West Seattle, Washington
13 Thursday
Taking a quick break from the tour of tree lots … so far, if your budget really requires the cheapest tree you can find, Home Depot is the place in WS (you can get a 6′ Douglas fir for about twenty bucks). More sites to visit, so that may not turn out to ultimately be the cheapest tree in WS, but in case you’re going out this afternoon, now that the rain has stopped (paused?), did want to mention it. We personally still mourn the old White Center Chubby & Tubby, where you could get a $5 “Charlie Brown style” scraggly little tree. More later …
The Fauntleroy Community Council reports zero coho returning to their creek, for the first time in more than a decade. The watershed watchers cite possible reasons ranging from global warming to tribal fishing.
We’re just trouble magnets today. After the drama of the 35th (and surrounding streets) shutdown earlier (see posts below), on our way home from an evening outing just now, the Fauntleroy/Alaska intersection got blocked, as we approached it, by a police car arriving to check out a three-car smashup that appeared to have happened moments earlier. Didn’t look too serious, but the city 911 log page does show a fire-engine callout, so things may be a little jammed there till later tonight.
Just back from a trip to check out 35th — all open now — we wound up behind what was probably the last of the officers, two guys in a scary charcoal-gray humvee-ish vehicle you probably wouldn’t ever want to see pull up in your neighborhood. 4 PM UPDATE: Now there’s a brief story in the P-I.
According to a blurb currently atop this news site that was atop a news site for a while,  “a man has barricaded himself inside an apartment” and that’s what’s going on along 35th (see below).
WS Blogger Spouse took the photo from the Chevron on 35th near the shutdown:
This is the usual greeting over the loudspeaker from the Christmas Ship as it arrives at one of its stops, blazing with light, serenading everyone on shore with live Christmas songs from performers on board. And this is the big weekend for our part of town. Here’s hoping the weather won’t be too bad. First, on Saturday, the Christmas Ship (and whichever boats choose to accompany it) will pull up to Seacrest Pier at 5:15 pm, with Northwest Girlchoir Vivace performing. Then it goes back downtown to swap out choirs; with the Vashon Island Chorale on board, it’ll visit Lowman Beach at 8:50 pm Saturday, and then sail back along West Seattle’s west-facing shoreline, to reach Alki Beach for a stop at 9:40. All three of those stops are supposed to have bonfires, by the way. If you can’t catch the Christmas Ship on Saturday, it will make one more WS stop — Sunday, 7:10 pm, Don Armeni, also with a bonfire. The full schedule is linked from our WS Holiday Stuff page, as are other holiday activities in WS this weekend, including tonight’s tree lighting @ Our Lady of Guadalupe. (We’ll be out tree-shopping too, and planning to post a price-check here at some point!)
35th is blocked off right now south of the Austin vicinity. WS Blogger Spouse had to detour onto a side street … and a couple more of those streets are blocked off too. Lots of police. Not sure what’s going on — WSBS is going back to see how close it’s possible to get to check it out.
Tonight we drove through White Center’s main commercial district for the first time since last weekend’s shooting, right past the roadside memorial south of Roxbury, marveling at how it brimmed with flowers, glowed with candles. Business and school marquees around the area bear words of tribute for the fallen hero. It’s hard to believe it all happened just a couple miles from where we live. A P-I writer brings it closer to home in this column, tying into the story of Cafe Rozella on the border between West Seattle and White Center, a cool coffeehouse we ventured into for the first time just a few days before Deputy Cox’s violent, tragic end.
Update on The Junction’s new “raised crosswalks”: Junction Dave (see comments on our complaint post below) was right. The city not only was “on it,” sometime in the past 24 hours or so, they got crews out to put the first round of striping on the bumps. After “Molson” (also from comments on the same post below) reported a striping sighting last night, we checked it out this morning, and indeed, each side of each “raised crosswalk” has a pair of triangular stripes, pointing up and ahead.
After a car hit and killed Tatsuo Nakata last month at 47th and Admiral, the city promised safety improvements to the crosswalk there. Now comes word of a community meeting a week from Monday, at which city reps will talk about what they plan to do — according to a meeting notice forwarded to us, it’s two “curb bulbs” in the area, plus replacement of some “warning sign(s).” Is that enough? Some had been calling for a stoplight. If you want to have a say, the meeting will be at 6 pm Dec. 18, Hiawatha Community Center.
Website for Mud Bay says its pet-food-etc. store in the Admiral District opens next week.
You’d think it would have been relatively simple to turn the ex-Rainier Roaster into the future drive-thru Starbucks. Out with the rotisserie/in with the espresso machines, up with the sign, hello world. But noooooo. Exterior work has been going on for what seems like weeks; we’ve wondered if they’re perhaps planning to gold-plate the building. However, this might be a sign of progress: Another permit for the project just got issued today … for installing “alarm and video equipment.” And the store is now listed on the SBUX website as “coming soon.”
As the Times notes this morning, the city has now rolled out draft maps for its “bicycle master plan,” including how it would affect our side of the bay. You can take a closer look by opening this map (and hitting “zoom” about a dozen times to get up close and personal with WS streets). The dark-blue dotted lines mark streets where bike lanes would be set aside. The Times story singles out one of those routes, 35th south of High Point, as “controversial,” without elaborating. Most of Fauntleroy also is marked as potential bike-lane turf, though the Morgan Junction intersection with Cali Ave is black-lined, which means “needs further study.” The city’s still taking comments on all this, including a meeting tomorrow night in South Seattle, so if something about the draft map worries you or thrills you, you’ve got time to pipe up before the official plan is out next year.
After a few weeks of walking and driving over the new “raised crosswalks” in The Junction, we’re certain we liked the old non-raised crosswalks better. Under the streetlights, the slight bumps are such a subtle difference from the pavement, they’re not as visible as the old painted stripes were, and drivers seem less aware that they might need to stop. We almost got taken out ourselves the other night; feels like we’d be safer jaywalking. You suppose maybe the city could at least rustle up some sort of reflective paint for the sides of the “speed bumps,” so they’d be visible from afar, like this?
From our Holiday Stuff page (which also includes this weekend’s Christmas Ship stops, among other things): 7 pm tonight, Chief Sealth HS Commons, the Westside Symphonette‘s holiday concert … free!
According to this morning’s Times, King County Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Cox’s killer, Raymond Porter, “had been living in West Seattle.” Don’t know where; you can look up whether sex offenders are living in your neighborhood, but as far as we know, there’s no way to find out if you’ve got neighbors who happen to be any other type of felon.
The regional Church Council has announced an Interfaith Service of Hope tomorrow night at the White Center office of the King County Sheriff’s Department, to pray for Deputy Steve Cox and his killer.
Running this site for almost a year now, we’ve learned a lot about just how much creativity is continuously percolating on our side of the bay. Some of it, people take the time to write us about, such as the Ginomai artists’ community that is taking shape in the space once occupied by WS Christian School, and hundreds (if not thousands) of individual projects, such as this webcomic, and this band. And then, there are the WS artistic endeavors we happen onto, such as the erotic-glass artist who will be showing his stuff tonight, during a Biznik business-networking event at his studio. Boggles us a bit, but we’ll readily admit to a somewhat sheltered life. Play safe!
King County just announced the memorial service for Deputy Steve Cox, the officer and community activist killed in the line of duty in White Center early Saturday, is set for this Friday at the Christian Faith Center in SeaTac, site of other officers’ memorials, including Federal Way’s Patrick Maher in 2003, Des Moines’ Steven Underwood in 2001, and Richard Herzog, the last King County deputy killed on the job (2002) till now. Meantime, the county site has posted photos from the memorial set up in Deputy Cox’s honor at the White Center storefront where he was based.
Driving down Cali Ave a short time ago, noticed something unusual, and very un-senior-looking, happening on the sidewalk in front of the Senior Center. Two more drives around the block finally trained our eyes on a sign in the window, as the small crowd picked up its chairs and moved inside: Seems The Skate Church is now meeting Sunday nights at the WSSC.
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