streetscape: Entering Renton 2

Bench, Pylons, Grady Way

This is the second chapter in Entering Renton and it is the tale of two pockets: what we do with two land areas left over from factories and freeways, roughly equivalent in size and edging the north and south of downtown Renton. One landed (appropriately, The Landing,) fully formed next to two existing Big Box retail stores: Lowe's and Fry's. The other (Grady Way)--pictured above and below, has been changing over the decades incrementally. The most recent changes include streetscaping in the form of a new park, multi-family housing being built in the single family neighborhood and the home of Renton City Hall.

Grady Way at Rainier Way

Where we left off: Grady Way at Rainier Way; Wal-Mart sign in the background. Grady Way is undergoing a transition.

The Landing

The first, The Landing, developed over the last ten years and is representative of an urban village development. The second, Renton Village, is more typical of strip development from the 1970s.

The Landing, above, and Grady Way (Renton Village) below

Original Boeing factory and The Landing with housing and big box elements

The Landing retail aerial view

The Landing: New urbanist Main Street for the 2010s

The Landing

The Landing: Outdoor mall and formal pedestrian amenities

In addition to structured parking, there is still a lot of surface parking at the Landing

One problem with the Landing is it has no real connection to downtown Renton and as an important edge it doesn't address the problem we've been looking at: finding our way downtown. It does provide an interesting example of nodal development and how to get mixed uses to mesh together more in a pedestrian-friendly, formal, way. Housing does exist here in the form of high-rise condos. In the aerial above, you can see the problem of pervasive impervious surfaces still exists at the Landing.

Renton Village and Grady Way

Below is an aerial showing Rainier Way intersecting Grady Way, where we left off with the last blog post about Rainier Way and the western edge of Renton. The pocket of leftover land now houses the Renton City Hall circled in upper right of pocket and the big box of Sam's Club adjacent as well as a "mini-mall" circa 1970s. City Hall is housed in a 1970s/80s highrise on the freeway. Its been reoriented to a plaza which is still more welcoming to cars than people. And unfortunately, it's not downtown. It does have a connection to downtown in the form of Burnett Linear Park.

Interestingly, housing exists south of here at Grady Way, but in a very different configuration. See single family houses adjacent to Grady Way (above the "pocket", below). There is a wide variety of pedestrian circulation routes--more than one way to get from point A to point B--mostly involving parking lots that have been added over time. We have a linear park which will eventually get you to downtown. There are paths of desire and pedestrians cutting across a variety of retail parking lots, including a multiplex theatre and large-scale Asian grocery store. There is a plaza in front of City Hall. As the edge progresses toward the intersection of Grady Way and Rainier Way we return to auto-dominant uses in the form of auto sales lots.