Fell on Black Days

I wrote a piece for The Urbanist that claimed, on the basis of the public calendar, that the Arch is dark^[1] most of the year. The CEO sent me different numbers. I requested the full details via public records request, and SCC responded quickly, and I'm glad they did. It's good for everyone if we have a set of facts upon which we can all agree.

I had based my assessment on the SCC website's public calendar, which listed 115 event days in 2025 — implying 250 days with no activity. SCC's internal records, which include events not listed on the website calendar, show the Arch had 194 event days^[2] and 274 use days that year. And so it's official: the Arch is not dark most of the year.

But it's not all light and sunshine either.

What I care about as a local resident is the street-level experience on Pike Street. So how do we reconcile the official counts with my personal experience of walking through what feels like a dead corridor?

Let's take this one side of the street at a time.

The Arch has two addresses. 705 Pike, on the south side of Pike Street, is open daily. 800 Pike, across the street, has its own entrance — almost always locked.

In 2019, 800 Pike logged 184 event days over 74 events. In 2025, 60 days for 40 events. Much of the remaining activity is on the upper floors: Tahoma and the rooms adjacent to Hall 4EF, accessed via the Skybridge from the convention center's main halls. When a major convention runs Hall 4EF, it often books rooms in 800 Pike as overflow — without opening the street-facing entrance.

Thirty-eight events used the lower floors in 2019, spanning 101 event days.^[3] In 2025, only 12 events used the lower floors, and of those, just seven actually opened the street entrance — on 22 days in an entire year.^[4]

On the south side, 705 Pike is a different story — it's open from morning until night. But the small meeting rooms map a similar arc of decline. The Galleria breakout rooms — Level 2 and Level 3 — hosted 122 events in 2019. Since the Summit opened with larger, more numerous meeting rooms, bookings have dropped by more than half: 41 in 2023, 48 in 2025.

The Skybridge zone — Hall 4EF and the Level 3 breakout rooms — is the building's functional core: high-ceiling, column-free exhibit space that large professional conventions still book. It's the Arch's most resilient zone. The Skybridge itself is also the building's one street-visible signal — colored lights and movement when active, visible from Pike Street below.

The Atrium Lobby — a soaring interior space adjacent to Freeway Park, at the top of a series of escalators from Pike Street — is the most striking room in the building. But it rarely fills independently. When it does, it's usually as part of an event that books the whole building: the Northwest Flower & Garden Festival runs Hall 4ABCDEF — both zones at once. The most beautiful space in the Arch generates the least demand on its own.

The 6th floor — ballrooms and upper meeting rooms, reached through the Atrium — has windows facing Freeway Park, tinted. Galas, plenary sessions, training events. Nothing registers on Pike Street.

What all four zones have in common: none of them signal their own activity from the street. The Summit's Hillclimb — a glass-enclosed stairway running the full height of the Pine Street facade — shows you people moving inside. The Arch has no equivalent. The Atrium Lobby is at the top of a series of escalators from Pike Street. The 6th floor is two escalators up. The Skybridge zone is reached across a bridge above Pike Street. The one street-visible signal is the Skybridge itself — colored lights and movement, when something is happening.

This is why my original piece called the building dark. A locked door on one side of the street. A trickle of people on the other. Call them black days: not because the building is technically empty, but because you can't feel any warmth radiating out of it.

SCC is looking at these same numbers — the decline in Arch usage isn't news to them. The neighborhood is looking at this same street — the sparse activity isn't news to us. And the architects who built the Summit as an ant farm already know what street-level presence at the Arch looks like.

What will make news is whatever SCC has planned for the Arch in the forthcoming Campus Master Plan (about which I'll have more to say in a future Dispatch).

But for now, it's sufficient to establish that we're looking at the same numbers.