The future view from E John
Plans are taking shape for the new Safeway-and-apartment complex set to rise on what is now just a Safeway at 15th Ave E and E John. The project also now has a name. Depending on how a major lawsuit over rental price fixing allegations shakes out, Greystar Capitol Hill could end up an infamous entry into the neighborhood’s mixed-use development branding hall of fame.
The proposal has been making its way through the design review process, and is now scheduled for what could be its final meeting before the East Design Review Board. After rounds of refinements, developer Greystar and architects Weber Thompson have landed on a final proposal.
Design Review: 1410 E John St
Land Use application to allow 2, 5-story apartment buildings (336 units total) with retail. Parking for 373 vehicles proposed. Existing building to be demolished. Early Design Guidance conducted under 3038145-EG. View Design Proposal (49 MB)
REC–Recommendation
Project Number
David Sachs
The existing Safeway and its adjoining surface parking lot will be demolished. In its place will rise a pair of 5-story buildings. A new Safeway will be built on the ground floor, facing John and wrapping around to 14th Ave E. Along 15th, there will be space for a handful of small retailers. Plans have three areas carved out for retail space, but two of the three seem large enough that they might be able to be split up, so there could be up to five stores along 15th.
Above it all will be 336 apartment units. The units are planned to be a mix of studio, open 1-bedroom, 1-bedroom and 2-bedroom. Below ground, there are plans for about 373 parking stalls, 150 of which will be dedicated to the grocery store.
CHS last reported on the project here in January as lead developer Greystar, and the development team of architectural firm Weber Thompson, and Pine View Development held two “virtual neighborhood discussions” to pound out the final proposal for the design to create two new five-story buildings including the new grocery, around more than 300 market rate apartment units, some new, smaller retail spaces, and an underground parking lot for about 350 cars.
While a ground-floor lobby will connect them, the development will look like two buildings. One toward the northern edge of the site is roughly s-shaped, to curl around the Aquarian Foundation building at 15th and East Thomas Street. The other, larger building looks a little like a number 8 turned on its side, with a couple of edges knocked off.
The buildings will separate on 15th, opposite where Thomas hits the street. This separation will create a small courtyard, with some planters and decorative lighting fixtures. The courtyard will provide access to some of the retail spots, and to the main residential lobby. The designers have shifted the courtyard over slightly compared to previous plans, to align with the crosswalk on 15th.
The lobby will be only a single story, which, when combined with the recessed area, should provide a break in the mass along 15th. Most of the façade along 15th will be off-white and beige brick, sometimes horizontal, and sometimes vertical. Additionally, there will be some areas with a grey cement fiber and black brick. The lobby entrance will contrast that with a teal brick. On top of the lobby will be a second-floor courtyard, available to residents, which will wrap around to the rear.
New landscaping will be also placed in the sidewalk along 15th, along with a series of benches.
E John will see the new main entrance to Safeway. The façade along the street will continue the beige/grey color scheme, and the brick, cement board material plans. However, around the Safeway entrance, at ground level, there will be a limestone brick used. Closer to 15th will be space for a small café. The architectural renderings show a Starbucks logo on the café, which would make sense considering there is a Starbucks inside the existing Safeway.
Mid-block will be the main Safeway entrance. At the corner of 14th and John is a planned area for the pharmacy. It will have its own entrance from 14th and connect to the main store inside.
The bus stop on John will get a major upgrade. Plans include a “sculptural bus shelter” with a colorful art piece to set off the stop. The existing benches will be replaced with sets of rails, some at a good height for sitting and other for leaning. Plans also call for a curb bulb to be built out just west of the bus stop, so the buses will be able to tuck in while allowing passengers on and off, and cars should have room to go around them. The design packet notes that designers are still working with SDOT to hammer out the final configuration of the curb bulb, and changes to it may have add-on effects about just where they place things like bike racks and leaning rails.
The plans show lots of windows along John Street. Previous versions of the development plans had observed that it’s difficult for grocers to have long stretches of empty wall such as windows, since that means less space for shelving or refrigeration or other uses. But this version states the façade will be transparent and offer views into the store.
One reason for that is they’re moving the big, blank wall to 14th Ave. This street will have two separate vehicle access points. The one closer to John will be just for Safeway parking, while the other is planned for shared use between Safeway and the residential units. Each of the two will allow for two-way traffic. Both entrances will have “sight triangles,” corner areas cut out from the building to allow for greater visibility between cars and pedestrians.
In between the car access points will be a long wall with some pieces of art on it. Initial plans had called for a large, single mural, but that’s be changed to a series of art panels. Outside of the art panels, the building will retain the grey and beige mix of bricks and cement fiber. The exception being the entrance to the Safeway-specific lot, which will be red.
At the building corner furthest from John Street will be a pedestrian residential entrance.
The two existing residential buildings along 14th closer to Thomas will remain.
Finally, a small section of the new building will touch E Thomas. This side will have a couple of residential units with access directly from the street, and more apartments above. Thomas will also have an alley for truck delivery access.
In addition to the courtyard over the main entrance on 15th, another second-floor courtyard will face John Street, looking out just west of the Safeway entrance. The building will also have an L-shaped roof deck at the corner of 15th and John.
The developers have included plans to incorporate art into the design — “In response to public comment, the Board acknowledged the prominence of the site, its potential to function as a community hub, and the importance of Capitol Hill as an arts and culture district”
The Pike/Pine Urban Neighborhood Council community group of architects, designers, and development proponents has also been meeting with the development team and said in an update on the process to its members that the group “found the applicant to be responsive to our input.” PPUNC said it is also “generally supportive of the design” but focused its concerns on the 14th Ave-facing side of the project.
CHS reported here nearly a year ago as the major development got its first sign-off in the early design guidance round of Seattle’s public design review process. The early plans showed two residential buildings rising along the 15th Ave E side of the project mixed with smaller first-floor commercial spaces separated from the grocery by an internal plaza. Developers were also tasked with coming up with concepts for the E John side of the building that addressed street and pedestrian safety concerns around the nearby Metro bus stop and Williams Place Park across the street.
The final “recommendation” round of the process starting this week can be more intense for big projects with final approval of the general massing on the agenda long with smaller details like specific building materials and landscaping.
Meanwhile, the project name won’t be subject to design review — but maybe it should be. Greystar is currently at the center of a lawsuit over alleged price-fixing that complainants say artificially boosted rents in Seattle and neighborhoods like Capitol Hill.
If plans and other approvals and construction go as planned, the new building is expected to open in 2026.
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WONDERFUL, cannot wait for this to happen. Wish it started years ago!
public spaces belong to ALL people. Including homeless* just had to reiterate.
Yes, unless people break the law, like drinking in public, taking drugs, urinating, defecting, exposing themselves, threatening others, sleeping on sidewalk, passing out on sidewalks, blocking sidewalks, bothering people, scary people by ranting and screaming, littering, littering hazard material, starting fires, manufacturing drugs, using bus shelter as a home, etc etc
People break the law in their homes all the time. My neighbors do drugs all night. Can’t enter without a warrant. Yep. Life. Maybe mind your own business and stop upholding our BS legal system as an excuse to sh** on the poor.
It’s everybody’s business when the sidewalks are blocked.
This is my city and my neighborhood so it is my business and I will do everything I can to protect it from the scourge of Drug addicts and criminals. I have no tolerance for you entitled kids who think you’re social justice warriors just to give meaning to your empty lives. I don’t know who you think you’re kidding by calling them “the poor “or our”unsheltered neighbors “
Yep. Everyone is allowed to use public spaces on a temporary basis. When someone decides to use it on a permanent basis it starts being a private space which is not what we want.
I’ll remember that next time there’s a line at Neumos then.
I think a line is pretty temporary.
I hope you know that you are a tiny minority of people who think that the degrading of our city/public spaces by the homeless/addicts is just fine. Most of us want something better for Seattle.
In this case, the public space is the sidewalks. I’m sure the tents & detritus crowd will make good use of those.
I don’t give a superb owl hoot about what this building looks like but they need to put a crosswalk at 14th and John, especially if Safeway continues to keep their 15th and John entrance closed.
Yes, it is so dangerous. I agree. A crosswalk, is a must. Public safety. Started when they went with one door. Danger.
Cool – such a better use of that large parcel with all of those new apartments! And I love that 15th will be more active with multiple retail uses.
Way too much cement board siding, small windows, small balconies, lackluster retail spaces on 15th, and an awful streetscape on 14th. It looks very generic. Why is the largest development on Capitol Hill by one of the largest national development corporations not being held to the same standard of high quality materials and detailing of smaller successful projects by local developers? The community and design review board should demand more from the applicant given the major departures requested for the parking garage access. This is our one shot to connect the north and south sections of 15th with vibrant retail. Will there be space for local small business? Will they have unique street appeal and features such as accordion doors and operable windows? The new convention center has created some interesting retail spaces. Look to those for precedent.
The bit of 15th south of Safeway has been pretty dead for the 40 odd years I lived on Capitol Hill. The underlying reason (I believe) is that when the Group Health new building on 15th was permitted (maybe 50 years ago?) , it was required to provide retail storefronts on 15th (to try to enliven the street) BUT the storefronts were allowed to be very shallow and the very small spaces never encouraged any vibrant retail.
The most successful retail on that stretch, IMHO was the “Chinese Teapots”, – a Chinese Restaurant in a (I guess) former tea shop with giant neon teapots on the ceiling. It moved to the other half of 15th for a while (flourished as a vegan Chinese restaurant) then sort of faded away.
Basically the commercial strip between Williams Place and the 7-11 is only active on the West side, and the looming bulk of Kaiser sort of kills any neighborhood feel. (All my opinion, your mileage may vary)
In a neighborhood whose design guidelines include “Maximize preservation of the area’s existing tree canopy”, it’s interesting that they are confident they can propose what appears to be 0% on-site tree retention (not counting the few street trees), though many of the mature trees are at the edges of the proposed development.
It’s a grocery store and apartment building! Why should it be anything other than generic!? It’s hard to think of any time or place in the history of grocery stores and apartment buildings where they’ve been anything other than generic.
Exactly. This development plan really is a bunch of lameness and commentators on here expressing otherwise are either cluelesss, don’t care and/or, collectively, they are the very reason Seattle green-lights so much new construction garbage and blandness. They just don’t seem to know better?
That so many don’t have the most basic understanding of what creates a vibrant, inspiring and exciting community in the long term is so disheartening. Seattle deserves so much better than a lot of the junk being constructed around town now. If only they taught this stuff in high school. Until the automobile/petroleum industry killed streetcars (and well before, for millennia), almost everyone seemed to understand what smart, rational planning and community building looked like, at least in the brick and mortar sense.
You seem to have a lot of questions and stakes in the developments around you. I think you should look more into I-135 and the amount of local input that it could have on the design of future developments.
Yippee! Hurray! Another sterile collection of relatively nondescript boxes. EXACTLY what Seattle needs, right?
In a city where policymakers swear we don’t have enough land, could they not have included a lot more units with a few more floors?
Got to love the creative use of color to jazz up what can be a bleak looking Autumn-Winter-Spring! [oh wait, they used Home Depot default colors]
And, the big windows to help with mental health that is so under assault by modern life? Bravo! [wait, no, they blew that, too]
The embellishment and ornamentation look top notch [read: don’t exist]
And, the clear sensitivity to usage of environmentally sustainable building materials? Top notch! [almost certainly non-existent or almost so]
But the landscaping looks amazing! [not really].
Another missed opportunity. The only remarkably good thing here is the replacement of a surface parking lot with better use, which is standard operating procedure in dense places these days anyway.
Seattle needs new planning and development stewardship that possesses and coaxes vision from developers. This? This is vision-less, ‘market rate’ [read: expensive] profit-driven, cookie cutter whateverness.
This might be ‘good enough’ if it was built by the city as affordable housing. It’s not. I voted for i-135 due to this simple fact alone: that new entity, if approved, will almost certainly produce better-than-this housing that is ‘green’er and much more affordable.
There was a time, long ago, when developers had enough pride to up their game, if only to show off that they were better.
I’m sure there will be lug headed, uninformed low-bar defenders of this who are naive or careless about the everyday importance of aesthetics and best land use but those folks should really get out more, travel and see what’s possible (or, admit they shill for those who build this drivel]. Far better is possible, without killing profits.
Hopefully, the new Safeway will be their very best store yet, at least (which would still make it so-so by Seattle standards)
Oh, it’s Greystar! They are being sued and investigated for all sorts of shady dealings from price fixing to unlawfully investigating and harassing their tenants. Fantastic!
I agree with your comments. And I think that, 30 years from now, people will look around Seattle and say: “What were they thinking?”
I can only conclude that the City officials who approve designs like this are in the pocket of developers.
Then you should advocate for the repeal of seattle design review guidelines that force developers to build this way.
How is that?
Design review boards are open to better designs. As it exists, design review seems to be a process whereby developers extort departures from design standards by threatening to build fourth-rate instead of third-rate buildings (paraphrasing a local architect).
Check out the project at 131 13th Ave E, just south of E John, where some of the largest street trees on the Hill are threatened because the developer seemingly has no grasp of the most basic concept in architecture: respect for the existing positive attributes of the site.
Design review boards enforce dumb standards set by the city. This why you get all those weird buildings with multiple colors and weird things jutting out.
Developers are not being “forced” in any sense. They build ugly/cheap-looking buildings because they make more money that way. Get real!
You are completely wrong.
“I voted for i-135 due to this simple fact alone: that new entity, if approved, will almost certainly produce better-than-this housing that is ‘green’er and much more affordable.”
and what could possibly make you think that is true? This magical entity is going to somehow create more aesthically pleasing, environmentally and user friendly housing for a cheaper price? Pretty much everything you describe will cost more money. What do you think will happen when we remove the design board from the process as the council wants to do in order to speed up development? You are going to get basic, cookie cutter, function over form buildings. It will be faster but it will most likely look like East Germany, that’s the reality.
A) if the land doesn’t have to be paid for and there is no profit (any ‘surpluses’ will go back into the authority for more building and to subsidize other business), you can build better and with better accoutrements. See Singapore.
Capitalism and moderately/affordably-priced housing go hand-in-hand about as well as corporate-run health care does. We can do better and what’s doing now IS NOT WORKING.
B) If you read my comments, you know that I agree, asserting that City Hall and Seattle DP&D have been derelict in their duty. This includes their idiotic idea of scrapping standards and review. Utterly stupid and clueless. There are better and safer ways to expedite emergency-needed housing. Again, see Singapore.
I love Seattle but sometimes I think too many ignoramuses run things here, with little idea of their actual doable options to make things better.
What about the QFC on 15th? Any redevelopment word there?
I have been wondering about that too because the way our current article reads there might not be any grocery store on 15th ave for a good few years or more .
I’m just glad Instacart exists.
Why? You need little serfs to do your shopping for you? God the gig economy has really made everyone lazy and entitled.
Your so right Derek. We should all make our coffee at home, cook all our own meals, transport ourselves to every appointments, etc, But instead we frequent coffee shops, dine at restaurants, and utilize Uber et al., etc. All along the way we employ “serfs” to do these things for us. Serfs who make money while they’re working, which is kind of like having a job, don’t you think. Hey, I even housed one of these serfs while he worked for a food delivery service (my teenage son). How lazy and entitled we all are. Thanks for showing us the way, and for pointing out that all public spaces belong to homeless (your word) people too. Ever vigilant!
Can’t speak for louise, but the pandemic is not over for some folks. Would it be better to have little serfs waiting on them in the ICU?
This is a concern troll. Most people aren’t affected by it the same way and still use Instacart.
I don’t understand why US grocery stores need to be so large. I go to Europe frequently for business, and there are so many more, smaller markets in each neighborhood. Granted, in general Europeans don’t have the monster refrigerators that are standard in the US so they shop more frequently, but in the smaller stores it’s not as much of a chore.
In regards to this development, it’s like Thousand Island at a salad bar, not very good but it’s expected to be there. Sort of like Safeway.
In a European city the store would be in the basement rather than a parking garage and the street level would have small independent retail.
European cities also have tremendous zoning rules that stop construction that would make them more dense. The typical European city has one or more suburbs surrounding it that does include at least one “hypermarket” where normal people shop. Ever wonder why Paris and Rome etc etc have the same skyline they have had for hundreds of years?
When you visit Paris, you’re literally in a museum if you stay in the historical part of town. Go out to La Defense or other surrounding areas if you want to see how “real” Parisians live.
Population-wise, Paris is more than four times as dense as La Defense (20,000 vs. 4400 per km2). La Defense is a business and tourism district. The big buildings are offices, not residential towers.
I wasn’t talking about Paris, but I would point out that Paris is already dense and that zoning restrictions in the historic district preserve the unique sense of place, history and the primary economic driver, tourism.