West Seattle, Washington
30 Saturday
This Thursday night, the city’s Southwest Design Review Board meets to consider the plans for those two Cali Ave teardowns we 
lamented in extended posts a couple weeks back: 3811 Cali (left) and 6053 Cali (right). It’s at the SW Precinct (near Home Depot) — 3811 is first on the agenda at 6:30; 6053 follows at 8.
You won’t find it on the website for this converted apartment building (Cali/Myrtle) but a closer look at its streetside sign reveals creative phraseology for what one commenter called its “converted motel” look — “midcentury retro condominium homes.”
One day after the P-I noted that Seattle’s supply of rental homes is way down, we found a great rental right here in WS. This house first caught our eye because it had a “for sale” sign up; then a “sold” signlet went up the other day, and this Craigslist “for rent” ad appeared. See what it’s like to live in one of Alki Ave’s last remaining standalone homes! (Providing you can spare $3250/month.)
Not only did Megawatt move into the new WS Community Resource Center @ 35th/Morgan as of today, so did the West Seattle Food Bank, according to a DNDA e-mail newsletter kindly forwarded to us by a stalwart reader. Congrats to everyone who’s worked on that project for years! (WS Helpline tells us they’re making their move into the building next month.)
Didn’t know this was happening today, till we saw a banner at a worksite along Fauntleroy near Lincoln Park while we watched out a bus window: It was “Spring Rebuilding Day” for Rebuilding Together Seattle, which we hadn’t heard of till now; sounds like a great cause.
Just happened onto the “for sale” ad for the waterfront apartment building at 3633 Beach Drive. It touts “excellent high-end conversion opportunities.” (We have a memory of this building: a little-remembered windstorm in fall 1991 that caused some roof trouble, and other mayhem along that stretch of Beach Drive; the repair permit is still in city records.)
Or so say a couple newspaper articles today, including this one from the Times with a mostly-WS focus. Almost enough to make you want to put yours on the market and reap the profits … oh wait … as we remind ourselves here at WSB HQ, the only problem with selling our house at a nice (relatively) fat price would be, then we’d have to go jump into one of those bidding wars for some other house up for sale at a nice (relatively) fat price … sigh.
The new High Point gets a mention in this article today about the high cost of homeownership (condos included) within city limits.
Note on the front door of Gatewood Baptist says they’ve finally made their move to the new digs on 35th (formerly Calvary Lutheran), and the name change (Life Church) too. Meantime, the townhouses on ex-church property across the street are moving fast … frames are up for at least two of the buildings.
-Another one of our looming megaprojects gets its Design Review Board closeup this Thursday: 4729 42nd SW, aka Soon-To-Be-Ex-Parking-Lot Behind Soon-To-Be-Ex-Petco, aka Ex-Monorail Land.
-Make sure your calendar’s marked for the big meeting a week from Wednesday at Charlestown Cafe, which folks are trying to save from the fate of becoming future home to Soon-To-Be-Ex-Petco.
-Jumping back down to The Junction, we heard concerns a while back from the neighbors of 4515 41st SW, more “mixed use” creeping into a residential neighborhood. Its next Design Review Board spotlight comes up April 12.
-Now hopscotching back up toward Admiral, we got a note recently from a neighbor who wonders if anyone else cares about the phenomenon of creeping commercialism spilling further inland from Cali. This neighbor lives near the beauty salon across from the far corner of PCC’s lot, west of McDonald’s, and contends zoning only allows a home-based business, not a business-focused house with big signs. The neighbor says a zoning inspector ruled the signs could stay because they don’t have text — they’re considered “art.” They’re campaigning to get the businessperson to tone down the signs.
-Finally, another reader points out that the ex-Christian Science church north of the Hiawatha playground, east of Safeway Parking Smackdown Ground Zero, has relatively recently transitioned into something called Sanctuary At Admiral, giving The Hall At Fauntleroy (among other venues) a run for its money.
As mentioned about halfway through the plentiful comments on this post three weeks ago, a big Delridge apartment building is going condo. (Odd little blip on the city website about the complex “failing” an “inspection” this week, related to all this.) The Weekly features the project in this story (by photo, not by name) and links it to a company whose website simply notes “West Seattle, coming soon.”
“Open House,” sure, but “Grand Opening” for a mini-cluster of new $400K townhomes (Fauntleroy & Findlay)? Struck us funny, or maybe we’re just giddy from sunshine.
If you live in one of West Seattle’s many older houses and have a bit of curiosity about who lived in your house way back when, here’s an unlikely tool: The city database of “side sewer cards.” Look up your address and you’ll find an image of the hand-drawn, hand-written records showing where your house connects its “side sewer” to the nearest main city pipe and who owned it last time it was inspected (check the back of the “card” for that info). And if yours goes back far enough that the person who originally owned it is likely to have left the planet by now, you can look ’em up on the Social Security Death Index.
One day after the Tempest in a Pizza Box, the P-I’s got another story that appears ripped from the pages of West Seattle Blog (but with a few new details, such as, who’s trying to buy, and build on, that big front yard).
Yet another historic West Seattle house is on the market — a side note on this article reveals that this is your big chance to buy the “Hainsworth House” (our WS History page has a link to its backstory). And as far as we can tell, nobody’s ponied up yet for Beach Drive’s historic Satterlee House or its acreage-riffic front yard — but there’s been a price cut; the SH listing is now down to $995K, from $1.2m, where it had been since splitting off from the no-price-cut-yet front yard (originally last summer the two were bundled for $3m).
Old news to some, since apparently this has been out there for a few weeks, but we just happened onto it while making a periodic check of the site for the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association, the organization behind a variety of community improvements including most famously in the past year the Youngstown Arts Center transformation: DNDA’s longtime executive director Paul Fischburg is leaving, and they’re looking for somebody new. (We wrote to ask what he’s moving on to; he forwarded us a copy of his announcement memo, which mentioned that he’s leaving after 10 years with no particular plans, but will enjoy some down time while mulling the future.)
A shiny new city land-use alert sign (the posts look like they just came out of the lumberyard) is now up in front of the Schuck’s/Hancock Fabrics parking lot that eventually will make way for Fauntleroy Place. No new milestones on its city DPD tracking page; the architect’s site (it’s craftily framed; follow “what we do” to “business/commercial” to “mixed use” and find Fauntleroy Place there) says construction will start in 2008 — we wondered, is it really that far away? Maybe so, given that several city agencies/commissions still seem to have some questions (or so you’d gather reading the last page of these minutes from last month’s meeting of the city Design Commission).
Noticed a fair amount of signs around WS lately touting “Verge Condominiums.” Didn’t realize till a morning drive along Harbor Avenue today that “Verge” is the building across from the piles o’ harbor stuff we always referred to as the “slag heaps” (caveat, I can’t find proof of exactly what’s in those piles). What’s more, it’s got an over-the-top marketing campaign. Signs in front of the building mention (paraphrasing now) “smelling salt spray,” among other fantasies. Checked out the Verge website after the drive and it’s really almost funny. For one, the waves on the home page are open-ocean, “surfing Waimea” type waves, not the “ferry wake” wavelets of Alki. For two, the typestyles are beautiful but they really needed to hire a proofreader (helloo, it’s macchiato, not machiatto; 2 misspellings apiece on this page and this page; then on this page, besides the misuse of “it’s,” the photo of the guy staring quizzically at the Fine Cuisine is good for a laugh).
Redevelopment can be a fine thing. However, you’d think they could sell these condos quite nicely without trying to paint the neighborhood as the next best thing to the OC.
Two sightings tonight on our side of West Seattle have us in eye-rolls:
(1) A set of teardown-turned-condos on the east side of Cali Ave now bears a name on a big advertising banner: “NOMO 12.” Took us a block or two to figure out that “NOMO” has nothing to do with Hideo the baseball player or Stan Boreson’s basset. Though we can’t find an online reference to confirm this, it HAS to be “NoMo” as in “North of Morgan (Junction),” a la all those pretentious names you find in NYC, Belltown, other trendy or wannabe-trendy neighborhoods. Cringe.
(2) Someone has peppered power poles on the south end of Cali Ave with laminated bright red flyers shouting, COYOTE WARNING/MULTIPLE COYOTE SIGHTINGS IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD/KEEP PETS INDOORS! Heaven & stars, all the flyer’s missing is a picture of Wile E. Coyote with a big circle/slash “no” symbol through his face. We suppose “keep pets indoors” is a more appropriate exhortation than oh, say, “shoot on sight,” but really now. The anti-wildlife hysteria is a little out of control. Keep your pets indoors is a great idea so they won’t get run over; that’s a bigger threat than hungry wildlife. Hmm, maybe we’ll go make up some flyers along the lines of CAR WARNING/MULTIPLE CAR SIGHTINGS IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD/KEEP PETS INDOORS …
Even with the acceleration in teardown-to-townhome construction, West Seattle still has thousands of homes dating back to the ’50s, and earlier. We found out some of our house’s history not long after moving in — I was out doing some garden cleanup one day, when a man walked up, asked me a few questions about the house, then revealed his father was the original owner/builder. He told us his dad had to go off to serve in World War II not long after the house was done; after the war, he said, his dad moved into the homebuilding business bigtime, and the family eventually moved to California. (Whenever I find myself bemoaning our house’s relatively tiny size, I think of its original residents, who were double our number and apparently got along just fine!)
After this encounter, we did more research on the house by going to some government building (memory fails me) and looking up its original building permits. (You should still be able to do this nowadays; check these places for starters.)
I mention all this as an excuse to link to a few interesting house-history sites we’ve encountered recently while doing online research. One is this site set up by real-estate agents for a Fauntlee Hills home that sold earlier this year (though the site is still active, please note the listing is not); they went to great lengths to create a site with the house’s history and even old marketing materials for the area (if you’re not familiar with Fauntlee Hills, it’s the group of brick houses just east of Fauntleroy Church and the old school-turned-community center, uphill from the ferry dock). Another is the site a local developer created a few years back for a 1923 Craftsman home he rescued from impending teardown, then moved a short distance and renovated. And the third is a site for a home whose history is still in progress, a rather dramatic renovation project we’ve seen along the south end of Cali Ave. Very nice of these folks to share the houses’ history with the rest of the world!
(Apologies to Joyce Kilmer.) As someone absolutely passionate about being a truly green greenie — as mentioned before, if you looked at our house from Google Earth, you would barely see its roof amid all the trees and shrubs we’ve allowed to grow around and over it — I’m skeptical about Hizzoner‘s new “WE (HEART) TREES” campaign, lovingly (and mostly uncritically) previewed in the P-I and Times this morning. One even more fabulous way to slow tree loss would be to apply tougher standards to the rampant infill that’s under way in areas like ours. On the slopes over Lincoln Park, in the past few years, we’ve seen acres of greenery fall to developers’ backhoes (here’s just one example), replaced by oversized houses (do 2 or 3 people really need 3.5K sf?). How about we save a little more greenspace than just what’s left in our parks? Dare to look at an “undeveloped” lot and consider that maybe its highest and best use is to stay “undeveloped.” There’s more to “environmentally critical” than streams and wetlands.
From a Times story today about Seattle house-hunting, an alarming paragraph that seems to malign our fair side of the bay:
They drove to West Seattle to see a house in their price range. In the neighborhood, they saw a sign posted outside a convenience store near the high school that said something like, “We know you students are thieves. Only one student inside at a time.”
They couldn’t see themselves living there.
OK, which high school would that have been? Neither West Seattle HS nor Sealth HS has a convenience store within a block or so, unless my memory is failing me. Perhaps a high school temporarily housed at Boren? Although I can’t think of any convenience stores adjacent to that campus either …
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