West Seattle, Washington
03 Tuesday
Remember the exotically named, misleadingly marketed Verge Condos on Harbor? Six months to the day after we muttered about the peculiarities of their website, seems at least a few remain available, since today a soggy sign-waver was stationed nearby:
Construction appears to be starting at the Gionnoni’s Pizza (STILL don’t know who they are)/Taco Del Mar site at Westwood Village. Noticed tonight that a fence is up (where a tree lot stood weeks ago), with a construction trailer and Honey Bucket on hand too.
Tonight, thanks to helpful Cindi from MorganJunction.org, we have actual police info about last week’s incident that kept some WSers awake thanks to chopper involvement. A lieutenant from the Southwest Precinct sent her this explanation of (a) the crime and (b) why one inquiring caller couldn’t find anything out:
The call was a burglary with two suspects in the 6900 blk of 37th Ave SW. We were able to catch one of the burglars using the helecopter and K9.
Sometimes we do not staff the precinct clerk due to staffing shortages. A lot of the time, the daytime clerk may not be aware of incidents that occur at night unless it makes the news.
We could always do better in putting out info. We are currently trying to get the IT folks to allow us administrative access to revamp our precinct website in order to put out better info to the public.
Seems about once a week, someone notices a mysterious, unexplained late-night closure on the West Seattle Bridge. Here’s the latest report (with one response saying, without elaboration, “it was a police training exercise”). Anyone with more definitive dirt, please let us know. Meantime, remember all those recent helicopter buzzings? We have one neighborhood account of what was happening at the time on the ground (after the jump) …Read More
As of a few hours ago, the Thistle/Northrop sinkhole has a bridge over it, which means (a) the stairway down to Lincoln Park is fully usable again, and (b) you can get one heck of a view directly into the sinkhole (most amazing is the sidewalk along the west side of Northrop, just suspended in mid-air, nothing beneath it). We’ll have to go back later for a picture of that, but we did catch the bridge-building SDOT crew there this morning:
A friend of ours who grew up in a mountain state told us that you know you’ve REALLY gotten some snow when, days or weeks after it melts, dirty slushy piles of it are still lingering in parking lots and similar places. So, we can now officially declare our Snow-n-Ice-mare ’07 a REAL event, upon discovery today of the official Dirty Slushy Leftover Pile near the southwest edge of Westwood Village:
While Lady Liberty’s away, the snowpeople will play! (another Alki pic from Bob Bollen)
Spotted this afternoon on the curb in front of The Kenney along Fauntleroy, the best West Seattle snowman we’ve seen. However, we’re wondering, what is it supposed to be? Snow squirrel? Snow raccoon? Snow rat?
OK, enough about the weather. Did you see the comet yesterday? Supposedly we’ll get another chance today. Look west toward Vashon around sunset. We think that’s what was visible from WS Blog World HQ — although we couldn’t see the “tail” — so we wondered if it might have been Venus instead — check out this cool photo from Mischiefblog (be sure to click for the large version).
So what do you do to chill out after a nervous, stormy night? Go sailing, of course! (Looked like a regatta out in the waters between Vashon/Blake/Beach Drive early this afternoon – caught these 2 participants across from Me-Kwa-Mooks.)
If any Christmas-light nuts are still lurking out there … one last sight worth seeing, just happened onto it tonight. On the north side of Roxbury, just west of 35th (across from the ex-Safeway-now-church), someone’s covered a tree in red and white lights shaped to perfectly simulate a giant Santa hat.
If you’ve got business at the post office — you might want to wait a while. WS Blogger Spouse reports that after two postal holidays (New Year’s Day plus National Day of Mourning for Pres. Ford), it’s a spillover crowd, at Westwood, at least. No word yet on the Junction branch.
Thought we heard a broadcast report mentioning some people are still out, but a quick spin around found no evidence of that, and there’s nothing on the City Light hotline. (The SCL website’s been useless; they haven’t updated since last Tuesday’s outage.) Did see a SCL crew at Caffe Ladro, but it looked like a well-deserved coffee break, nothing more. All the Morgan Junction businesses are back on, and darn good thing, since there’d be hell to pay, for example, if one of WS’s two liquor stores were closed the day before New Year’s Eve … but it’s not, and looks like all’s right with the world. We’d expect a fresh run on D batteries today, though. (P.S. Let us know if you DO know of any “pocket” that’s still out.)
Now that we are finally able to get online (albeit in the dead o’ night), a few more things:
-Time’s running out for a cool way to make your mark on one of the biggest projects in WS right now: pledge $ by New Year’s Eve for a tile at the new West Seattle Food Bank.
-One week left to tell the National Weather Service what to name The Storm.
-If you missed it in comments below, The Cow/Bull/Steer is back (does it have an official name?) atop John’s Corner Deli, after its Dorothy-esque windblown journey during the As Yet Unnamed Storm. Here’s proof:
-Last power update for the night: The pocket just west of Westwood Village is back on. The pocket near Home Depot (Delridge & Orchard) is not (at least, as of our drive thru the area a few hours ago). Meantime, the sinkhole saga on the hill over Lincoln Park seems to be even worse, at least for one homeowner featured again in tomorrow’s P-I.
-While checking out the Delridge/Orchard outage, we took an unintended turn and wound up on Puget Ridge. More than a decade in WS, and we’ve never been in the South Seattle Community College area before, believe it or not … hard to tell at night, but seems like some people up there must have a heck of a view.
-Non-outage related business notes: First, Bakery Nouveau. Ducked in on its second day of ops today to have a look (unfortunately we’d just had lunch so no room for a taste). Several of the items in the case at the time looked incredibly scrumptious, such as a chevre/garlic/pine nuts galette-type thing (sorry, our culinary vocabulary fails us), slices of dark chocolate cake, and brown sugar pecan brioche (gotta stop by tomorrow morning and see if they’ve got any more of those for breakfast). Also in business notes, the former Jan-Michael salon (and long-ago “frozen custard stand”) just north of Thriftway in Morgan Junction has finally revealed its new identity … a mortgage company moving from its prior spot a few blocks south on Cali.
Just visually confirmed an e-mail report that the Junction Christmas tree is horizontal tonight. Trying to find out whether the weather is to blame, or something more sinister, like perhaps a prolonged protest over its fleetingly shelved Sea-Tac brethren.
In no particular order, here are the results of our first West Seattle Blog Posse Cruise for Christmas Lights. More to come …
BEACH DRIVE/ALKI/HARBOR: Sad to say you can drive the entire waterfront stretch without many significant sightings, except of course the brightest WS Christmas house of all, the Menashe mansionette on Beach Drive (a few blocks south of Shore Place). From there, we had to drive all the way to 1671 Harbor for anything on the waterfront worth writing home about (at least as of last night).
ALSO NOTABLE TO THE NORTH: A block on the west side of Walnut, south of Hinds, has several bright spots, as does a short stretch of 40th, north of Charlestown, and the east side of 41st, heading north from Manning. Then on the SW corner of 41st and Hinds, there’s a house with a novel deployment of light strands — two dangling in the air between the porch and the front-gate arbor, like power lines. Back on Walnut, we saw a few bright spots north of Stevens (back side of WS High School). (This map will give you a general guide to the entire area we just mentioned.)
THEN IN THE NORTHWEST QUADRANT: If you love the famous light-encrusted tree at Point Defiance Zoolights, you’ll love the tree outside a home on the west side of 45th, south of Lander (near Lafayette Elementary). And not far from there, 47th both just north and just south of Admiral impressed us too.
One more reminder, if you want to share a light location with your fellow West Seattleites, e-mail us and we’ll be thrilled to share.
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.
-Big banners at the Farmers’ Market today reveal that it’s only taking a holiday hiatus — after the Dec. 17 finale-for-the-year, it will return Jan. 7 as the “Winter Farmers’ Market,” 10 am-1 pm.
-The ever-busier section of Harbor Ave near the tow yards, Verge, ActivSpace, etc., is now even busier, as Budget Trucks seems to have set up a rental business there, with many of its offerings parked on the street. Best to avoid driving RVs and Oversize Load Tractor-Trailers through that stretch. Bicyclists may not be safe either.
-Also more-lined-with-parked-cars-than-ever, Thistle between 35th and Delridge, during the Mars Hill services, which apparently won’t move to their new ex-Doxa home before next month. We cruised by just to see if any protesters were there, since the demonstration outside MH-Ballard got called off. Nope. (If you don’t recall why somebody wanted to protest MH in the first place, here’s a refresher, plus the church leader’s latest musings on the subject, and a pointed deconstruction of said musings.)
-Looks like a whole lot of WS folks out buying Christmas trees. If you’re not sure about your options, remember to check the list at the bottom of our Holiday Stuff page.
This near-winter time of year, it’s tougher to get a chance to tour the town in daylight. So here’s what we spotted today while catching up:
-A new pedestrian stoplight is up (though the crosswalk’s not painted yet) at Fauntleroy & Kenyon, around midway down the east side of Lincoln Park. About time; without it, you’re taking your life into your hands if you try crossing Fauntleroy anywhere between the 76 station and the park’s southernmost parking lot. Looks like the Fauntleroy Community Association’s been campaigning about this problem for a long time, so perhaps we have them to thank. (Speaking of pedestrian safety, here’s your chance to make a BIG difference: The city’s Pedestrian Advisory Board needs new members, and Monday’s the application deadline.)
-What was Fauntleroy Auto Works (Cali Ave just north of Fauntleroy), future site of what we think of as the Monorail Memorial Park, is now a pile of rubble.
-We found six seven places to buy Christmas trees in West Seattle, so far. (All are now listed on our ever-evolving West Seattle Holiday Stuff page.) Seems like fewer than years past, but as we realized while driving around, we’ve got fewer empty lots these days. P.S. The P-I mentioned the Holy Rosary lot today in a story about nonprofit tree sales.
First, we spotted a mild outbreak of NoMo. Now, comes SOA — on a flyer for Tuesday’s expanded trick-or-treating in the Admiral business district (3-6 pm), with half a dozen or so businesses south of Lafayette School joining it this year, and identifying themselves as SOA (South Of Admiral). What next? WeCa? EaCa? NoFa? SoFa? AlAl? (as in Almost Alki, a la the marketing of Verge Condos)? We could at least turn Beach Drive into SoAl. But I’m still looking for a justification to meld Luna Park and someplace-or-another into LunaSea …
Got a closer look Friday at two of the higher-profile projects around WS: In The Junction, raised-crosswalk work has begun with an extensive dig-up on the east side of the southern block (near Petco). One observer noted he thinks the city should be putting up ground-lit crosswalks (as in White Center) instead of these speed-bump crosswalks. Too late now … Over at the ex-Rainier Roaster, workers were doing something with the second-story siding as the drive-thru Starbucks transformation rolls on. Wondered if they’re going to turn the 2-story building into a 1-story facility for SBUX, but the permit aps say “non-structural improvements.”
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