Document Actions
Restarting the Heart of Downtown Bremerton
The Seattle Times
By Eric Pryne
October 19th, 2008
Ron Sher has found another ugly duckling to transform.
Sher is the Bellevue developer and visionary who brought two failing suburban shopping centers back to life — not just as temples of commerce but as gathering places where people come to spend time as well as money.
One visitor labeled his first project, Bellevue's Crossroads Mall, "a mall with soul." When he repeated Crossroads' success at Lake Forest Park Town Centre, fans said it had become the city's living room, its heart.
Now Sher wants to resurrect the former J.C. Penney store in downtown Bremerton, a neighborhood that is just beginning to emerge from decades of neglect.
He bought the virtually windowless 1960s hulk in November for $8 million and plans to transform it into a retail-residential-community center that will become Bremerton's town square.
Sher calls it Harborside Commons.
"This kind of stuff is what I'm passionate about," he said during a recent tour of the property, which sprawls over most of a city block near the ferry terminal. "I love place-making. My whole thing is to be able to create these places that catalyze a community."
Downtown Bremerton already was undergoing a revival before Sher came to town, thanks in part to new civic leadership and an infusion of government capital.
A conference center with a hotel, restaurant, offices and shops opened next door to the ferry terminal in 2004. Since then a new waterfront park, government center, marina, two office buildings and two mid-rise waterfront condominium complexes have been completed.
Another hotel and a short tunnel to funnel ferry traffic under part of downtown are under construction.
But the big J.C. Penney building, which covers nearly 2 acres, sits squarely in the center of all this new development, a silent reminder of past bad times.
The building, abandoned in the 1980s when the retailer moved to the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale, is now a parking garage.
"It's the hole in the doughnut," says P.J. Santos, of Opus Northwest, which developed the conference center complex.
Mayor Cary Bozeman says Harborside Commons is the key to bringing shops and shoppers back to downtown.
"This is going to be the centerpiece of the city," he predicts. "And we couldn't have a better developer because this is a developer with a social conscience."
Sher comes from a family of developers. He's a principal in a company that controls shopping centers, hotels and office buildings in Washington, California and New Jersey. He once co-owned the largest retail-leasing brokerage in the country.
