A meeting over the new residential and commercial design for the QFC project that will replace Queen Anne's Metropolitan Market drew a couple hundred people to the Bethany Presbyterian Church on a steamy Monday night this week.Members of the community council's Land Use Review Committee - which held the meeting - were generally pleased with the new approach. But even though strident public objections to the project have been dialed back a bit, resentment still runs deep in the community. Just how deep was revealed when Christina Cox, one of the property owners, told everyone that QFC had provided free bottled water for the meeting. The announcement was greeted with boos by several in the crowd.Lee Beard, from Beard and Page Architects, used basic renderings to explain the new design, which still takes up the entire block. But the four-story development has been broken into three distinct blocks of buildings so that the project doesn't overwhelm the street, he said.A 35,000-square-foot QFC still anchors the project, but there are now small commercial spaces at the north and south corners on Queen Anne Avenue, Beard said.The plan calls for deliveries to be made at a loading dock at the northeast corner next to the Baptist church, an arrangement that raised red flags for many in the crowd. Underground parking is included for retail customers, along with above-grade parking under a terrace and residential units for tenants. Access to the garages will be off Crockett and Howe streets, not off the alley or off Queen Anne Avenue, according to the plan.
Despite Sunday's scorching, sweltering and often uncomfortable 90-degree heat, plenty of brave souls managed to make it over to the intersection of Queen Anne Avenue North and Roy Street to celebrate the second annual Uptown Sunday in Counterbalance Park.Although the all-gravel appearance of the lot brings to mind everything except a future park, construction on the area is scheduled to begin in 2007. Young and old alike gathered on Sunday for music, drinks and awards under the sun. Organizations such as the Greater Queen Anne Chamber of Commerce, Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, Uptown Alliance and Uptown Stroll set up tents in the area - most people were probably more interested in the shade than the information that the structures provided.
Two new shows at the Henry Art Gallery join the ongoing Maya Lin exhibit to offer summer visitors an eclectic experience in contemporary art. From the massive Lin installations to the small color panels by Byron Kim, there's enough here to raise myriad questions about the nature of art in today's America.The first show to greet the visitor is "Akio Takamori: The Laughing Monks." Takamori, a lauded University of Washington ceramicist, offers four new ceramic sculptures which he has paired with a collection of vessels and works on paper taken from the Henry's collection. In one room, the two laughing monks of the show's title are sitting on a high platform that extends across much of the gallery. Facing toward each other, they survey the collection of 20 bottles and vases. Judging from the fulfilled look on the monks' faces, there's sake in those containers and they have sampled just a bit too much.
Soul-searching about his profession, estimable New York Times critic A.O. Scott recently wondered, "Are we out of touch with the audience? Why do we go sniffing after art where everyone else is looking for fun, and spoiling everybody's fun when it doesn't live up to our notion of art?""Lady in the Water" brought that rhetorical query to mind, since critics have almost unanimously savaged M. Night Shyamalan's latest. Reactions to this benign bed-time story/fairy tale have been shockingly virulent, with many reviewers indulging in poisonously personal attacks on Shyam-alan or scattergun rants that omit much of what actually happens in the movie (e.g., Lisa Schwarz-baum's bile-ish Entertainment Weekly screed). Does all this critical Sturm und Drang mean that "Lady" doesn't rise to art, but will appeal to heat-waved audiences looking for AC fun? (Answer: No)
One of the first things I did after we formed the Georgetown Merchants Association was to invite Mayor Greg Nickels to a future meeting. When I submitted the information to his scheduler, I wondered how many times I would have to invite him before he accepted. I learned the answer the next day: one.Within 24 hours of e-mailing my request, a staffer called and said the mayor would love to attend. He was already booked for June but he could come to our July meeting. July it was.Knowing this was a huge opportunity for us, and for Georgetown as a whole, we needed a plan. We decided to hold a pre-mayor meeting to discuss logistics; after all it wasn't every day the mayor comes to visit. Maybe a dozen of us met to talk about what we wanted to accomplish and how we were going to do that. We decided to take the mayor on a journey of sorts. We were going to show him how Georgetown has changed through the years: it would be a mixture of past, present and, of course, our future. Designated speakers would talk about their businesses and why they chose this neighborhood. Basically, we wanted to add a human element to Georgetown. This is a neighborhood that so often is called "industrial" but there is so much more to it, and we were going to do our best to illustrate that.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the more units of housing we build, the more affordable they should be, but here in Seattle, as in many cities across the country, exactly the opposite is true. Runaway growth has correlated directly with higher rents and an increase in the number of existing low cost units that are demolished to make way for new, more expensive development. Growth also has been accompanied by an alarming number of units lost to condominium conversion.Up-zoning property for greater density only increases the pressure to tear down existing housing. Older duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and single-family rentals are particularly susceptible. As for condo conversions, an April Seattle Times article explained how 9,200 apartments have been converted to condos since 2000, county-wide. Last year saw the biggest change with about 4,000 units converted. This resulted in a net loss of rental units because it exceeded the number of apartments built county-wide, wrote the Time's Virginia Rhodes.In the city we see the same trend. Just this past year, between June of 2005 and May of 2006, Seattle lost over 2,000 housing units to condo conversions and 681 to demolition, of which the great majority had been home to low-income renters.
My husband, Dick Burkhart, and I have chose Amtrak and tandem bicycling as our modes of travel during a recent trip across America. Conscious of human impacts on the Earth's ecosystems, Dick and I noted that many neighborhoods are making small efforts to reverse the trend. Everywhere there are signs of turning away from suburban sprawl and gluttonous resource consumption.Our first stop was Portland where my nephew, Kenneth Southerland, lives in the Hawthorne District, a committed bicycle community. Ken and his friends refuse to own cars. They carefully choose their homes, jobs, and entertainment along Portland's intricate complex of bicycle lanes. Ken's small back yard is mostly a vegetable garden that includes a patch of wheat from which he grinds his own flour.Eugene had bike lanes and paths running everywhere. Our host, Gary Trudeau, lives three miles from the city center on an acre of land with a big vegetable garden and several bee hives. Most of the time he bikes to work, a lifestyle not uncommon for Eugene. When we got off the train in Chico, California, most people we met thought nothing of driving cars miles in any direction. In fact, I spent most of my time in the Chico area sitting in the back seat of a car with our friend, Lucy Sperlin, an anthropologist and the backbone of the Butte County Historical Society. She drove us miles out of town past the remains of abandoned gold rush era mines to the ghost town of Oregon City, California, of which there is nothing left but the school house and cemetery. It seemed to symbolize the sustainability level of today's neighborhoods.
A massive 60-unit homeless facility proposed by Downtown Emergency Services Center (DESC) will likely overwhelm Southeast Seattle's fragile Hillman and Columbia City neighborhoods with dubious benefit to the homeless population it is supposed to serve. However, for the pro-DESC group "Rainier HOME," anything less than complete project endorsement indicates antipathy towards the homeless. In a June 9 Seattle Channel segment, DESC director Bill Hobson similarly decried the "demonization" of the homeless instead of answering troubling questions about the project's size and cost. DESC won't even allow the Southeast Seattle Crime Prevention Council to participate in a proposed good neighbor agreement! We care deeply about both the city's homeless and our neighborhood, and reject DESC's and Rainier HOME's divisive attack-the-messenger tactics as we search for a more thoughtful middle ground.
The press conference announcing the sale of the Sonics and Storm last week was incongruous on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start.To being with, the press conference was ironically held on the teams' practice court near the Seattle Center. But there were also basketball sneakers with floating balloons tied to them placed on top of standup tables - as if the bombshell news was something to celebrate. There were a couple of coffee urns, too, which were notable because they didn't feature Starbucks logos. There were tubs full of lukewarm bottles of pop and water as well, which was fitting because lukewarm was about the best way to describe the general reaction to Howard Schultz's attempt to paint a happy face on the whole situation. To point out what a swell hometown guy he is, for instance, Schultz claimed he even turned down other offers for more money because, he said, the unnamed buyers would have moved the two basketball teams out of town.Unlike Oklahoma City's Clayton Bennett and his Professional Basketball Club investment group, which will wait at least a year before bailing. And hey, it's just a coincidence that Oklahoma City's Ford Arena will be vacant right around then as the Hornets move back to New Orleans.
Summer's heat has finally settled over Seattle, and with it comes the season of street fairs and block parties, just in time to entice people out of their hot and stuffy homes. From Capitol Hill to Wallingford, neighborhood sponsored festivities in the Emerald City have a tradition of pulling out all the entertainment stops. They often attract internationally known music acts, hundreds of regional vendors and jam the streets with hordes of people. As a result, some, such as the Capitol Hill Block Party, have become more of a regional event than local get together. However, bigger does not mean better, and the residents, businesses and admirers of Georgetown proved the old maxim true with the inaugural Georgetown Street Carnival on Saturday, July 22. "We wanted people to know that Georgetown actually has kids that live down there. It's a bunch of families." said event organizer and primary financial backer Scott Hornell, who asserted that the weekday vibe of his neighborhood is markedly different from the nightlife-driven weekend atmosphere often associated with the historic area.
The Lake City Western Vigilantes make their way through Greenwood during the Greenwood Seafair Parade on Wednesday, July 26. The Vigilantes will make another appearance at the Lake City Parade, of which they are co-organizers.
The Burke Museum is giving middle-school students the opportunity to investigate a real DNA mystery at a new, week-long summer day camp.During the Investigating DNA: The Albatross Salvage Project - taking place in University of Washington laboratories this week and next - campers will learn the basics of how DNA is used around the world. Under the guidance of scientist Sharon Birks, genetics-sources manager at The Burke Museum, students will use actual museum-collection specimens from a bird project."It will give students the introductory skills for understanding genetics and an opportunity for middle-school students to conduct original and meaningful scientific research," according to Burke Museum director Julie Stein. "These students will know about DNA in ways that will very soon be mandatory in our world. They will see the practical application of this science through the Albatross research, but they will learn so much more because they will discover it for themselves."
Usually July is a great stretch of 31 days here in the Pacific Northwest. The sun scatters the region's notorious cloud cover, and Rain City residents forget what it's like to live under the dark, drizzly skies of winter. This year, July began beautifully with a not-too-hot streak of days leading up to a long Fourth of July weekend. The clouds even parted for the Lake Union and Elliot Bay fireworks displays.Unfortunately, the month's perfect start quickly disintegrated into a bloody, hot mess for the Greater Seattle area.The mayhem kicked off 50 miles northeast of Seattle on July 11 along a gorgeous stretch of trail near Mount Pilchuck, where a Green Lake woman, 56, and her 27-year-old daughter, a Ravenna resident, were shot during a hike. To add a bit of international pain to these rare wilderness homicides and make the news even tougher to follow, the Israeli army and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah fighters started a vicious war in the Middle East. Mainly civilians have been killed, and the vast majority have been Lebanese. The most recent atrocity happened on Sunday, July 30, when 57 unarmed Lebanese civilians, including 37 children, were killed when an Israeli warplane targeted their high rise in the village of Qana, where they were taking refuge.
He actually had the audacity to say that this is what's best. Starbucks coffee baron Howard Schultz, the Seattle Supersonics principal owner, tried to present the recent sale of the team to a group from Oklahoma City as a celebratory affair. But the balloons and streamers screamed of audaciousness, disingenuousness and just plain B.S.And, frankly, it was insulting.The sale was a good thing for Schultz and the group of Sonics owners he led. They made $75 million or so in the five years they owned the team. Which is good work if you can get it. But the truth is that Schultz and Co. sold the city out.
The North 45th Street corridor was named as the top vote-getter July 12 in Mayor Greg Nickels' search for the "dirty dozen" worst transportation problems in Seattle.Speaking at a press conference at the Wallingford Center, the mayor promised the city will repave the street later this summer, and he took the opportunity to promote his $1.8 billion, 20-year plan to fix a decades-long backlog of deferred maintenance for the city's roads, bridges and sidewalks.But the Seattle City Council has been discussing a funding package that is roughly 75 percent of the mayor's. A 'lumpy, bumpy' rideKara Ceriello didn't think North 45th was as bad as some other streets in Wallingford, although she admitted it's "very lumpy-bumpy." Ceriello is the co-president of the Wallingford Chamber of Commerce and one of the owners of the Not A Number store, along North 45th.She's worried about the scope of the work: "We need to make sure that they're going to repave the road, not just pave over [the existing asphalt]," she said.Ceriello also questioned the timing of Nickels' push for funding. "It's interesting it comes right after new budget money was found," she said. "So why do we have to hit everybody up again?"