Archive

The Seattle Sports Commission's Region Ready program is turning Pacific Place into a stadium annex. What that reveals about downtown activation — and who does it.

One Friday a month, downtown Seattle finds its rhythm. A dispatch from the February Fourth Friday art walk through the convention district.

25,000 fans will pack the convention center this week. Here's what's outside the doors.

Convention center debt service nearly doubles in 2030. To cover it, Seattle hotel revenue would need to grow 9% every year for six years straight.

A one-bedroom on Pike Street rents for $2,444 a month. You can see the Summit building from your window. The PFD pays $2,426 a year to own the empty lot on the other side of it.

Who needs sports bars when we have the Arch?

Seattle Convention Center claims $1.4 million in profit following a $1.9 billion investment. Let's do the math.

Playing games at Sakura-Con

Eleven works of Pacific Northwest art just joined Seattle's collection of hidden gems.

How convention center food works

EVENT RAP freestyled the commons argument at the Arch. The op-ed landed in The Urbanist. And a GeekWire piece from Sammamish asks a question that lands closer to home than it looks.

On June 1, a new public-safety facility opens inside the Seattle Convention Center. It's called C-STAR. What else do we know about it?

It's all just a big misunderstanding, right? This isn't what it looks like, isn't that so? Hello? I even made you a sign.

Ferguson fills empty seat with Roundtable CEO -- five other seats expire July 30.

New wayfinding just dropped! Follow at your own risk

A utilization analysis of Seattle Convention Center, based on their own records.

The Seattle Convention Center confirmed it has no sanctuary policy — with a new "Public Safety Hub" opening June 1.

Renderings obtained through a public-records request show C-STAR as a glass Pike Street storefront — designed with the police department, the Downtown Seattle Association, and the city's CARE team at the table.

A full room on First Hill turned out to talk about the building next door — who runs it, where the money goes, and what a neighborhood with a long civic memory might ask for before the next expansion.

Seattle Convention Center wants to host the city's graduations. And speaking of valedictorians, guess who earned the BEST MANAGED award and a Smart Star?

Seattle just licensed twenty years of its public sidewalks to a Columbus billboard company. The neighborhoods that will host the kiosks were never asked — and the city is last in line for the money.

What a downtown public institution actually costs, who watches it, and the facility at 810 Pike.

The contempt for AI "slop" is earned — but aimed at the wrong thing. The problem was never that a machine helped; it's whether the work punches up, is sourced one claim at a time, signed, checkable, and disclosed for a reason.

Seattle was voted the best World Cup host city in the country, and the only one where air travel fell instead of rose. The crowds that packed the waterfront were local — which is exactly the argument for running our convention center as Seattle's living room for the whole region, not a hotel-room machine.

The Convention Center is redrawing its whole campus. Three firms submitted three very different visions of what it is for — and the choice was made last August, with no public hearing. Take the pick yourself, then meet the three plans.

What does the death of a Cheesecake Factory say about the convention center across the street? And what must happen to fill the void on both sides of Pike?

I rushed the numbers out for National Hot Dog Day. Then I did them properly — and the case got stronger.

The convention center's new safety hub is nearly open — and it turns out there was nothing to hide.

For six weeks starting July 28, the convention center is closing the block between Pike and Pine to cars — a pilot pedestrian street, with night markets on Thursdays through August. Here's what's happening, and what it could become.

An eight-figure sole-source contract runs from the public campus to the hotels' marketing arm. The people who vote it up are being appointed this summer.

Every stranger who sleeps in a downtown hotel pays a toll toward the temple of tourism — whether or not they're a pilgrim. First in a series on who runs it — and who gets to choose the priests.

From a trade-show floor to a twenty-year run of Seattle's sidewalks — the timeline of the kiosk program, and the dual role at the middle of it.

A short history of Seattle's placemakers — a commercial advantage, a governance weakness, or both at once?

The Ratepayer Oversight Board is looking for you.

In the Great Recession the state got out of the tourism business — it moved the convention center off its books, then closed the tourism office outright. Fifteen years later the industry finished its answer, a statewide fund designed, in its designers' words, so it "can't be swept."

The convention center's board has nine seats; five reach the end of their terms July 30. One already has its successor — a hotel-finance executive who has chaired the boards of the marketing vendor, the downtown coalition, and the hospitality lobby. Three islands of this series, in one appointment packet.

Two strangers spend the same $300 night in Seattle — the going downtown rate last summer — and pay the same 15.7 percent in lodging tax, down to the same convention-center line. Then one bill gets longer, the two $21s go to different worlds, and only one of them goes to housing.

Four Thursday night markets on a car-free 9th Avenue, and five conventions on the Seattle Convention Center campus. Dates, times, sizes, and what each one is — no commentary, just the month.

The 43rd District reported 39.6% turnout this month. Inside it, precincts ran from 16.8% to 69.0% — and a new Dispatch tool shows you the same split for any race in King County.

The State Auditor released the convention center's 2025 financial statements this morning. Three charts from the document.

The convention center's books and floor plans as a database, read from the District's own documents, where a figure opens the page it came from. Who built it, why, how, and what it does not claim.

The Summit more than doubled the convention center's floor, and business grew by two thirds, so spaces sit empty. Which ones, on which days? The floor plans and the event log as a database, so the question has an answer.

The paint on 9th Avenue won't come off the street. The pattern it's covering up was published seven months ago — in the Convention Center's own master-plan deck.

The convention center's CEO dates the safety hub at 810 Pike to an idea in January 2025. Here is what the convention center said about it between then and opening day.

Reading the Seattle Times story on C-STAR alongside the convention center's own February board presentation.

The board meeting in plain terms. The year's numbers, the coffeehouse, the district plans, bookings and the AI policy.