The folllowing letter was written by Capitol Hill resident Ellen Taft and sent to City Hall. As an advocate of taller buildings on Broadway and of good city planning in general, I am extremely disappointed with not only the city's proposal to re-zone Broadway, but also by the undiplomatic Unilateral Declaration of Re-zoning perpetrated by city council. In terms of getting the public to accept the proposed zoning changes on Broadway, the mayor and city council have forgotten three important facts about the population of Seattle, First, Seattle folks still think they are living in the small town of the 1940s and are extremely reactionary when it come to city planning. Secondly, the public has developed, based on long experience of civic mismanagement, a basic distrust of any proposal emanating from City Hall. Thirdly, in the case of any proposal concerning Broadway's improvement, the public does not have a short enough memory to overlook the mayor's attempt to save a measly $400,000 by cutting our bike cops on Broadway. As a result, we are not likely to embrace the proposed changes. Perhaps if the mayor and city council had considered these things they might have come up with a plan which was more palatable to the public. Here are some recommended changes.
There were costumes and there were floats. There was dancing in the park, drag queens and politicians.Last weekend, the 31st annual Pride march and festival, the city's largest gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered event, took place on Capitol Hill for what may have been the last time. Next year, the festival is likely to move to the Seattle Center, while the march/parade route is undetermined.As for this year's Pride, a record number of people attended. Roughly 150,000 people, possibly more, lined Broadway to watch the parade, took part in entertainment in Volunteer Park or both. It was the largest Pride event held in Seattle. The more than 180 organizations participating in the march, which lasted more than three hours on Sunday, June 26, was also a record.
I know a thing or two about airplanes.I rented a room at the Sunrise Motel, in Moses Lake, at the south end of the second longest runway in North America. Airlines would train crews and test new jets from Boeing. For six months, while I taught English as an intern at Big Bend Community College, Japan Airlines' 747s practiced touch and goes from mid-morning through 9 p.m., with a break for class and lunch.In eight hours of flight time, jets came and went every 15 minutes, 200 feet overhead. That made 32 passes over the Sunrise Motel, and 32 approaches on the runway's far end.The South End may soon have more than its fair share of noise pollution.A Southwest Airlines move to King County International Airport (KCIA, also called Boeing Field) would test the patience of neighbors in the Greater Duwamish district as much as student pilots tested mine in Moses Lake.
Southeast Seattle has an irresistibly diverse collection of thriving "small mart" retailers offering a low cost medley of goods from every conceivable source, to supply its culturally diverse community. All that wonderful variety is just sitting their waiting to mystify and reward home grown and adventurous shoppers who are willing to buy the familiar in unfamiliar surroundings, and who are eager to try ingredients and cuisine that take their taste buds outside their familiar time zone.This is week three of my walking survey of small, specialized grocery markets in Southeast Seattle. For my final installment I'll focus on the valley along Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. At South Cloverdale there stands a struggling landmark, a crossroads produce street market: the Vegetable Bin Polynesian store. Unfortunately, today it looks like it is suffering at the hands of Sound Transit's traffic disruption. As I go north I am discovering that the incredible diversity of small store shopping along MLK Jr. Way provides a market for every taste and culture, and that variety confronts the curious with a challenge to step out of their familiar groove.
I loved the concept of Fat Albert, and I applaud Bill Cosby's ability to turn the fat kid into the hero of his inner city community. But there was something about the timing of the movie that perplexed me. Why didn't it come out 10 to 15 years ago in the heyday of the Bill Cosby TV era? Why did it come out now?Writers often do that to themselves. We take a small thing and turn it over and over until we find the small cracks and read them like the ancient Chinese read the fissures in oracle bones. Fortunately, in the case of Fat Albert, the cracks were in proportion to a rather large body and easy to read.I am talking about corporate greed and how it is seeping into every crack and crevice of American culture, and it may be as institutionalized as American apple pie.
In the middle of the afternoon on Saturday, June 25 members of the community gathered to celebrate the return of the lifeguards to Pritchard Beach after a two-year absence. In addition to a meet and greet with city council members Richard Conlin and Nick Licata, the two council members who pushed hardest to have the funds released for the lifeguards, there were light refreshments provided along with music by the group Steel Drum Journey.
You'd never know to look at it that Hitt's Hill - the quiet wooded knoll just south of Columbia City - was once a world-famous source of deafening explosions and fiery displays. But it's true: for over 70 years the Hitt Fireworks Company operated there, turning out innovative explosives of all kinds, and producing fireworks shows for audiences near and far
A series of three workshops last week on replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel were supposed to give state and Seattle transportation officials a feel for the public's preference for either a short or a long project timeline.It's a significant question for the future of a vital, north-south transportation link because, while the shorter approach would be cheaper, the shorter approach ironically would see the viaduct completely closed to traffic for more time than the longer approach, officials said.
They could've chosen anything.Longer lunches, shorter classes, lower prices at the vending machines: All seemingly viable choices for your average high school kid. Instead, faced with the task of creating public service announcements as part of a media literacy class, students at Rainier Beach High School transformed obstinacy into opportunity by using their assignment to talk about the much-debated Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), a compulsory test given each year to fourth-, seventh-, and 10th- graders in Washington State.
In its ongoing efforts to raise $24.7 million to rehabilitate the East Kong Yick Building in the International District of Seattle, the Wing Luke Asian Museum has recently received some welcome support from two area elementary schools, developing a partnership that in many ways symbolizes the core reason for the museum's growth in recent years.The classes that contributed their time and efforts towards the future home of the only pan-Asian Pacific American museum in the country were Libby Sinclair's fifth grade class from Alternative Elementary II of the Seattle Public School District, and Sandra Kim's third grade class of Wing Luke Elementary. Respectively, they created water colors of the building as well as a comprehensive anthology of Seattle's Asian-American community filled with oral histories and original poems and narratives about the building, and the people who have lived and resided there over the years.
A second-grader makes his move (at left) on the school's giant chess set during the June 10 chess tournament at B.F. Day Elementary School, 3921 Linden Ave. N.
As 2008 draws near, parents' anger toward Washington state grows. And students either scratch their heads in bewilderment or tear out their hair in frustration because of the confusion surrounding something called a WASL.The Washington Assessment of Student Learning (commonly referred to as the WASL) is a statewide test administered in all Washington public schools. All fourth-, seventh- and 10th-graders are tested in reading, writing, listening and mathematics. Eighth- and 10th graders also will take the test in science.Beginning with the year 2008, high school students who do not pass that WASL test will not graduate, regardless of their grades or SAT scores. Now, of course, they can retake the test the following year, but doing so in effect postpones their going to college.
"BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING" By Malcolm GladwellIn a psychological study conducted in the 1990s, groups of black college students were given 20 questions from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for gauging how well students will perform in graduate school. When randomly selected students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, this seemingly simple act was sufficient to "prime" them with the negative stereotypes that American culture often associates with African Americans and academic achievement, thereby affecting the student's performance.
Last month, Midwesterners Lisa Etter and Hayden Smith started a new adventure in Greenwood: their own nonprofit coffeehouse called the Green Bean Coffee House."What has happened to our neighborhood since this [café] started has been completely infectious," said customer Georgia England, a Greenwood resident.Etter and Smith were inspired to open a nonprofit coffee shop after living in a low-income part of Chicago. At the time, Etter worked in a homeless shelter and Smith taught at an elementary school. The two women planned to open a shop in Montana or Utah, until they encountered Randy Rowland.A pastor for the sanctuary that meets at Greenwood's Taproot Theatre, Rowland had already raised funds for such a coffeehouse in Seattle. He found a location for the shop next door to Taproot Theatre, where Bomber's Tavern used to be, at 210 N. 85th St.
While some people use datebooks to project the day's events, 22-year-old Aftin Ikeda chooses a much more serendipitous means to forecast her day: the stars and the World Wide Web.Each morning Ikeda climbs out of bed and anxiously checks her e-mail, in which her daily horoscope clues her in to what type of day she'll have. She thoroughly reads through the short paragraph and catalogs the prediction in her mind to help guide her through the day.Ikeda, like countless others, puts her faith not into the logic of the saying "Whatever happens, happens," but into the firm belief that what happens occurs for a reason. She puts her faith in fate, which comes from the Latin word "fatum," meaning "thing spoken by the gods."