The existing monorail is not meant to be a practical form of transport. It's just a joyride between Westlake Center and Seattle Center.

How much longer are we going to continue this charade?

It's not so much the signs. It's that it sets a loopy precedent. The private property ruling means the owners can approve some messages and disapprove of others.

Private ownership (of pedestrian spaces) and "public/private partnerships" reduce the amount of area which is explicitly public -- where activities guaranteed to the public can freely and without restriction occur. The impact is that the owners of the area now have control to approve or disapprove of free speech. A kind of veto power. There are many deceptively Publicy-Looking areas that might look like classic public space, but they aren't. Think not only of malls, but the increasing plague of "Town Centers", strip malls (where a storefront owner may approve of your message on the property, but can be overridden by the landlord).

The point here is all about control of free speech. The police are much happier to come and arrest you on private property than they are to try to manage your public expression in a public place.

You could protest at City Hall, but who goes there besides workers, and reporters to film the photo-op? Just about anywhere else, you're on a sidewalk and the people driving by you hear about a tenth of a syllable of what you're trying to say. The connection between the protester and the person the protester is trying to reach is increasingly walled-off.

Depending on how vigorously they wield their messages, protestors and preachers may properly provoke caution from those passing by, but they should rarely cause alarm. It is instead courts' tolerance for slowly stripping away, one painful precedent after another, the First Amendment right of freedom of expression that should cause alarm.

A mall is not public property. It is private property. Just like my house. People visit the mall. People visit me in my house. If someone says something I don't like in my house, I have the right to toss them out. Why shouldn't the owners of a mall have the right to toss people out that they disapprove of (save for issues of discrimination)? Sure, it is a larger scale, and malls have thousands of visitors, but the principal is the same, no?

Although filled with members of the public, a mall is NOT a public square. It is still private property. Owners of a mall can set any sort of rules they want. They can say no riding bikes inside the mall. Or you have to wear a shirt and shoes in the mall. Or no smoking in the mall (even before our current smoking ban). Or no loud boom boxes in the mall. Why shouldn't they have the right to say: no protest signs inside the mall?

I totally agree that picketing is a basic and essential means of protest and free speech. I just don't understand how this applies inside a privately owned building.

A stairway from the street to the Monorail should have been provided, but in the interests of commerce, it was probably determined that routing all those tourists through the mall was going to be good business.

Naturally, when it comes to Downtown, business and it's interests reign supreme.

{Does anyone remember the battles over the creation of Westlake Mall, and the turf war over the block of Pine that remains a street instead of becoming part of the Westlake Plaza?)

Whatever, it's all good.
As long as we can shop.
What else really matters?

Sean, the Frye Guy is fine where he is. Sidewalks are public space.