West Seattle, Washington
17 Sunday
Thanks to Jerry from JetCityOrange for sending this video clip of the Cali/Seattle SW corner demolition, before it got to the rubble phase we photographed the other day.
No moss growing under some developers’ feet, er, backhoes. Less than two weeks after we noted that permits were granted for the SW corner of Cali/Seattle, the demolition work is almost done — “before” (April 25) and “after” (this morning) photos below:
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.
As mentioned in the city’s latest neighborhoods newsletter (page 4), the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association is hoping to eventually buy the former Boren Junior High — now used as interim home to schools under renovation, Cleveland HS at the moment. It’s doing an architectural study to look at the 14-acre site‘s potential, with the thought that it could hold more than 400 housing units and tens of thousands of square foot of commercial space. (The Boren building doesn’t seem to have much preservation value, unlike the Fauntleroy Schoolhouse, but you can read about its history here.)
A couple more of those ubiquitous yellow “land-use application” signs are up at the 35th SW site that was formerly home to the Seventh-Day Adventist church, 
now Temenos and the Mars Hill bus pen (left). The application in question, for which a Design Review Board meeting is now set (5/24), mentions — no, not condos — an auto-repair business and offices “adjacent to existing building” and lists the same owners as Swedish Automotive a few blocks north. No reply yet to our note inquiring about their plans for the site.
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.)
… currently home to 2 houses on 42nd, just listed at $1.5m “to be sold together.”
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.)
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.
Just verified a reader tip that Auto Buff, west of Metro Market, is moving next week (you can’t miss the huge banner out front, with the address of its new location on the east edge of The Junction). No detectable permit movement on the 42nd/Admiral mixed-use project planned for that spot, though.
The city just granted permits for the townhouse project that’ll replace this brick multiplex @ SW corner of Cali/Seattle (not far from similar projects).
Also on the topic of doomed brickwork, there’s an addendum to the saga of the unique fourplex that’s on its last legs across the street from Charlestown Cafe — scroll to the bottom of the original page to check out a comment just posted by one of its current renters.
At the suddenly megabusy Cali/Charlestown crossroads, the burned-out ex-Schuck’s store eyesore is one step closer to demolition: The city has issued its land-use decision for the project proposed at that site. We’ll leave it to our professional land-user readers to comb the fine print for surprises; as for us, we’ll just be watching for the demolition permit, as this is one building we will NOT mourn.
From the “triangle” where Delridge cuts between 16th/17th before Roxbury, a former auto shop is transforming into what city records describe as “West Seattle Bible Church”:
Further north on Delridge, the neon sign for the sister shop to Bubbles is up and running (our camera disc decided not to capture it, sorry); not far away, in the 5600 block of Delridge, a former roofing business also appears to be morphing into a “coffee shop”:
Checking the lineup for future Design Review Board meetings, we learned of two projects along Cali that will apparently take out what we consider distinctive old buildings. Both will be taken up by the SW DRB on May 10. We posted yesterday about the first one, at 3811 California. The second is a longer, more personal yarn, so we’re putting it (pix included) one click away:
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Two of the latest lots slated for denser development are saddening us a bit, not because of the future development, but because of what’ll be going away. Both are on Cali. One will take much longer to explain, so we’re working on that for tomorrow; today, a shorter yarn: 3811 California SW, not far south of Cali/Charlestown (which might need its own districtlet name with everything proposed there – CalChar?), sold in February for just under $1 million, targeted for an apartment building with “street-level retail,” where the wrecking ball would be taking out this distinctively designed 1920s brick fourplex that we remember first admiring from a Charlestown Cafe window. The picture doesn’t entirely do it justice; take a look next time you drive by, before it’s gone:
The Design Review Board is back in WS tonight, looking first (6:30 pm, SW Precinct) at the project at 4515 41st SW (east edge of The Junction) that drew neighbors’ concern last fall because of a “park ‘n’ ride garage” type component. (Second on the DRB double bill, 14 townhouses on two parcels along 18th SW between Henderson and Barton.)
Neighborhood discontent is brewing on the west end of Alki over a proposal for more cell-phone antennas at the west end of Admiral Way. Details have been posted in the past 24 hours at Beach Drive Blog and on the Alki Beach Community group @ Yahoo, with plans for concerned neighbors to meet this Sunday. According to the property history on the city site (which includes information on this permit application), this has been an antenna site for at least a dozen years. UPDATE: Here’s a photo of the apartment building where the additional antennas are proposed for the roof. If you look hard you can see several of the existing ones (“screened” as they are).
Just a bit north of Verge Condos on Harbor Ave, two more big buildings (six stories) just got permits, with plans for condos over retail: 3257 Harbor and 3303 Harbor.
That’s one way we would sum up organizer Mark Wainwright’s main theme for the spirited crowd that sardined itself into the northernmost room of Charlestown Cafe tonight. Not to say there won’t be some rabblerousing …Read More
Just in case you forgot: It’s not a political meeting, not an official meeting, really just a grass-roots get-together for folks concerned about the closing of the Charlestown Cafe and/or what might replace it (currently, it’s proposed as Petco’s new home once that store leaves The Junction), and what they can do about it. 7 pm tonight @ the cafe.
Busy day for north West Seattle in the city’s land-use-permit department: First, the city says again that the King County project to upgrade the pump station on the east edge of Alki is OK by them. Second, a townhouse project at Cali & Seattle just cleared some hurdles — with this construction permit, another construction permit, this demolition permit, and another demo permit.
The former video store and the ex-we-can’t-even-remember-WHAT-it-was-before to the west are now both rubble, barely a week after demolition work began. This view looks west from 41st (Jefferson Square sign off to the left):
Busy dance card tomorrow night for West Seattle’s King County Councilmember Dow Constantine. He’s the guest of honor at a fundraising “roast” at West 5, kicking off his next campaign. But his staff tells us he’s hoping first to drop in and “touch base” with the gathering crowd at the Charlestown Cafe meeting, which they regret was scheduled long after the West 5 shindig was nailed down. (Afterparty, anyone?)
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