tienda Folk Art Gallery, Magus Books, Porter and Jensen Jewelers and Wooly Mammoth, continue to draw students as well as longtime customers from throughout the city. Other longtime merchants are now expanding to take advantage of the growing market for vintage goods, as have the owners of The New Store.

But this core community is too small to overcome the minuses of the area, both real and perceived. Without new blood, residents in new housing will simply follow the current pattern, skirting The Ave in favor of University Village or elsewhere.

No shortage of activists

It isn't that The Ave and the U-District lack forward-thinkers or citizen involvement. Probably no corner of the city has done more brainstorming and planning. It's got an articulate, realistic chamber of commerce president. And for the most part, the retailers, old-timers and newcomers, are an optimistic bunch, jazzed about the future, which includes a piece of the Regional Transit Authority plan.

"The great glory of it is that people actually do get along here," says Patty Whisler, longtime resident and you-name-it-she's-been-on-it planning committee member. "And we know that along with cosmetic changes, we need to build in a kind of diversity that will be sustainable . . . restaurants, services for young people, student-oriented stores and shops. We also need things to draw an older, more affluent crowd back to The Ave."

The BIA is a well-intentioned move in the right direction; now some more muscle is needed. Most of all the U-District needs a macher, a pushy bigshot with plenty of ideas and all day long to boost them. Someone to put all his or her energy into going after new business, backing up the willing but somewhat overwhelmed merchants already in place, and getting University types and city officials to buy in and help where they can.

There was a time when the president from one of a neighborhood's banks would be the natural leader, pulling the right mix of property owners and politicians together, pushing the city and county to change zoning, pay for improvements and beef up public transportation. With neighborhood banks a thing of the past - even regional banks are almost extinct - so is that sort of leader.

Worse scenarios have been fixed all over the city, from Pioneer Square to the Denny Regrade. Half as much support for the front yard of our largest university could propel The Ave into better times.

Until a de facto Mayor of The Ave surfaces, intense interest on the part of one or two city council members would spark some action. Not just a week here or a month there devoted to one U-District issue.

Giving The Ave the attention it deserves for, say an entire year, could turn the energy and character of Urban Universityland into one of the city's hot spots.

(Kimberly B. Marlowe's e-mail address is kmar-new@seatimes.com)