Who Killed Kirkland’s Galleries?

With about a dozen venues dead or relocated, can this once thriving art scene bounce back?

Illustration by Cristin Ford for City Arts

Kirkland defines itself by its devotion to the fine arts. Its wealth of galleries and public art is one of the first things you see touted on the official civic Web sites. The Kirkland Cultural Council even produced a video, “Art in Public Places,” encouraging developers to incorporate public art into hotels and office buildings.

Public art is on the increase (though trouble may lie ahead), but galleries are in rapid decline. Almost a dozen have closed their doors or left the city in the past few years.

Gunnar Nordstrom, whose eponymous gallery was part of the Kirkland crawl for seventeen years, decamped last fall for downtown Bellevue. He identifies two main causes for the decline: the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11 in 2001, and the subprime bubble burst, which began damaging galleries last spring.

But Nordstrom thinks there’s a local cause, too: he blames a Kirkland business environment unfriendly to smaller proprietors. “There is a tremendous misconception by landlords — many of whom are absentees — that they have a gold mine. But they only see us on nice days when people are out walking. There is a huge problem with parking in Kirkland, and the mix of stores has dwindled. The landlords have a fictitious belief that there is retail traffic in downtown Kirkland, and there is not.”

As sales plunged, his lease came up for renewal. “The landlord wanted to raise my rent by 25 percent in a down economy. With no negotiation. If I don’t have a large amount of foot traffic coming by my door, why would I pay for it? The mentality of these landlords is to not think about the repercussions. My choice was to close or move.”

"The landlords have a fictitious belief that there is retail traffic in downtown Kirkland, and there is not." — Gunnar Nordstrom

Nordstrom raves about his new location in Bellevue Place, across NE 8th from the vibrant Lincoln Square. His gallery windows face directly onto the Hyatt Regency’s courtyard.

“It’s been a fabulous move. The space is a little bit bigger, yet my per-foot cost is four dollars less than it would have been in Kirkland. I have a forty-foot corner window. I have Joey’s Restaurant fifteen feet away from me, with a glass wall, and a captive audience of two hundred tables a night. On a Friday or a Saturday evening, I’ll have twenty-five to thirty people in.”

At his former spot, he was typically getting six evening visitors. “It’s not a good retail environment. You can’t park in front of the store you want to come to. There are more vacancies — you can’t have a card shop at thirty-eight dollars a square foot. And the City Council is constantly four to three against downtown development.

“‘Keep our little town quaint!’” Nordstrom says mockingly. “‘Well, do you shop downtown?’ ‘Nah, you can’t get anything there! We go to Bellevue!’”

Not all Kirkland landlords are adversarial. Patricia Rovzar, who folded her Central Way gallery into her other location, near Seattle Art Museum, around the same time Nordstrom left, had a supportive landlord. But there were so many businesses coming and going around her that the area felt unstable.

The next big battle is playing out on a larger stage: the massive redesign of Kirkland Parkplace. The project has ignited fiery debates over land use and the raising of building height limits. “It’s a fabulous project for Kirkland,” says Nordstrom, who is consulting for the developer, Touchstone Corporation, on including public art in the design. “But it’s being fought tooth and nail by one building owner behind them who’s going to lose their view. And it’s amazing how sympathetic the neighborhood groups can be.”

It’s is a soul-searching moment for a small town that isn’t really a small town. Its population is less than half that of Bellevue, it’s not growing as fast as Redmond, and it will probably never be as hip as Seattle. But it’s surrounded by these big brethren and will have to decide whether to keep up with its siblings, and where to place art in its list of priorities.

Luanne Erikson, director of Howard/Mandville Gallery on Park Lane, is more optimistic than Nordstrom. “There were only five galleries in Kirkland when we came here nineteen years ago,” she says. “It went up as high as sixteen, and now we’re back to five. It’s all cyclical. The merchants in Kirkland have always gotten stronger by banding together, and that is where we are starting over again.”