Before and after Renton’s Piazza Park

This was the 1970s view on Renton’s South Third Street, about three decades before we purchased the car dealership and and the Sporting Goods store (on the left) for park use. (Photo credit Renton Historical Society)

This is the same location 55 years later, about two decades after we purchased and planted the Piazza and Gateway Park. (Photo credit Google Maps)

In my second term on Renton City Council I helped tip the scales in a 4-3 vote to purchase a car dealership in downtown Renton, and build the Piazza Park and Pavilion Event Center.  All seven councilmembers and the Mayor were soon on board, creating the beautiful garden-style Piazza Park Renton has been enjoying for the past 25 years.  We tore out the dealership parking lot, and added pretty stained-concrete patios, lawns, trees, shrubs and benches. We incorporated two impressive water features into the new park: a formal cascading fountain and a 40-foot babbling stream.  We eventually acquired the aging sporting goods store as well, giving us space for Gateway Park and food trucks, and room for another future building which several of us thought might be a public arts and crafts studio and market.

On May 14, 1997 the Seattle Times published an article titled  “Is Jet City Finally Taking Off? — Projects Bringing New Look To Blue-Collar Hub”

“Renton, the little city with industrial shoulders on Lake Washington’s southern shore, suddenly is on the verge of coolness.”….“To help, the city is building a 1 1/2-acre plaza in the heart of town scheduled for completion next spring. The Piazza Project, at Burnett Avenue South and South Third Street, will anchor downtown businesses and provide a focal point with benches and trees, a fountain and amphitheater.  In addition, the city will redevelop a 15,000-square-foot building on the site for possible use as a public market or festival and banquet hall.”

We also remodeled the dealership showroom into the Pavilion Event Center with the help of Mithun Architects, the award-winning firm that designed REI’s flagship store in Seattle.  The design highlighted the historic old-growth wooden bow-string roof trusses, that gave the room unobstructed space, and we surrounded the 12,000-square-foot open space on three sides with unobstructed glass. New glass “garage-style doors” could be opened by rolling them up in the summer, creating indoor-outdoor pedestrian flow.  Mithun helped us tear out the cement-slab floor, and excavate a two-foot deep crawl space in the building that allowed us to distribute conditioned air throughout the building and run electrical and plumbing, without visually impacting the open space. We topped the crawlspace with carpeted “plenum floor panels” that distributed air throughout, and could be lifted for easy maintenance of the system below. The event center brought tens of thousands of visitors per year to our downtown, many of them for the first time.

Today, the Piazza and Gateway Park are closed and torn up for construction of a mini soccer pitch, the addition of a million-dollar jumbotron  TV, removal of the water features, a modest “log-pile” playspace, the removal of  77% of the trees in the Piazza, and the addition of more Piazza pavement.  I’m personally not a fan of these changes. I actually feel like they are taking us backwards.

The Pavilion is also being changed, along with the Piazza.  The engineered plenum floor has been thrown away, the crawl space has been filled in with gravel, and a new cement floor has been poured.  Partition walls are being added, and HVAC equipment and ducting is being installed in the bow trusses.  The building is looking more like it did when the car dealer had it. It will host a small meeting room and still-unknown collection of retailers and venders (Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick is shown in one city chart).

All we would have to do is park some cars for sale in the Piazza, play an advertisement on the Jumbotron, and we will have come full circle.

While I would not have chosen these changes, they are well underway, so I can only hope they turn out to be popular long-term.  I ask our Public Works Department and elected officials to dedicate the time, energy and perseverance to making sure their changes are improvements, and that taxpayers get real value for the $12.8 million we are investing.  Maybe one day I’ll decide they were a good idea, but I’m certainly not convinced of that yet.

The “plenum floor” of the Pavilion has been torn out (photo from City presentation)

The crawl space has been filled in with gravel (photo from City of Renton)

A concrete floor, partition walls, and overhead heating systems are being installed in the Pavilion (photo from City presentation)

The 40-foot-long babbling stream, trees, vegetation, and “Summer Breeze” artwork have been removed from the Piazza to make room for more pavement. (City of Renton photo)