By CONSTANCE SOMMER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

When Pacific Place shopping center opens across the street from Nordstrom's new flagship store on Oct. 29, more than a few people will be happy to put the past behind them:

• City officials who took heat for agreeing to pay $73 million for a center parking garage that cost only $50 million to build.

• The developer who was forced to admit it had fallen a month behind on its building schedule.

• And finally, downtown drivers fed up with traffic snarls spawned by the construction surrounding the mall between Sixth and Seventh avenues, and Olive Way and Pine Street.

The 335,000-square-foot, five-story Pacific Place is scheduled to provide a forum for some ritzy national retailers making their Seattle debut.

The jewelers Tiffany & Co. and Cartier are listed as tenant boutiques on the mall's first floor, only a gem's throw away from each other.

Max Mara, the trend-setting Italian designer, also plans a store on the first level, while the upscale catalog retailer J. Peterman Co. says it will open one of its first stores in the nation on the mall's second level.

New restaurants include Il Fornaio, a chain of pricey Italian restaurants out of San Francisco; Stars Restaurant, another upscale native of the City by the Bay, serving contemporary California cuisine; and Gordon Biersch Brewing Co. of Las Vegas, which brews its own beer in addition to serving food.

A handful of retailers will have stores accessible from the street, each with its own distinctive storefront: clothing retailer J. Crew, Tiffany, home furnishings merchants Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware and bookseller Barnes & Noble.

The shopping center will also boast an extensive, curved skylight over the entire central atrium -- an effort to make the indoors feel more like outdoors -- and a General Cinema Theatre complex spanning some of the fourth level and all of the fifth.

These are the kinds of details the mall's developers hope will stick in shoppers' minds, rather than the politics and headaches of the past three years of Pacific Place's slow birth.

First, there was the parking garage.

The mall's genesis stems from a deal, struck in 1995, that involved moving Nordstrom's downtown store into the former Frederick & Nelson building at Sixth Avenue and Pine Street; plus constructing a new shopping center across Sixth from Nordstrom's new flagship; and building a 1,200-stall parking garage below the shopping center to serve both the center and Nordstrom.

The city has agreed to pay $73 million for the parking garage, although the developer's own loan records list the structure's cost as $50 million. City officials say the deal, which has been judged legal, guarantees that the old Frederick & Nelson facade is preserved, that minority- and women-owned firms were hired in the construction process, and that a predicted $95 million in tax revenue will flow into the city treasury over the deal's 30-year span.

Nevertheless, the deal continues to draw fire from critics who say the city could have better spent the money on civic necessities such as hiring more police officers, financing public housing or buying more library books.

The garage opened over Memorial Day weekend, and rates run as low as $1 for four hours every evening.

Pacific Place ran into another hurdle early this summer. Rumors began to fly that it would not make its opening date of late September and might even butt up against the launch of the holiday shopping season in late November. Retail analysts said such a move could mean a serious loss of sales for merchants, who counted on having the fall to establish themselves before the holiday onslaught.

Pine Street Development finally announced that the mall would open a month behind schedule, on Oct. 29, still comfortably ahead of the Thanksgiving weekend shopping rush.