Suburban Soul Man
Ron Sher thought he could build a community around an ugly, failing shopping mall. Is he nuts?
The new suburban downtowns have many virtues: parks and cultural facilities, more residential density and transit, pedestrian access to shopping and services. But they strive for polished predictability and uniformity just as the old suburbs did. “We offer a resort setting,” explains Bellevue Square owner Freeman; you might also call it a facsimile city stripped of messiness and chaos. Freeman’s own stab at public space, a couch-decked rustic atrium called the Lodge tucked between Starbucks and P. F. Chang’s, has become a lively gathering place in its own right. But it was explicitly conceived to serve shopping: “The longer people stay, the more they buy,” Freeman told The Seattle Times when the Lodge opened in 2001. “We like to make it easy for them to stay.”
It’s easy to stay at Crossroads without buying much of anything. And once you acclimate to the pageant of languages, skin tones, and national costumes, other, subtler forms of diversity emerge. Blue collar types mix with blue bloods from Medina. Old people—some extremely old—push their walkers and play cards with friends. Visibly disabled people, and an assortment of the acutely eccentric, find a place here. There are babies from many lands, office workers on their lunch breaks, even a smattering of urban hipsters who come for the free music and cheap ethnic eats. Pam Toelle, a longtime resident active in nearby neighborhood groups, attributes the diversity to one thing: “It’s free. …Families that have little money can walk over and bring their children and have a night out.”
Walking around Bellevue Square is also a time-honored tradition. And the past decade has brought many changes to Bellevue’s downtown: major arts institutions, ongoing efforts to create open space and a pedestrian-friendly streetscape (i.e., a greenbelt linking downtown to Meydenbauer Bay). The city’s once-sterile core has grown far more welcoming. But though Sher acknowledges that downtown is “working well for a lot of people,” he doesn’t spend much time there: “It’s not my favorite place to go.”
Indeed, though both are too polite to say so, Ron Sher and Kemper Freeman are like Bizarro World versions of each other. Both are the mall developer sons of mall developers. Sher lives in Medina and Freeman just outside it. Both prefer two-wheeled vehicles, though Freeman rides Harleys while Sher clocks 3,500 miles a year on his bicycle. Freeman was an outspoken opponent of Sound Transit’s light rail plan and spent $4 million trying to defeat it; Sher is a transit booster who makes his food-court tenants use nondisposable china and flatware. Freeman recently embarked on a $40 million renovation of Bellevue Square with Italian limestone floors and an “urban garden” ambience; Sher recycles the same old midcentury mall parts. “I’m sort of a tinkerer,” he admits. “I’d be more likely to spend money on public art than on marble floors. It’s more about how you are in the space than the awe of the space.”
That approach has worked for Sher in other spaces as well. In 1998, once he had Crossroads on a solid footing, he embarked on a similar transformation of the derelict Lake Forest Park Town Centre. He installed the expansive Third Place Books, which has the feel of a well-worn independent bookstore and sells new and used volumes together, along with a small food court on the eclectic Crossroads model. In autumn of 2007 he bought Bremerton’s abandoned J. C. Penney store, which he plans to turn into a mixed-use social and commercial hub for a long-neglected downtown. That same year he helped devise an updated Crossroads subarea plan that envisions multifamily housing at the mall. But he says he probably won’t undertake the development himself: “That may be for the person who works on it after me. It’s a huge job.”
Published: February 2009
