From the clippings drawer, here is a memory of how downtown public plazas were described some thirty years ago in Seattle, contemporaneous with William H. Whyte’s classic study of the use, non-use and unintended behaviors characteristic of such legislated places.

Please see below an embedded image of Linda Sullivan’s Seattle Times article. Zoom in to read the text, in which she examines, as did Whyte, how human behavior and preferences related to, and, in some cases, modified the original plaza designs of this urban downtown of 1979.