Is Amazon’s new Seattle HQ the ultimate tech utopia?

South Lake Union is convinced that it is Seattle’s future. It’s easy to see why: Signs advertising new apartments mark every street corner. The place has more construction cranes than a Richard Scarry book. For every office tower, there’s another one rising next to it, half finished — and next to that tower-to-be is a majestic and rectangular hole in the ground, waiting for someone to fill it with concrete.

Back in March, I wrote about the office-park mode of building – a creation of both pastoral fantasy and Cold-War paranoia – and its remarkable endurance, even in the forward-thinking, youth-driven companies of the tech industry. There are some signs that this is changing: Both Google and Facebook have proposed adding housing to their suburban headquarters, which would turn them into something more like a university campus or a factory town. Smaller tech companies and satellite offices of the bigger firms increasingly open up shop in urban districts, like New York’s “Silicon Alley.”

If you want to understand why South Lake Union looks the way it does, look for a small, modernist lean-to at the intersection of Westlake and Denny Way. The building itself — the South Lake Union Discovery Center — is temporary. At some point in the next few years, it will be disassembled and replaced by another multi-story mixed-use building. For now, it houses a massive model of the neighborhood, sprawled out under a printed canopy of robins-egg-blue sky. Lori Mason Curran, the investment strategy director for Vulcan Real Estate, the developer behind much of the neighborhood, gave me a tour of the model with a laser pointer before showing me around the neighborhood in person.

Curran was among Vulcan’s early hires. The company’s goal was to create jobs and bring in city revenue because, as Curran puts it, “cities like that.” “We were getting ready to ask for infrastructure,” she continued, “so we needed to provide these things.” Vulcan finished its first buildings in 2004 —  an apartment complex, an infectious disease research center, and the headquarters for Tommy Bahama, a sportswear company. It lobbied Seattle’s government to build a streetcar line down Westlake Avenue. The line would connect the newly developing neighborhood to the edge of Seattle’s downtown — but also allow Vulcan to put in more buildings and less parking.

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The streetcar line opened in 2007, and it was a game-changer: Once it started running, the price per square foot for office space along the line doubled. Most of that land was owned by Vulcan. That same year, Amazon announced its decision to set up shop in the neighborhood.

Amazon’s rapid expansion in Seattle has been met with a combination of excitement and unease. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, brags about its origins in a garage in the suburb of Bellevue, but an early Amazon investor told The Seattle Times that one of the reasons Bezos kept the company in Washington — instead of moving to, say, California — is that he was trying to reduce the likelihood that large numbers of his customers might be required to pay sales tax. Until recently, the company had a reputation as one of the biggest skinflints in Seattle — refusing to even talk to local nonprofits and charities while other hometown companies like Microsoft and Boeing donated millions.

“There is Another Sky” is both perfectly nice and a solid example of the kind of civic/corporate art that dominates this era – vague, inoffensive, and studded with anti-skateboarding modifications. The glass roof is printed with an abstract design that was made to look like a forest canopy, and when the sun sets, LEDs attached to the glass flicker in a way that is meant to simulate fireflies. In cold, rainy weather, you can lie on one of several heated boulders as though you were a lizard, watching the rain fall on the glass and never quite hit you.

Nowhere does the work hint at how close this space came to becoming something else – a place with real trees instead of a modernist abstraction of them. But then, Seattle had its chance to have a park, and the city turned it down. Today, Seattle arguably has more tax revenue than it would have if it had a park to maintain, rather than several city blocks of Vulcan-developed buildings bringing in the Benjamins. And the development in South Lake Union has spurred infill development in other neighborhoods around the city, too. “I just want this city to grow,” Susan Jones, a local architect, told me when I mentioned that many people were unnerved at the pace of development around the city. “Seattle is a suburban town. It can handle the density.”

South Lake Union is better than an office park. But it also doesn’t feel like a real neighborhood. Even with multiple architects designing the buildings, the structures still have a cookie-cutter quality. Nothing is edgy, or glamorous, or even tacky. There’s nothing animating this neighborhood that feels remotely like the freewheeling hippie grandiosity that seemed to animate the creation of the Seattle Commons plan (or the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project — another Allen project). South Lake Union may have its origins in a gift, but today, it’s all business.

Sometimes a boring-looking neighborhood can spruce itself up by having interesting street life, but in South Lake Union, almost everyone is young, and male (Amazon’s workforce in Seattle is 75 percent male), and white (or, less often, Asian). The homogeneity can give the place the quality of an early Twilight Zone episode. I walk for several blocks before I see someone with gray hair. The homeless, omnipresent in downtown Seattle, are mysteriously invisible.

Grist / Amelia Bates

The neighborhood reminds me of another place I’ve been to recently — Google’s campus, in Mountain View, Calif. What’s missing, though, is Google’s upper-class daycare vibe. There are no free bikes abandoned in the grass, no shirtless tetherball games in progress.

You can spot some signs of nearby dot-commery if you know where to look: There’s the permanently installed ping-pong table, with legs made to look like the profiles of different scientists. There are the strategically placed boulders that Amazon employees are instructed to have their dogs pee on, so as not to kill the landscaping. There is a bike share station, and a pillar with a built-in bike pump and hex tools. If, as Vulcan’s planners remind us, millennials will occupy the majority of office chairs come 2030, then South Lake Union, with its pee rocks and ping pong tables, is ready for them.

By nightfall, South Lake Union is empty, except for the crowds around a few restaurants. The area may have room for 43,000 employees, but Vulcan has only built housing for about 1,367 of them, bringing the neighborhood tally up to 6,500. (Another 6,000 apartments, from a variety of developers, are in the works.) And that housing is expensive — while the neighborhood has a modest amount of public and workforce housing, market-rate housing starts at about $1,400 for a studio apartment.

Vulcan’s goal is to build South Lake Union into a 24/7 neighborhood — one where people work, live, and play. Right now, though, it lacks the critical mass of destination spots that its young employees would go to. It’s not surprising that, every night, they desert South Lake Union for neighborhoods like the older, scruffier Capitol Hill, which lies uphill to the east, just over the interstate.

When I walk through Capitol Hill one evening, the effect — despite all the people staggering around me in full drunken-bro mode — is strangely poetic. Every Friday night, the young workers of South Lake Union crawl out of the neighborhood in epic numbers, like salmon trying to spawn.