For Lacey, Sixth Avenue plan is a work in progress

By Christian Hill | The Olympian • Published July 05, 2008

LACEY – The yellow crane rises above Sixth Avenue Southeast, a beacon to the transformation occurring below.

Workers are constructing a four-story office and retail building. A short distance away, an apartment complex completed last year is filling with tenants. The street has new pavement and on-street parking.

Nearly 10 years ago, a committee of citizen volunteers charted a new course for the city's core. Sixth Avenue was to be the main attraction.

According to their vision, residents would want to walk and discover the shops along the tree-lined streets or enjoy time at the plazas that dot the route. With apartments above the shops, people would have the opportunity to live within walking distance of their jobs at the nearby state offices and close to shops or eateries.

The recent construction is evidence that, like never before, the vision is on the path to becoming reality. However, there is a long way to go.

Retail storefronts both old and new sit empty.

And at least one longtime business, Paulson's, stands on the outside looking in at this new future.

"It's a transition, and it takes time," city senior planner Rick Walk said of the progress on Sixth Avenue.

Woodland District

Sixth Avenue connects the city's academic and civic heart with its commercial center. City Hall, the Lacey Timberland Library and Saint Martin's University are along College Street, and South Sound Center and Fred Meyer line Sleater-Kinney Road Southeast.

Combined, they encompass the 260-acre core area known as the Woodland District, which city officials, business leaders and residents wanted to move in a new direction in 1997. It was zoned a central business district eight years earlier, in 1989.

The vision "moves the city from an automobile-oriented shopping area that people pass through on their way to another destination to a center where people can gather, interact, shop, play and walk," according to an introduction to the development guidelines that the committee and a consultant drafted in the late 1990s. That proved to be forward-thinking; in the years since, skyrocketing gasoline prices have prompted some to reassess their driving habits.