West Seattle, Washington
30 Sunday
… “Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon.” (1971) I refer to our soggier-than-usual weather, already blogged inventively today by Defective Yeti with an apropos screen grab. No new mudslides here in the west yet (a slide in Everett has been the big headline so far). But the “blue horizon” has indeed appeared — like — WAIT! RIGHT NOW! TO THE SOUTHWEST! I’m bolting for the front steps so I can get a fraction of a ray … later!
That’s what the penguins in “Madagascar” said, anyway. Tonight while I waited to drive up the 1st Avenue South ramp to the westbound WS Bridge, a variation, from a panhandler walking briskly down the driver’s side of the backup — “Even a nod and a smile, even a nod and a smile, even a nod and a smile,” he chanted.
I didn’t process what he was saying quickly enough to consider honoring his request. I used to be a sucker for any poverty pitch, till the day I came off the WS Bridge onto the eastbound 1st Avenue S. ramp and saw the big wad of panhandler signs stuffed into a gap between railings. Something too calculated about it, I realized, and stopped being a sucker.
Breakfast today at Zatz, West Seattle’s only bagel shop. Its bulletin board heralds a milestone passed just last month — 10 years in business! One of the Admiral Junction’s success stories. I wonder sometimes why that part of town has been so slow to gentrify; certainly there are other bright spots such as Metropolitan Market, but otherwise, what a mixed bag. Maybe it’s on track to become our banking district, with the new Bank of America joining Wells Fargo & WaMu, but it’s also the franchisey-est Junction, with Jack in the Box, Baskin Robbins, and (West Seattle’s original!) Starbucks all elbow-to-elbow. Which reminds me, have to find out what they’re going to do with the old gas-station property on the franchise side of the street.
West Seattle ferry riders may not have to return to grumbling-tummyhood after all. Or so says the Vashon Beachcomber.
Glad to hear it; tried one of the Sound Food sandwiches some time back, surprisingly gourmet for cold, pre-packaged fare. (They offered some hot choices too; we just weren’t in the mood for them.) But really, the run is so short (unless you’re on one of the occasional straight-shot-to-Southworth trips), do you need food? If you’re sailing from Seattle, hit the Thriftway deli or Tully’s en route, or the Cat’s Eye Cafe once it reopens. (Speaking of which, the WS Herald just posted the cafe story.)
Half a dozen West Seattle elementary schools are on the latest list recommended for new water pipes, along with Denny Middle School & its neighbor, Chief Sealth High. The total project cost is estimated at $11 million plus. I’m wondering, how much is it costing, in the meantime, to provide alternative water sources for our kids? Do we really have to wait for another levy to fix this? Bill Gates is busy throwing money at Third-World health issues; maybe he could give a few centavos to Seattle Public Schools. Oh wait, he did, didn’t he, and regretted it, if I recall correctly …
A local TV station told the story tonight of the “TEMPORARILY CLOSED” sign on the Cat’s Eye Cafe north of Lincoln Park. Seems a car crash is to blame. Hard to tell from the outside, but pictures of the inside made it clear why they’re closed. The woman who runs the cafe told the reporter she’s hoping they’ll reopen in about three weeks. Hope so!
This P-I column today tells the heartening story of two West Seattle families with more in common than where they live.
Turns out I know a little something about both families. Anyone who’s been in West Seattle more than a few years will of course recognize the name of Mike Heavey, who had a boffo sign team back in his campaigning days. But it took me a few minutes and a bit of Googling to remember why I recognized the name of John Moe — I’d followed a link once to his blog.
Though she may not have a West Seattle link, the third player in the P-I column is noteworthy too. As we learned back in our early-parenthood days, maternity nurses rock.
I’ve walked by these people’s office dozens of times. Didn’t take time to fish online to see what they’re about, till now. I think this is the coolest page on their site. Note how the dropdown breaks it all down by neighborhood. (We won’t hold the Genesee typo against them.)
Happy 2006! Here are some completely random highlights of 2005 on the west side:
*Continuing mallization of Westwood Village: The new wings with Barnes & Noble and Pier 1 opened. The real highlight of B & N: the desserts in its cafe — from Cheesecake Factory. (Get the cheesecake, without the big meal tab! Yee-ha!)
*Death of the monorail: I’m personally puzzled as to why even West Seattle turned against it in the end. Yeah, the folks running it made some mistakes. Ultimately, though, they would have worked it out, and we would have had true mass transit. Take a look at the old trolley photos outside the train store in the Junction; sigh and know we won’t see anything like that again in our lifetimes.
*Monorail property moves: West Seattle Herald takes up a much more visible spot, in the Admiral Junction. I gather they’re bitter about being forced from their old headquarters, but honestly, this is a better place, and might help more locals wake up to the fact that we actually have something resembling a community paper.
*Mondo condos: Wherever zoning permitted, single-family homes came down, and condo/townhouse buildings went up. Most notably, ex-monorail board member Cindi Laws’ old garden house site in Alki. I do miss the morning glories. Runner-up for most notable site, the condo building that’s almost done, just south of Caffe Ladro. I didn’t really believe all that bluster a couple years ago about Trader Joe’s, but nonetheless, this is a bit of a relief.
*SW Community Center improvements: The basketball court is nice, but why couldn’t they have allocated a few bucks to expand the changing facilities for the pool? Check out other city pools and you’ll realize just how pathetically cramped this site is. Well, at least we still have a pool. Two, in fact, when summer arrives and Lowman Pool opens for its mini-season. (Is it May yet? Hurrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeee ….)
*Greg Nickels re-inaugurated: We’re not likely to have such power concentrated here in WS, once he’s gone, unless Dow Constantine decides to go for it (go, Dow, go!). Although I wish he would just make peace with his plus-size body — watched him a few minutes ago on the “New Year’s at the Needle” broadcast telling the anchor-clones he’s hoping to lose weight in ’06. Look, Greggie, we love you just the way you are. Really.
*Speaking of food: My New Year’s resolution is to find out what all the pho fuss is about, now that the Than Brothers have arrived in our part of town.
Did a double-take today, driving south on Fauntleroy just past Fairmount Park, in what we have always known as the Fairmount Park neighborhood. A green and white sign is up on the west side of the street, just past the stoplight south of the school, saying “Welcome to Fairmount Springs … our neighborhood.” Springs? As in, Palm Springs? (with which even Alki Beach would never be confused, and as a desert-hater, we say, damn good thing) Is this some subversive new neighborhood-naming campaign, like whatever in the world gave rise to “West Edge” in the downtown spot by the viaduct’s Seneca offramp?
Pothole Alley, perhaps. But not Fairmount Springs. “Park” sounds classier, in fact.
Coming up later … our West Seattle Year-in-Review. Highly subjective, of course. But bound to be fun!
All along the west side of California Avenue SW as it climbs the shoulder of Gatewood Hill, south of the Morgan Junction urban village, er, business/residential district, the old warbox houses are making way for three-(or so)story reworks. None, though, is quite as mystifying as this one. Price tag: almost a million bucks. OK, we get that, for a view house, but this one is in a spot where sightproofing seems as necessary as soundproofing. It’s a corner lot directly across one street from a busy church and school, and across California from the church annex, including more play space for the kids. To boot, the lot is right at the start of the California climb, right about where buses (and many other vehicles) start to gun their engines to make it up the incline.
We repeat — a million bucks?
Passed the Cat’s Eye Cafe north of Lincoln Park this morning — big hurricane-zone-style piece of wood over the door, spray-painted in orange, TEMPORARILY CLOSED. Looked like something more serious than the holiday closures local restaurants engage in. Hope it’s not the same kind of “temporary closure” that bit Chez Million on Alki (formerly The Lighthouse Grill and The Point) before the unmarked butcher paper went up over all the windows …
Wow, how did we sleep through all this?
That’s one thing about our little peninsula … a whole lot of land where there’s nowhere to run except right into the Sound.
Some people can’t wait for Christmas to get here. Not me. The holiday itself always makes me sad. I love Christmas lights more than any other feature of the season — but once December 25 arrives, it seems half the people who put them up, stop turning them on. I know they’re not out there on Christmas Day dismantling their displays, but suddenly they just stop bothering to go out back and plug them in, or whatever. Personally, I don’t believe in taking down the tree or deactivating the lights until after New Year’s Day. This is still a “holiday week,” even if you’re working. So here’s a shout-out to all the fine folks who “let it shine, let it shine, let it shine” until the day they box everything up again. Especially West Seattle’s boldest and brightest, the Menashes down on Beach Drive. (But what happened to Fauntlee Hills, over the ferry dock? We took a spin through their neighborhood this year & it seems to be a shadow of its former self.)
Not far from Lincoln Park, housing developers have ripped out a phenomenal amount of greenery in the past few years, turning hillsides into homesites. The watershed is gone; the trees and bushes for urban wildlife, all gone. Today, one of these projects has turned up in the P-I. A developer whines that it hasn’t been particularly profitable, while also claiming he and investors launched the project with these questions: “What’s the best use of the land? What can we do that impacts the site the least?”
The article doesn’t even nod to the possibility that the answers might have been, leave it alone.
Westwood Village may be a mall wanna-be, and the addition of Barnes & Noble and Pier 1 certainly has nudged it closer to mallhood. But it’s never going to be a real mall until it’s got its own after-Christmas-sale mania! We’re just back from a trip over there and pshaw, no bargains to write home about. Especially Bed, Bath & Beyond. Quel disappointment! We couldn’t even find a $20 choco-fountain. B&N has calendars on sale at half price, but then again, you didn’t need a Magic 8 Ball to see that one coming …
If you take the West Seattle Bridge straight to 1st Avenue South, or I-5, you might not care much about the endless Viaduct dithering. Same if you telecommute. But for the thousands of us who rely on that crumbling concrete lifeline along the waterfront, its looming doom is a matter we ponder daily, if only for the moments we roar along its deck, praying The Big One won’t strike until we are safely off it. Lately the discussion has focused on “tunnel vs. New Viaduct,” but this weekend, an editorial threw in an alternative viewpoint — why not just tear it down and stop there? Intriguing, especially if truly usable water transport could be mustered (for example, foot ferries not just from the Water Taxi jumping-off-point vicinity at Seacrest, but also from Fauntleroy, for the south end of our peninsula) — but does it have the proverbial snowball’s chance?
The Seattle Times Christmas edition features more than a bundle of after-Christmas-sale flyers — it also showcases a nice collection of local folks doing good. Among them, this guy. Trivial side note — nice picture of our west-facing shore behind him, too; so many people think West Seattle=Alki=downtown skyline views.
Honestly, this is intended to be a blog about West Seattle — what’s going on, and what’s not going on, on this side of the city, the quasi-peninsula that used to be a city all its own.
However, today, while this is still in stealth mode, we just have to say something about one of the “who stole Christmas?” controversies raging wildly across the Web.
The East Coast substitute teacher who revealed the truth about Santa Claus to a class of first-graders wasn’t all wrong.
“Those same children are going to know someday that what their parents taught them is false,” she explained, according to newspaper accounts. True. Exactly why we chose not to start the whole Santa mess with our kid, and honestly, we’re surprised more modern parents haven’t chosen to go that same route. Were we the only ones who felt betrayed when we realized we’d been deceived all those years? Did all the rest of you really just go “Oh, OK, whatever, fine,” when you found out? Didn’t it make you wonder what else your parents were lying to you about?
And yet … there is another side of Santa, also represented in the article we read about the East Coast controversy. One of the miffed parents mailed the substitute teacher a copy of “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.”
To this day, we do believe in that Santa — the symbol of unconditional giving, and therefore love. That’s the Santa we taught our kid about, not the one that scratches up the roof, tumbles down the chimney, and cleans out the cookie jar.
Merry Christmas. No, we mean it. Not just Happy Holidays.
Much more to come …
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