Monday, May 18, 2009

Dead Projects: Selig's Folly

Back in the seventies and eighties, Martin Selig's name was everywhere. If any given project was worth developing, Selig & Co. were in on it. Things have changed quite a bit in the meantime. Personally, I haven't heard Selig's name mentioned in years. So it was interesting to see Selig's handle on this project at 3rd & Battery:

If you look close enough at the artist's rendition you'll how inaccurate it really is: there aren't any bums pushing shopping carts full of garbage down the street, no obviously crazy people anywhere and nobody's looking for a sheltered nook where they can smoke crack. Come on, people, we're talking about 3rd Avenue here!

So Martin Selig's big dream is to build a towering three-story thingamajob here. Well, he'll have to demolish the existing building, a one-story brick structure from the fifties that used to be home to the famous Exotique Imports, a record store that had a few very weird things. Observe:


Now it looks like the only business left, if any, is something called the Free Sheep Foundation:

Everybody knows that free sheep are the most dangerous. Anyhow, these signs have been up for a long time. This project isn't happening. It's dead. Even 3rd Ave. doesn't need this puny effort at legitimacy. Martin Selig, this project is lame and you know it. If you're gonna build, build big. Three stories is ridiculous. I mean, even an 11th-century English peasant wouldn't be impressed. To the best of my knowledge, this project won't be happening. But if it does, we'll lose a really trippy piece of parking lot art:

Somebody call M.C. Escher. Tell him to get real scared!

1 comment:

Jim said...

Selig's name was once synonymous with Belltown, then with Seattle itself (the early and late 80s, respectively). Now with even bigger real estate speculators defaulting on their loans, he has gone back to his old haunts to start the cycle over again. And here is the website of the Free Sheep Foundation: http://freesheepfree.org/