About This Site
Digital trail maps for visitors to the Seattle Convention Center Summit: the Pike/Pine corridor to the waterfront, the Monorail to Seattle Center and Queen Anne, the Melrose Loop on Capitol Hill, and the walk to South Lake Union.
I worked at the Seattle Convention Center in 2023 as an on-call attendant and guest services lead.
After leaving, I built Convention City Seattle — digital trail maps for visitors to the Summit, starting with the best stops for visitors in nearby Capitol Hill.
In February 2026, a Seattle Times article on the convention center's finances sparked an idea. I wrote a LinkedIn post. Then I built this site.
This site was built in two sprints.
The first sprint — three days — was the walking-tour essay: stop-by-stop observations, from Plymouth Pillars Park to Pike Place Market, and then back on Pine St. to the Summit. It requires close reading of a place — figuring out what each corner means and how to say it.
The second sprint took three days. I built custom graphics for the walking-tour navigation, an interactive sensitivity analysis with sliders that update the financial projections in real time, a three-entity restructuring model mapping out how the debt gets divided across SCC, King County, and the City of Seattle, and a line-by-line source walkthrough tracing every figure back to the page it came from in the audited financial statements. The process was cyclical: figures extracted from the source documents propagated into the sensitivity model and restructuring analysis, which updated the operational notes and narrative, with consistency checks at each stage.
From here it's front-of-house: putting the case for the Commons out into the public sphere.
The same platform can host any place-based civic proposal — a highway lid campaign, a waterfront redevelopment argument — or additional walking tours for Convention City Seattle.
AI assisted throughout — research, drafting, code, financial modeling. Any errors are mine.
This is a research artifact and a civic argument — built on five years of walking past the neighborhood gap, a year working inside the building, and a sprint this February when I finally had a practical plan to write down. I'm a builder and analyst. I have relevant alumni networks and latent connections in Seattle's civic world — but I've never tried to move a policy outcome before, and I'm not a well-connected insider by the standards of the people who usually do this.
The site assembled itself from separate experiments. I wanted to test how well AI could read a government financial statement — that led to a sensitivity model and a method for maintaining sources carefully enough that every figure traces back to an audited document. Separately, I was rethinking my tourism trail work: a block-by-block walk aimed at policymakers and urbanists rather than visitors, asking "what's wrong with this picture" at every corner. Put those together and the site was mostly there. The /advice and /feedback forms came from a different question: how can the site do the outreach without requiring me to always be pushing it?
I'll continue to update the site periodically, and I'm available to brief, hand off, or support whoever wants to carry it further. If that's you — journalist, council staffer, organizer, someone with a stake in how the Arch building is used — the Take Action page is where to start, or email me: ivan@ivantohelpyou.com.