West Seattle, Washington
03 Sunday
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.)
Anybody who hasn’t left home yet and has to drive Harbor Ave — two big City Light trucks are down there in the (for now) greenbelt zone, working with a power pole. Traffic cops are stopping cars, one direction at a time, so it’s a bit of a holdup.
Huling/Gee isn’t the only name change along Fauntleroy’s mini-“auto row.” At Fauntleroy/Oregon, the tattered old “Bob Ochsner Cars” sign just vanished, and a slick new “West Seattle Motors” sign (left) just appeared. (If you can’t recall the old sign, check the right side of the photo on the bottom of this city page — scroll down, then over — about the neighboring, historical-ish Wardrobe Cleaners neon sign.)
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.)
As of this morning: no price change for either the cheapest or the most expensive.
According to the WS Herald (which describes these as “preliminary plans”): visitation @ Howden-Kennedy May 10 & 11, rosary @ Holy Rosary May 11, funeral (also at HR) May 12.
After we referred to the forthcoming, long-in-the-works Giannoni’s Pizzeria at Westwood Village as “mysterious” one too many times, their owners surfaced in our inbox and shared some details about what they’ll be doing when they open (south side of WV, next to Sally’s Beauty Supply). And they confirmed, they’re not a chain! Click ahead to read their full e-mail:Read More
Some upcoming, mostly eclectic events that deserve an advance shoutout:
–THIS THURSDAY: “Home Buying De-Mystified” free seminar @ PCC
–THIS SATURDAY: Bead 4 Life, 11 am-4 pm @ at T(ea) Gallery (a semi-hidden treasure on Cali, south of Admiral): beautiful beadwork displayed/sold as a fundraiser
–THIS SATURDAY NIGHT: Silent Auction to benefit another WS blogger‘s breast-cancer-fighting 3-Day Walk team (event’s on QA but such a great cause, with a WS link, we can’t resist)
–THIS SATURDAY NIGHT: Free theater! “One Night Only” — also @ Youngstown Arts — short pieces (4-10 minutes each) that The Community Theatre’s members have been working on in workshops. 7 pm reception, 8 pm show, free treats promised!
–LOOKING WAY AHEAD TO MAY 15 BUT YOU CAN BUY TICKETS RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE: The Taste of West Seattle, which benefits the wonderful WS Helpline, whose site has more info and a link to buy tix online.
The city website just put up this alert about paving work on Roxbury over the next few days.
Just posted at the P-I site: Flashing incident over the weekend in the 4500 block of 36th SW.
According to Councilmember Dow Constantine’s ace staff, the official count for Elliott Bay Water Taxi passengers on kickoff day was 2,545 — which they suspect was an all-time WT record (previous known high, 1,600-plus on the day last summer when a crash closed The Bridge). As for the King County Ferry District plan that could ensure the WT’s future — DC’s team says it made progress today in the council’s “Committee of the Whole” (8:17 PM UPDATE: click ahead to read the full press release on that):
Last week we tracked the 35th/Holden Chevron, which to our knowledge still has the highest posted price for regular gas in WS (holding at $3.39 as of an hour ago). 
Some folks wrote us asking for help in finding the cheapest gas. As of our unscientific drivearound survey last night and this morning, the Cali/Andover Exxon and Cali/Charlestown 7-11 (left) appear to be tied for that honor, at $3.17/gal for regular. (Both are in the repaving zone, so getting there requires patience.) As of last night, the Arco near Home Depot on Delridge wasn’t too far above that, at $3.19. Let us know if you’ve seen cheaper!
#1 — Avoid the parking crush by Seacrest (photo below; it stretched for a mile each way); walk or take the water-taxi shuttle (weekend schedule here; also this year they’ve printed schedule cards, easier to use than the brochure formats from previous years). The shuttle is running 7 days/week but parking probably won’t be quite as crunched on weekdays.
#2 — If you want to save a few bucks, now that the annual freebie day has passed, the best bargain for WEEKEND WT use is the Metro all-day pass. $2.50/person gets you all-day use for one full day on Metro buses and the Water Taxi – which otherwise is $3/each way. Remember that you can only buy this pass on board a Metro bus, only on Saturdays/Sundays, and it’s only good for the day you buy it. But what a deal!
… currently home to 2 houses on 42nd, just listed at $1.5m “to be sold together.”
Just received a note about something traumatic that happened on Admiral earlier today, with a request to let everyone know about those who did a very good deed as a result. We’re putting it up exactly as we received it, and it’s a bit long, so if you’re seeing this on the home page, click ahead to read:
The place to play that game right now is on the south end of Cali; hot on the heels of NoMo 12 comes SeventyOne, a condo-conversion apartment building SoMo, er, south of Morgan Junction, having its first open-house weekend as we write, just days after the remodeling crews cleared out. It’s got its own hypey website, of course, which proclaims that SeventyOne “redefines style on California Ave.” (Pardon our obsession with accuracy, but must ALL these condo-marketing websites have typos? This SeventyOne page alone has four.)
Checked out the WS Farmers’ Market a few minutes into opening day, and we are thrilled to see that our personal faves are back, including Eats Market Cafe, Herban Feast with its strawberry-lavender lemonade, and best of all, Langley Fine Gardens, which brings over beautiful plants from its Vashon nursery, including exotic solanums like the one at left (3 for $8!). The market’s open today till 2.
We’ve been so eagerly awaiting the return of the Elliott Bay Water Taxi, we couldn’t resist getting up to glimpse its first Seacrest arrival of the season. Below is the proof (before the sun came out!), as it approached the dock @ 8:50 am today. (The kickoff party isn’t till noon but the Water Taxi is running its official schedule; first run from WS was at 9.)
On this busy spring Sunday, perhaps between your Farmers’ Market stop and your Water Taxi trip, take a little time to help ponder the future of the Fauntleroy Schoolhouse. A community open house is happening there 11 am-2 pm to facilitate and inspire that pondering. And there’s urgency — the school district still owns this 90-year-old treasure (the child-care center, events hall, and others based there are tenants) but is indicating it’s time to sell off this and other “surplus property.” If you have only driven by, perhaps heading to or from the nearby ferry dock, you may not realize how large the schoolhouse property is; as a result, as one reader wrote to us, “there are developers who are hovering over the property.” Will it be the next townhouse cluster — or will the community rally to preserve it? Drop by today to offer ideas … or absorb them … a rare chance to do something before it’s too late.
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.
As of this morning, the WS station we’ve been watching was holding steady at $3.39/regular, but after a bus ride downtown (just $1.25!) we saw lots worse, such as the Shell @ Denny & Aurora (left). So if you’ve gotta fill up, home is better! (Or South Seattle Costco, where we paid $3.13 yesterday.) Oh, and the governor proclaims herself “ticked off” by the pump jumps.
After all the chatter leading up to the WS debut of Garlic Jim’s, it’s been open a month now, and the buzz has died down. A lot of folks gave it a try, with mixed reviews. So we’re asking today, has your pizza routine changed? Is GJ’s a regular part of it? Or, has the Pagliacci delivery-zone extension changed anything for you? 
We’ll start: Since GJ’s delivers to us but Pagliacci doesn’t, we haven’t gotten Pag pizza in weeks. (We’re sure they’re not missing us, since we’re not frequent pizza procurers.) Got GJ’s recently; 25 minutes from order to delivery, slightly overbrowned pepperoni pizza (left). We’ve noticed two major differences between GJ and Pagliacci: price, and subtlety — Pagliacci flavors can be subtle; 
GJ’s, generally not. Which is fine by us, as you would never mistake us for actual gourmets, though we do think GJ’s beats the non-locally based delivery chains (Papa John, Pizza Hut, Domino’s), and the price is right. Next up in the WS pizza world: the mysterious (still can’t find a biz license or anything else pointing us to who’s behind it) Giannoni’s (and neighboring Taco del Mar) is progressing at Westwood Village (right)
Three WS-related articles on the P-I site today:
-A well-known climber from West Seattle, Lara-Karena Kellogg, died after falling in Denali National Park. A tribute on this climbing blog points to a site friends have set up to share memories and condolences.
–Robert Jamieson pays tribute to Charlie Chong. (We are still keeping an eye out for funeral/memorial plans and will let you know when we hear something.)
-The entrepreneurs who moved Retroactive Kids from Morgan Junction to Columbia City are profiled. Among other things, they observe that WS wasn’t funky enough. (We hereby apologize; we’re quirky and crazy ourselves but never quite made it to funky.)
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