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There is a new sign on Pike Street. Green blade, mounted so you can read it walking up from either direction: CLEAN · SAFE · SECURE, a small "CStar" logo beside it, and a security camera already bolted up underneath — watching the sidewalk before the door it belongs to has opened. This is C-STAR, the convention center's new storefront "safety hub," and the sign means it's nearly here. I've been following it since May, across four pieces and a public-records request; if you're just arriving, this is the place to start.
The sign is up and the camera is live, so it's close to a ribbon-cutting. But back in May, there was no sign and no information about what the place was for.
For months, the only way to learn anything about 810 Pike was to read a construction scope off the state bidding portal, pull a job posting, and file a records request. So I filled in the blanks.
When this started, the headlines out of Minneapolis were federal immigration raids, and I looked at Seattle's summer — a World Cup about to fill downtown — and wondered whether this was the moment the feds rained on Seattle's parade. So I raised a worst-case scenario that I couldn't rule out, that C-STAR could become a staging ground for federal immigration enforcement.
The records came back and deflated it — the convention center's only federal agreement was a $4,620 USDA wildlife-management contract, now inactive; no Homeland Security, no ICE, no Customs and Border Protection. The partners named in the design are local and civic — the police department, the city's CARE team, the downtown business groups. And with hindsight the fear was probably never going to land: the World Cup was the country's party too, and a venue that runs on its own workforce and customers has every reason to keep federal enforcement at arm's length. On the evidence, C-STAR is benign, and behind the taped-over windows, a noteworthy experiment in community safety — the convention center's version of a Japanese "police box," or kōban.
Despite the benign answer here, once we accept closed doors and taped-over windows in one place, we are conditioned to accept them in the next, where the answer may not be so reassuring. The cost of opacity isn't only whatever is hidden on a given block. It's what it trains a neighborhood to stop asking.
It doesn't have to be this way, and a few blocks down Pike we've got the proof. This spring Barnes & Noble opened a store at 520 Pike — eighteen thousand square feet in the old North Face space, a couple of blocks from the convention center. Its windows wore "Coming Soon" for months: the wraps, a careers QR code, a countdown to opening day. It opened on May 6 — the same day I published the first question about what was behind the door at 810 Pike. One opening came with a ribbon-cutting and months of notice. The other I had to file a records request to understand.
A bookstore, granted, has a motive a safety hub doesn't — it papers its windows because it's selling something. But the reason to announce C-STAR isn't marketing, it's the people who live around it. If C-STAR is good for the neighborhood and not only for the campus, that's news a downtown property owner can use — in my own building there are units that would show better beside a better-secured block.
And here's a bit of unfinished business: the convention center has no sanctuary policy — the district said so in writing. The City of Seattle closed it on its own property, so did King County, so did the Port of Seattle — an independent agency, like this one — and the convention center hasn't. It's the plain notice I see at the dog park and the library, stating the property's policy on immigration enforcement; here there's a blank.
The neighborhood is getting a kōban, and I'm sure we'll find out more about it soon.
I started Convention City Seattle to get convention visitors out into the neighborhood, and I started the Convention City Dispatch to get residents interested in the convention center — which is important to the economic, social, and civic lifeblood of our city. I look forward to C-STAR opening its doors, and to the rest of the campus following suit — opening up to the neighborhood around it.
Ivan Schneider is the founding editor of the Convention City Dispatch.
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