West Seattle, Washington
15 Wednesday
The weather’s more beautiful than expected and there’s a good crowd browsing the Art Fair booths at the beach. Dozens of booths, plus a bouncy toy for kids ($1), are on the blacktop promenade, both sides of the bathhouse. Live music, too! Here’s a few scenes we caught while strolling through — first, the obligatory overview:
Two pix from our favorite booth, on the west end of the Art Fair — Hoppy’s Garden Art, lovely and reasonably priced creations (the rectangular trellises in the second photo were $79 & $89):
Not part of the fair but part of the scenery — with a low-ish tide down on the beach itself, boogieboarding was in order:
Art Fair signs say it’s 10-5 today and tomorrow; city website says till 6; just an fyi in case you’re not planning to go till late in the day.
Hot out of the inbox:
At about 8 a.m. this morning my husband and I saw a little
brown dog running down the east side of 35th just south of Holden. We
tried to pull over but for fear of chasing him into the street we kept
going and hoped for the best. When we returned to our home near 39th and Elmgrove at 9:30, there was the same dog, still looking lost. We tried
to catch him but he’s very scared and he we eventually lost sight of
him around 41st and Kenyon. This dog successfully crossed 35th once this
morning, I am worried he’ll try again and he’s obviously lost. The
dog was small, around 8-10 pounds and looked like a dachshund, possibly
mixed with chihuahua. He was wearing a black collar and I am not certain
there were any tags. Please keep a look out for him and I am also
hoping if his owners read this, they can narrow their search.
Leave a comment if you know whose dog this is – with the Art Fair, the parade, etc., we will be offline for a good chunk of time today and e-mail won’t be seen for a while.
Though tonight’s Seafair Torchlight Parade happens downtown, there are a few Seafair-related items of WS relevance:
-Because of the Torchlight Run preceding the parade, The Viaduct will be closed tonight, from 5:45 till 7:30 or so.
-The West Seattle Hi-Yu float got fixed, thanks to Alki Automotive, and is ready for the parade; it got a lot of ink (pixels) in this Seattle Times parade preview.
-Thanks to Northwest Asian Weekly, we found out a West Seattle teenager has a prominent role in one of the most popular parade entries: Jennifer Gee, featured by NAW as an “Outstanding Graduate” for her achievement as this year’s West Seattle High School valedictorian, is captain of the Seattle Chinese Community Girls’ Drill Team (photo taken by Jason Parker at Hi-Yu Parade last weekend).
-Last but not least, West Seattle writer/humorist John Moe (whose blog Monkey Disaster is one of the 70-plus sites linked from our Other Blogs in WS page) wrote an amusing piece about potential Seafair revisions for the Times.
If you’re going to the Torchlight Parade, we’ll see you there. If not, we highly recommend checking out the first night (since last week was rained out) of Movies on the Wall by Sidewalk Cinema, featuring “Best in Show,” next to Hotwire Coffeehouse. Free! Fun! (Here’s our post from the first time we went last year.)
The Alki Art Fair, of course, is now just hours away … you can’t miss the signs all over WS …
Then in a couple weeks, there’s a second Art Fair in West Seattle — this one on August 11th at C & P Coffee south of The Junction. It’s their first one ever, and they’re looking for more participants; e-mail the C & P folks to find out more.
Ten days ago, we were all talking about the city plan intended to lead us all further into the world of recycling, while, by the way, reaching further into our wallets, to pay for upgrading city refuse/recycling facilities. Tonight we know how MUCH more West Seattle’s Most Famous Politician wants us to pay for trash service, for starters: A buck a month for the “average” house (?), $15 more per month for the average commercial Dumpster, among other things. City press release here; Times story here. Not final till the City Council says yes.
Hot out of the inbox, a city update on the Admiral Way paving project, including a total shutdown between 41st & Olga, week after next — here’s hoping it’s finished on time, before colliding with Freeway Fright ’07 — click ahead for the full text of the city update:Read More
Sign on Rick’s Barber Shop along Cali south of The Junction says “barber shop closed until further notice.” Voice-mail greeting says the same thing. Don’t know how long it’s been there; we just happened to be walking through the between-junctions (TweenJun? nah, let’s not go there) area for the first time in a while & saw it.
The Times says the victim is a student at SSCC; both the Times and P-I updates say the gunshots may have followed some kind of squabble over a ring. No particular description of who they’re looking for, just that a red minivan might have been involved.
CHARLESTOWN CAFE CORNER: Our Town West Seattle is inviting those concerned about the cafe site’s future to gather at 7 pm next Thursday (August 2) to get the newest information one week before the next city Design Review meeting on the proposed project.
BURNED-OUT EX-SCHUCK’S CORNER (below): Finally, finally, finally the demolition permit application is in, two months after the land-use permit was OKd for the 2-story commercial building planned there (this page about that project has a small sketch of what it might look like).
The weather looks relatively good, knock wood. This is the weekend that Alki is awash in art, Shakespeare in the Park holds court at Camp Long, and we WSers are “Stuffing the Bus” at the Farmers’ Market for WestSide Baby‘s biggest annual diaper drive, among many other things (including a few events outside WS that might interest you) — click ahead!Read More
We saw the fire call online for “assault with weapons” at 5626 Delridge; the P-I’s Big Blog has a few details (near the bottom of this post) — one man shot, taken to Harborview Medical Center. FRIDAY 9 AM UPDATE: P-I has a few more details; so does KIRO tv, with a pic.
From Creighton Space (one of the 75-plus sites featured on our Other Blogs In WS page): A poster near his home promises a reward for solving an arson, but where was the fire? (We’ll check with our police contacts in the morning if no one solves this sooner.)
Tomorrow’s the deadline to sign up your block for a night of crime-fighting, community-building, street-closing fun: Night Out 2007 is Tuesday, August 7, 6-10 pm. Find out how to sign up for it here. If you’re in the “Weed & Seed” grant area of South Delridge/downtown White Center, you might be able to get a small grant for supplies (not food); click here to e-mail the folks responsible for that. If you’re in the Beach Drive area, BDB has been working to organize a get-together there. If you’re in Fairmount Springs (northeast of Morgan Junction), their invite is online. Pigeon Point has a location posted too. Wherever you are in WS, if you have a Night Out get-together, take a pic that night, send it to us, we would love to post it in our follow-ups.
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Thanks to the reader who let us know that the heavy equipment has finally begun to arrive at the Lafayette Elementary playground project, a month after the ceremonial groundbreaking.
Our blogland-trolling picked up this tale. (Wonder where exactly he meant by the “Delridge projects.”)
According to Beach Drive Blog, the city’s landmarks board has a meeting tomorrow to talk about what’s going on with the Painted Lady, aka the Satterlee House, on Beach Drive. As we have reported in recent months (May 30, May 12, September) the house and its huge front lawn are for sale, and if they’re not sold together, the front lawn could become home to three other homes.
Hot on the heels of the successful reunion of Lucky and his owners (see the comments) … We gotta help bring this guy home. Bloggers, new parents, and all-around good people Paul & Steph are looking for their lost kitty Jake, who’s been in their family 11 years. They live on the upper east edge of Gatewood, near the 35th/Myrtle towers. If you’ve seen Jake, follow that link to contact them.
We’ve been waiting for one of the local papers to finally pick up on the Alki Statue of Liberty situation; today, the Times finally does, in a choppy article that doesn’t quite capture the heart of what’s happening now, but at least has pix of the new statue. (If you missed it, earlier this month we reported the latest twists and turns, after the July 11 pro-plaza group meeting and after the Alki Community Council meeting last Thursday). Two more Liberty notes: In this week’s WS Herald, Cindi Laws — best remembered for her time on the monorail board — has a lively letter-to-the-editor about the statue; also, we’re still waiting for the Carrs’ sealady.org website to go up (they said at the ACC meeting that it would be up last weekend).
… witness Miss Seafair Erin Waid, a West Seattleite who reigned over Hi-Yu last year, caught on camera tonight by the P-I’s new Big Blog, out for burgers — at Interbay Red Mill! — with the rest of the Seafair court. (Erin’s Seafair reign runs till just before Saturday night’s Torchlight Parade, when for the first time the new Miss Seafair will be crowned pre-parade instead of at a separate evening event; contenders include West Seattle’s Michelle Edwards.)ÂÂÂ
Last weekend we drove past Me-Kwa-Mooks and saw a space roped off on the street in front, marked RESERVED FOR UDALL BUS TOUR. We were in something of a rush to start with; then we got sidetracked by something and completely forgot to look up what it was all about. Then this just appeared at the P-I site. How cool of them to side-trip to WS to help remove The Evil That Is Ivy.
The city proposes expanding incentives for “affordable housing” in “urban village” areas, of which we have a few (including The [Alaska] Junction and Morgan Junction). However, some are voicing skepticism till they’ve read the fine print, including (according to this P-I article) WS-based City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen. EVENING UPDATE: A reader points out the Seattle Displacement Coalition is upset about this; click ahead to read parts of its own press release:Read More
We’ve tried Shoofly Pie Company twice since it opened — shoofly itself was both sweet and tangy and we’ll leave it to the Eastern natives to tell us if that’s the way it’s supposed to be — but we can give unqualified rave reviews for the cherry pie: Not too tart, not too sweet, not goopy. We wrote to Shoofly proprietor Kimmy Hsieh Tomlinson to ask if she’s got anything to say to customers and would-be customers in WSB-land, about how it’s going and future plans; you can click ahead to read what she wrote back:Read More
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