Yesler Terrace
Celebrating Community Through Placemaking
Seattle, WA
Yesler Terrace, the site of a 76-year-old subsidized housing project has been reborn as Yesler, a 30-acre, diverse, modern, urban community with residents across the income spectrum. The $1.7 billion project includes parks, housing, and mixed-use facilities.
We were invited to participate in the project by the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), developer of the project. Our assignment: develop placemaking, wayfinding and interpretive elements for the site and signage/graphic standards for the public residences.
Our goal from the start: design authentic-to-place elements and identify Yesler for residents and visitors. We developed icons and representing the neighborhood: school, community, and sports activities, health care facilities and history of the site. The icons and wayfinding blades are placed atop a colorful segmented pole, aka the “Russian nesting doll” post.
The toppers are painted aluminum and measure 20”-24” in diameter. Some are flat, others dimensional.
The eight locations generated multiple destinations for the wayfinding blades. Here they are in the shop, ready for installation.
The client team wrote stories about the rich history of the site: the first people, the early settlers, waves of immigration and the families from the 1940s to today. We turned the images and copy into nine porcelain enamel interpretive panels mounted on the segmented pole.
Yesler was the original “Skid Row,” where oxen skidded huge trees to Henry Yesler’s sawmill, home of both the first City Hall and, since the late 1800s, an elementary school.
To encourage walking, the Directory map lists nearby amenities with a “5 minutes to here” circle.
With the skyrocketing cost of housing in Seattle, SHA anticipates the market rate housing portion and the connections to the regional public transportation network will be attractive to the thousands of people who work in nearby hospitals, universities and office buildings and in downtown Seattle.
