This giant building will devour us all!

Lord knows I don’t intentionally wish to rant; it just happens. Last weekend I was walking around, outside Bellevue Square trying to get to Sesame Street — or at least, to the Sixth Street Fair — and I happened to look up to see this giant behemoth, blocking out the sun. If you haven’t been in downtown Bellevue for a while, you might not have noticed that they finally restarted work on Lincoln Square; in fact, this little photo is of the famed One Lincoln Tower which they optimistically expect to open in November. Our latest visitors, my inlaws, wanted to know if I’d seen the ads for the condos, which I had (thanks to the recent Alaska Airlines inflight magazine), and they also had (thanks to whatever it is they get — Forbes or the Wall St Journal or something).

The Lincoln Square people had wanted to sell those condos on top of Lincoln Square for 1.88 MILLION DOLLARS. I think there were going to be 148 of them, which means 148*1.88 million == more money than I can shake a stick at. Seriously. If I saw that much money at once, the stick would fall from my nerveless fingers, to the ground, unshaken.

Which spawned an inflight discussion on who in the world would pay 1.88 *MILLION* dollars to live in Bellevue. And is that the starting price? Because I only saw one floor plan. But even if that’s the price for the penthouse, that just means they start at a million bucks.

What do you get for that? Well, the ads in the magazines show a pretty nice floor plan, and it’s very spacious. There’s something about a skywalk to the mall (which seems a bit strange, as you would think they want to keep people trapped in their own mall). And there’s something about 24 hour concierge service. Which seems nice, but… we’re in Bellevue. What is there around here, that would require a concierge service?

Bellevue: This is where I went to the “Taste of Bellevue” thinking to myself that it would give me a taste of what it was like to live in Bellevue. So what (you ask) was at the Taste of Bellevue? All signs pointed to a small parking lot, where about six or eight trailers circled a few tables and chairs. There was: My Sweet Lord (a krishna-vegetarian trailer claiming to be from Seattle), a Euro Gyro and Crepe Tyme combined trailer, sporting a blue ribbon from Colorado between the two, a generic lemonade stand which I thought was called Sweet Cold Lemonade because that was what the signs all said, a Taste of Phillipines, a Lou-don’s BBQ, a Ziegler’s Bratwurst, and an Outback Jack’s Roadkill Grill. To lend a little bit of authenticity to the affair, there was also a Jamba Juice trailer, and I will admit to seeing a Jamba Juice store or two, around Bellevue, but doing a yellow pages search on any of the other stores led nowhere. So, this is what tasting Bellevue is like. These guys should be encouraged to rename the “Taste of Bellevue” to the “Taste of Generic Fair Food” next year.

The fact that the Lincoln Square folks are planning on making room for twenty restaurants in their cute little building isn’t making me that optimistic for a sudden rise in the level of epicurean delight in town. Pardon me for being a little pessimistic, but you have what is essentially a giant mall with a hotel and condos stuck on top. The two restaurants I’ve heard are definite shoo-ins are both chain restaurants.

Stay tuned for a November sneer, because at this point, I’m just getting started.