Open the Arch
The Arch is the Seattle Convention Center's original building, opened in 1988 on Pike Street downtown. A second building, the Summit, opened a block away in 2023. The proposal: open the Arch to the public on the days it has no event, with the people who live here helping decide what happens inside.
A public body owns the Arch. Open it when it is not in use.
The Arch is owned by a public body, the Washington State Convention Center Public Facilities District, and it stands at the geographic center of Seattle, where Downtown, Capitol Hill, First Hill and Denny Triangle meet. The proposal: on a day with no event, open it to the public. Let the people who live nearby use it, and give them a real say in what it is used for.
That is the long game. The short game is to find out who else wants it. This page is where the idea lives.
The convention center is planning the neighborhood
The convention center is writing a Campus Master Plan for the Arch, the Summit and the land around them. The draft schedule of stakeholder meetings it presented to its board on February 24, 2026 names downtown business, property and hospitality interests, a park friends group and a customer advisory group. No residents' organization and no public hearing appears on it.
The pattern is to decide early and tell the neighbors late.
- The master plan. The convention center picked its architect in the summer of 2025, the work began that August, and the board ratified the contract in December, with no public hearing. The Campus Master Plan: What's Been Decided.
- C-STAR. The CEO dates the safety hub at 810 Pike to an idea in January 2025. By June 2025, the convention center's executives were contacting the mayor, the police and other city agencies about it. The board first took it up in January 2026, to authorize the construction contract. For most of Seattle, the news was the opening itself: KING 5 covered it on October 8, 2026, and the Seattle Times four days later. C-STAR Opens.
- Ninth Avenue. The convention center's own posted planning record for the block starts April 28, 2026. Neighbors and local businesses heard about the closure in a letter dated July 21, one week before the street closed to cars on July 28. That is notice, not a say. Ninth Avenue Freeze-Out.
A plan we help write would be a better plan.
The Arch still has empty days.
Each bar is one zone of the Arch across 2025. Dark is a day with an event on in that zone; the rest is a day without one.
- Skybridge and Hall 4EF211 days with no event
- Ballrooms and meeting rooms, Level 6221 days with no event
- Atrium and Hall 4AB230 days with no event
- 800 Pike: Tahoma Level310 days with no event
- 800 Pike: street floors, with the door321 days with no event
Across the whole building, 91 days in 2025 had no activity of any kind, not even setup. The street-level door of the 800 Pike wing opened on 22 days.
Source: the district's event log, produced in response to a public-records request on May 15, 2026. A use day is any day under an event contract, setup and teardown included; the log shows 274 use days in 2025, leaving 91 with none. See Fell on Black Days for the counts and definitions, and Twice the Space for the floor-by-floor version. Zone counts are from the buildings page on Convention City Insights, built from the same log. The 22-day figure is my own count from the log.
The plan is being written now
The Arch belongs to a public body, and the convention center is deciding what its campus becomes for the next ten years. Whether the Arch opens to the people who live around it depends on whether enough of them ask before that plan is done.
If you agree
Follow the reporting
New dispatches on the convention center and the master plan, by email, when there is something to report.
Tell us what you would do with an empty day
A rehearsal, a class, a meeting, a market. Write in through the Dispatch feedback form and say what you would use the room for and who else would come. Groups that say so on the record are how this idea becomes more than one person's.
Write in →