The New Heart of Bellevue

A community catalyst and soccer mom sees culture at the center of  Bellevue’s next urban renewal. Do you see it too?

When I meet Genevieve Tremblay at Bellevue City Hall in late January, she insists we zigzag across the city in my car to Safeway’s distribution center, to PNB’s Eastside school, to the fenced-off Cadman Cement factory grounds.

She has given this tour before. A year or so ago, the forty-seven-year-old mother of three scooped up several of Bellevue’s city officials, including the assistant director of economic development, Tom Boydell, into her forest-green Sienna minivan (her “swagger wagon,” she jokes) to show off her vision for the future of the Bel-Red Corridor. It’s a neighborhood already slated for development, which she feels is Bellevue’s “last crack” at creating an urban destination that rivals Seattle or Portland.

Pointing out the banal strip malls and commercial warehouses that define the corridor now, Tremblay sees a canvas for pioneering creativity on the Eastside, not cynicism. And she’s not squeamish about the big picture either. As I wait to take a left turn, she jokes, “I’m not a developer. But I know how to ask for thirty-eight million dollars.”

Photography by Andrew Waits for City Arts.

Tremblay wasn’t so optimistic when she and her husband decided to move here from Mount Baker in 2002. In fact, suburbia scared her. Professionally trained as a graphic designer, filmmaker, art director and painter, she thought she needed the arts and culture-rich life only Seattle could provide. But her family needed more space: she was pregnant with her third child, and her husband, Edward, had been commuting to Microsoft for years. So they found a house in Phantom Lake, and it wasn’t long before Tremblay had joined an experimental painting class with five of her neighbors. 

While we eat homemade egg-salad sandwiches at her kitchen counter one afternoon in late February, Tremblay tells me how she learned to braid her passions for community, creativity and technology. It started when she lived in Seattle and wrote the application for a nine-thousand-dollar grant to get business cards and other communications materials for the teachers at Beacon Hill School, where her older daughter attended kindergarten. 

Eventually, she launched a creative consulting business, Cultural Entrepreneurs, with a colleague, strategic design planner Celeste Tell, to help reinvent creative spaces and project strategies for whole companies.

But when she witnessed the activity in Seattle’s cultural overlay district, which formed a committee to devise ideas about preserving culture in Seattle neighborhoods that would inform the city council’s policies, she was inspired to go even bigger. That’s when she met Matthew Kwatinetz, a developer and former director of Capitol Hill Arts Center, who recommended that she enroll in the UW Extension program for commercial real estate, which she did in 2008 in order to take on the Bel-Red corridor with a similar approach.

Now she’s finishing up her first four-year term as a Bellevue arts commissioner, is co-curating an exhibit at Kirkland Arts Center and, it seems, is positioning herself to be the mascot for Bellevue 2.0, that is, a city that’s defined by a shared commitment to classical arts and high-tech innovation. 

At the Heart of It: Genevieve Tremblay with her minivan and her city map parked outside the gates at the Cadman concrete factory, which just happens to sit at the core of her vision for a new Bel-Red Corridor

For all her talents and expertise in the interdisciplinary arts, Tremblay’s sharpest sword seems to be her Rolodex. I sat at her table at a Bellevue Youth Theatre fundraiser in early February, along with arts organizers, Bellevue city officials and designers. I watched her juggle intelligent conversations with everyone at the table, all the while sporting hip costume jewelry that used to belong to her mother. 

Every gathering is, for her, a creative think tank, even if she’s chatting with other moms on the sidelines of her daughters’ soccer games. “My favorite job is to sit around with fabulously brilliant people and just think up things,” Tremblay says, shrugging. “But there’s not always a market for that.”

It was required in the UW program she attended, for which she had to collaborate with experts throughout the commercial real estate field in conceptualizing a large-scale development project, called BRINC, the Bel-Red Corridor Incubator, which was intended as a space where creative people could live and work on the Eastside in ways they couldn’t before. Tremblay and one of her teammates, Seattle architect Kate Wells-Driscoll, are still working on the project: a mixed-used space for retail, residences and artists’ workspaces (the incubator) to be built at the heart of the Bel-Red redesign, the “sweet spot,” right along the route of the new link rail. The incubator would encourage artists to coexist and even collaborate in shared spaces. “This whole open-source trend is about sharing and transparency. That’s a very different mind-set, I think, than the old model of arts,” which isolates artists behind closed doors in private studios.

Taking her project further, Tremblay partnered with Shelly Farnham, the artist and technologist who cofounded Waggle Labs and Dorkbot (incubators in their own right for collaborative tech-driven creativity), to research how local creative types actually use technology, in order to identify how a space could serve them. Using their findings, she created a marketing strategy for BRINC, making it not a building, but a place that would catalyze an entire movement.

“Although I do think there’s still a way to create stuff like that in the corridor,” she says. “It was a concept piece to trigger dialogue on what’s going to happen over there.” 

Tremblay unrolls a map across her dining-room table, shoving pieces from a half-completed jigsaw puzzle out of the way. It’s a full-color satellite picture, depicting a bird’s-eye view of the Bel-Red Corridor, a chunk of land running parallel with 520, that begins east of highway 405, and starts to narrow where 148th Avenue and Bel-Red Road meet. According to the city’s profile, this collection of industrial businesses is declining in economic activity. The city has spent years planning to redevelop it. In their plan, a Technicolor checkerboard represents planned commercial and mixed-used sections. The “Cultural/Arts District,” however, is but a small blue square hovering over the existing PNB school. 

Tremblay is, of course, not satisfied with that.

“I aspire to influence development,” she says. “I think the cultural piece is left out of the equation far too long in the planning process. If you talk to really sophisticated developers that understand cultural development” in other words, that get to know the area’s needs, “they’re the ones that transform communities.”

In keeping with that theory, Tremblay has identified existing cultural centers on her map and stuck on four felt hearts (left over from her son’s Valentine’s day project) to mark them.

Two of these points are highlights from our tour: the PNB School and Donn Bennett’s Drum Studio and Evolution Studios, where she says 175 bands move through regularly. Then there’s Rain City Fencing School and Bellevue Skate Park, also high-traffic spots where adults and children assemble for creative enrichment. 

“I can’t tell you how many people don’t know these places exist,” Tremblay says. “It’s like, OK, everyone get in the minivan ... ” 

Tremblay sees potential for them to work together. Using as models the media labs at MIT and UC Irvine, where dancers contribute to the development of animated video games, Tremblay envisions PNB, Rain City Fencing and local gaming companies having a natural – not to mention economic – link.

A fifth heart on the map – and the biggest – marks the only spot currently bereft of arts activity: the Cadman cement factory complex, where a dormant concrete hopper silhouettes dramatically against the sky. Situated on a hill, the complex has marvelous potential in a developer’s eyes. This is a sensitive issue, Tremblay explains, as the Cadman family has owned that spot for years and still feels connected to the community. But for the sake of conversation, she paints a picture for me of what the space – and a partnership with Cadman – could contribute to a cultural redevelopment plan like hers.

“They’ve got the sweetest spot: nine acres with basically nothing on them,” she says. “The land has got some contour, and the highest point has this beautiful view that looks over the city. It’s just exquisite. I see an amphitheater. It could be the place that everything radiates from. Maybe there’s park-funded arts and entertainment – so maybe Donn Bennett stages concerts – and maybe there’s Indian food places set up along the road so that all those people working in the area come and have lunch here and start to make it a place. Right now it’s not a place. It’s a hole that people almost see as an eyesore. That’s the last thing I see it as. The hopper is an icon. The hopper is to this place as … whatever that thing is called to Gas Works Park. It’s so spectacular.”

Instead of merely accommodating these creative islands, Tremblay sees potential for Bel-Red to build them up as a cultural vein that directs people straight to a freshly beating urban heart that supports the Eastside’s greatest strengths: cutting-edge, creative technology. And eventually, less traditional forms of arts and culture (like shows at Open Satellite and Kirkland Arts Center) will begin to find the life they need along the way.

“This is like an oyster,” she says. “You put that little particle of sand in the oyster and it’s going to develop layers and layers and layers.” •