Editor's Note: This letter was addressed to Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin and Sally Clark, chair of the Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee, with a copy to this newspaper.

Ballard, where I have lived ever since returning home to Seattle from college over 30 years ago, continues to undergo relentless change. Many familiar sites are giving way to development, usually for the better, but sometimes not.

As I hope you know, both the Ballard Manning's site and Sunset Bowl on Northwest Market Street are scheduled to be demolished and replaced by multiple family dwellings (condos and apartments, respectively).

There is significant community interest in preserving these remnants of Ballard's blue collar past, to prevent the neighborhood from becoming block after block after block of multi-story dwellings that are indistinguishably identical. If nothing else, both establishments provided a place to eat very late at night, something very hard to find in northwest Seattle.

Currently, the Manning's building is in the review process for landmark status, a designation that I feel the building deserves (it has marked the entrance to Ballard for many decades, and I pass it nearly every day). The developer is fighting this designation, claiming that they can't make enough money developing the site without removing the restaurant.

A Seattle Times editorial decried the building as "an old Denny's, boarded up" which indeed it is. The current owners are suing to overturn the landmark board's decision, claiming the decision "will preserve a vacant, boarded up building in the middle of a vibrant Hub Urban Village."

Hey everybody, the restaurant is empty precisely because the current owners kicked out the vibrant and profitable Denny's franchise, an employer providing working wages. To say the restaurant deserves destruction because it is now vacant or poorly maintained is manipulative at best. Clean it up and reopen the restaurant and it will be a nice place again.

When the building became a Denny's restaurant, the owners preserved the exterior architectural features - and the diner thrived (I've eaten there many times, usually late at night). The new owners can revitalize the restaurant and obtain similar results.

To the east, the developers for the Sunset Bowl site have only recently expressed any interest in incorporating a replacement for the bowling alley - one of the few remaining in the area (and busy now that Leilani Lanes is gone). It appears that they might not build anything more creative than what The Stranger calls "cookie-cutter luxury apartment buildings."

How many of the condos being built today will be standing 50 years hence? Will any of them be considered, then or ever, for landmark status? Or will there be so many of them, so much alike, that none of them will be special? Do today's developers even care? Both developers seem unable to think beyond the large boxes they wish to build.

I ask you to grant them development incentives to encourage them to respectively retain the distinctive Manning's building and a viable venue for family bowling. The simplest would be to allow them to build higher - with setbacks on the upper floors, the result could be quite attractive. On the Manning's site, for example, the 12th (or whatever) floor would have an unobstructed view of the Olympics (and more) and could contain a small number of exclusive penthouses. These would be pricey and thus a profit incentive for the developer.

The Seattle P.I. published another concept for the site: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/realestatenews/archives/132299.asp For Sunset Bowl, inserting an extra floor (perhaps below grade) for bowling in exchange for a few more floors of apartments might also be a very attractive incentive. If the bowling alley were below a floor of retail, the apartment dwellers would be shielded from the noise that is inherent in bowling.

The site is lower than the areas to the north and west, and a higher building wouldn't be as visually intrusive in the immediate neighborhood as it might be elsewhere. However, despite proposals as I have outlined here, I fear that money will push litigation which will push the city to say "sure, go ahead and knock down those old buildings and build more ordinary looking monolithic and monotonous monstrosities." This would be very sad. If such narrow and unimaginative thinking prevails, Ballard will be the poorer for it - as will be, in time, Seattle.

Please help us save some of the "working class" features that are a part of Ballard's history.

Regarding Seattle's landmark designation ordinance and a suggestion for a moratorium on designations until the city reviews the process: Such a hiatus would be an "all in free" time period during which developers would apply for permits for any site that might hold a "landmark." Unless the "moratorium" also prohibits granting permits, it would effectively repeal Seattle's landmark ordinances. Please do not institute such a moratorium. In the Crown Hill neighborhood, we got a gas station we don't want as a consequence of a similar gap in the permit process.

Michael Schuh

Crown Hill