Georgetown Steam Plant Reopens Possibilities for Duwamish Valley Community

Today's technology-oriented society, with its disposition to center STEM and shunt other disciplines aside, often evokes the feeling that engineering and industry exist a world apart from the arts. The Georgetown Steam Plant in South Seattle challenges that notion.

The two immense turbines standing in the middle of the building's four-story concrete cavern — with piping, ductwork, and other devices weaving into and out of them, through walls and other contraptions — look as much like an abstract sculpture as it does an example of early 20th-century engineering. Today, the arts and engineering blend even more in the programming that pulses through the plant. A grassroots group led by the founder of Equinox Studios, an arts space a half-mile away from the plant, hosts science fairs and arts events in the engineering landmark and invites other groups to do the same, all while stewarding a community-informed process to transform the plant into a multipurpose space that can support the needs and dreams of the Duwamish Valley.

From a Half-Forgotten Relic

In 1906, the Seattle Electric Company, a subsidiary of the Boston-based utilities giant Stone & Webster, built the coal-powered Georgetown Steam Plant 200 feet from one of the winding arms of the Duwamish River, before the river's straightened banks were pockmarked with polluters. The plant, on the seldom occasion that it was needed to back up the hydropower that provided the bulk of the utility's energy, helped power the 60-mile network of electric trains and street cars that another Stone & Webster subsidiary operated from Everett to Tacoma.

In 1951, Seattle City Light purchased a portfolio of properties from Puget Power and Light (a previous incarnation of Puget Sound Energy that had merged with Seattle Electric) that included the Georgetown Steam Plant. "It was already just way on standby," says Julianna Ross, City Light's senior community program developer for the Georgetown Steam Plant. "So it's not like we were excited to get it or anything." Only in extreme cases did City Light use it at all.

During the fall of 1952, the utility fired up the plant when a drought jeopardized the region's supply of hydropower, and the Georgetown Steam Plant provided the backup power to help nearby utilities avoid brownouts and blackouts. The utility brought the plant online again in 1964 to meet a surge in heating demand during a winter storm. Otherwise, the Georgetown Steam Plant never ran. A skeleton crew of "four or five gentlemen worked there at the tail end of their career," Ross says, "tinkering and making sure that everything was still workable," so City Light could fulfill the obligation tied to a million-dollar subsidy it received from Bonneville Power Administration, the federal entity that manages the electric grid throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Those subsidies expired in 1977, says Ross, "and it was kind of time to tear the plant down." But in the years just before that decision to demolish, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, established the Environmental Protection Agency, and amended the Clean Air Act, and the Washington State Legislature passed its own Environmental Protection Act. In a moment of serene irony, these new laws designed to safeguard land, air, and water saved the coal plant from destruction.

"Most people in the utility didn't even know about [the steam plant]" in 1977, Ross says. But before it could come down, the newly established environmental affairs division had to write an environmental impact statement. Ross says they dropped the reports off at the desk of a woman named Shirlene Clemence, and as she reviewed the paperwork, she realized, according to Ross, "everything about this building is historically significant." Clemence became the champion for the steam plant, first getting it on the National Register of Historic Places, before it then went on to be named a mechanical engineering landmark, a national landmark, and a city landmark. The steam plant was saved — if forever out of operation.

Of course, as many real estate owners know, an abandoned building beckons vandals. "So, [City Light] leased it out for $1 a year for 19 years to a group of retired steam operators," Ross says. The group called itself the Georgetown Powerplant Museum. But, according to Ross, they weren't well-positioned to provide a genuine community benefit, so the utility eventually ended that relationship and started hosting twice-monthly tours before, in 2019, issuing a request for proposal to find a partner that could activate the space in a way that would best benefit Georgetown and the broader Duwamish Valley.

Toward a Community Campus

When the call was issued, Sam Farrazaino, the founder of Equinox, got calls from half a dozen people urging him to get involved. He was hesitant, though; Equinox Studios had just started the process to develop a series of affordable housing buildings in the neighborhood — the first of which will likely break ground later this year — and he was busy with that and studio work. But the more he thought about it, the more he saw what a major opportunity it was.

Still, Farrazaino, a self-described child of the '60s, had other hesitations. "I'm an old white guy, and I'm not the person that this thing should be stewarded by," he says. "It should be stewarded by people that are the furthest from what I've been able to access, because of who I am. But somebody's gotta get it from here to there."

So he pulled together a team of people from around the community who could help draft a proposal and sketch out a plan for what they might do with it and how they'd engage the community in creating a vision for the space. Together, they submitted a proposal and created the Georgetown Steam Plant Community Development Authority (CDA).

In the years since the CDA won the RFP, the team has been somewhat limited with what it can do in the space. It can't do major renovations. The plant has no heating. Portions of the building remain unsafe for the public. And a lack of code compliance limits the occupancy. So the CDA has had to be creative in the ways it activates the plant — something that Farrazaino has plenty of experience with through his work building Equinox bit by bit.

The CDA also hit snags during its earliest community engagement process because it had yet to truly prime the canvas on which local residents would paint a picture of what they wanted the space to be, says Farrazaino. So for now, while the CDA gets that sorted, it has focused on building allies and interest and getting people into the space "through science, through arts, through theater, through dance, through music, through circle singing, through all these different things," Farraizano says, because "it's hard to get people inspired about something that they are not in relationship with."

The CDA has so far hosted art festivals, environmental conferences, "math and craft" nights, fashion shows, improvisational community choirs, album release parties, concerts, circus shows, and more.

Soon, Farrazaino hopes that they'll have a "there, there" as soon as the CDA can define what the permanent access road will be, which will allow them to go back to the community for input with a clearly defined proposition for what the neighborhood can expect to shape beyond a 120-year-old concrete building packed with industrial equipment and burdened with all the restrictions that landmark status imposes.

At the moment, the steam plant can only be accessed through a gravel drive at the end of a parking lot 200 yards long. 13th Avenue South, which runs next to the old Georgetown City Hall, once provided a direct connection to the plant, but after 9/11, that road was closed by the adjacent King County Airport because of security concerns, Ross says. But Farraizano has spent months coordinating with representatives from a dozen different agencies at the city, county, state, and federal level to reach an agreement to install a new road coming straight off the structure's southwest-facing door.

If that road is installed, connecting the steam plant to South Willow Street and Ellis Avenue South, it would run by an empty warehouse, a canopy-covered storage yard, and an unused building that belongs to the Air National Guard. And the CDA could potentially get those buildings for free when the street is installed, allowing them to create what Farrazaino calls a "campus of community."

Once this agreement is in place and the team has a good understanding of what it has to offer, it will return to the community and start a new phase of engagement "to provide a space for possibilities, where then the community can come and tell me, tell the government, tell the airport, tell City Light, tell the county what they want," Farrazaino said, "and then maybe I can help make it possible."

A Landmark for a Collective Future

The possibilities here are immense, and create opportunities for something more significant than the community might otherwise ever have. Ross recalls having conversations with a staff member in the city's Office of Economic Development about saving the steam plant, and they pointed out to her, "there would never be a cultural center of this scale in the Duwamish Valley if not for the steam plant."

This, however, represents its own irony. The river is a Superfund site, and the plant is a part of that. It even has a cleanup zone named for it, the "North Boeing Field Georgetown Steam Plant site." So Farrazaino and the CDA have a big question to answer as they continue to reactivate the plant: How can this center both tell the history of the environmental contamination that happened throughout the valley, and inform how we can live differently in the future?

The answers for the second half of that question have started to emerge. The Georgetown Community Council is exploring the idea of building a new neighborhood center that could, among other things, provide a resilience hub with heating, cooling, air filtration, backup power, and all the things such a space needs to keep community members safe in the extremes of weather that climate change brings. And there's potential for the old Air National Guard building, if it is brought into a broader steam plant campus, to serve as the shell for such a center, given everything it is already equipped with, Farrazaino says — though it would no doubt still need upgrades.

The science fairs that the CDA and its supporters have hosted over the past two years have also provided that same kind of space for envisioning what the future could be. There, people have deployed portable solar arrays, shared their vision for a circular economy, and demonstrated how to turn wood and mulch into a biochar that can capture carbon, clean soils, and invigorate plant growth. The science fairs also afford the kind of space that a community needs more of when it's confronted with so many problems that all need solving.

"There's so many challenges," Farrazaino says, "and everybody's working on their own little challenges — whether it's a personal challenge or an Earth challenge or a neighborhood challenge — they're all working on these things." And when all these problem-solvers come together in one space, it ignites excitement and incites yet more enthusiasm to endure. It helps people realize, he adds, "there is a community here that is struggling the same way, fighting the same fights, and building towards a collective future."

The steam plant could be the center of that community.