West Seattle, Washington
13 Friday
Results from last weekend’s “street-level survey” in the Admiral District are already available online.
Fun stuff happening midweek on our side of the bay, so here’s an advance alert:
-For family fun: High Point Community Center sponsors Springfest tomorrow.
-Two big entertainment events in The Junction on Wednesday night: “On the Verge” opens @ ArtsWest; Jonatha Brooke performs live-in-store @ Easy Street.
If you’re not spending Saturday morning at an egg hunt (those will be in our weekend roundup tomorrow), here’s your chance to spend a few hours helping document the state of part of WS, for posterity, history, later reference, all sorts of worthy reasons. The Admiral Neighborhood Association would love to have your volunteer help with its “street-level survey” of the Admiral District. Just show up @ Megawatt HQ at 9 am this Saturday morning; what will ensue will be a bit of training (combined with some free food) with the devices you’ll be using to record what you see, followed by strolling around to use ’em. Here’s what last year’s survey found, in case you’re curious.
It’s Friday, and that means time for the West Seattle weekend roundup. Indoor and outdoor fun to follow …Read More
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?)
Seattle Public Schools now seems settled on the plan to sell the old Fauntleroy Schoolhouse building as well as several other pieces of “surplus property.” It’s home to a busy child-care center as well as The Hall at Fauntleroy; many have wondered what a sale would mean to the site’s future. The Fauntleroy Community Association site says an event is now set for April 29 to serve as both an open house and “an opportunity to express your ideas for this property if it were in community hands.”
We had heard of the downtown demonstrations tomorrow and Monday, but not about “655,000 Steps for Peace” till we checked the WSNPJ site. Looks like the walkers will be passing through WS from the south tomorrow morning, scheduled to reach Harbor Ave, heading for downtown, by 2 pm.
While dropping off our ballot @ High Point Community Center, we grabbed a handy all-in-one spring brochure for HP, Delridge, and Southwest Community Centers, including SW Pool. Noticed while leafing through it this morning that registration for spring swim lessons starts tomorrow morning. 7 am sharp. That time is important, because lesson registration can turn into a madhouse (maybe not if you sign up online); classes are available for 6 months through adult age, and they fill up fast. We’re mentioning it because if you don’t live on the south side of West Seattle, you might not even be aware that Southwest Pool exists. It’s just east of Denny Middle School, and worth checking out if you feel like swimming but don’t happen to belong to the Y or a pool-equipped health club.
So much going on this weekend (and slightly beyond), we couldn’t resist. Full list ‘n’ links on the next click.Read More
If you see this before 5 pm — a big weekend event that didn’t make it to C Ro’s roundup (linked below) is happening right now — the West Seattle Rock Club’s annual Gemboree, at the Masonic Temple on 40th. Free!
So we show up at Thriftway a little while ago — right around 9 pm — look around at the nearly empty parking lot, and exclaim “where IS everybody?” Slowly a vaguely-aware-of-pop-culture light starts to flicker to life … Seattle’s favorite TV show (starring a ferry catastrophe this week, to boot) is on. Next Thursday at 9, we’ll pick some hot restaurant to try to crash …
As they used to say in the print heyday, “from the mailbag” … in this case, e-mailbag: Two people have written with questions to throw out to the WSB world — one about a restaurant, one about a “mysterious light.” They’re kind of LONG questions, so we’ll excerpt both e-mails “after the jump” … and if you have any answers, please leave them as comments …
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Last warning — 7 pm tonight, The Hall at Fauntleroy, our West Seattle rep on the King County Council, Dow Constantine, brings the entire council to WS to look back at our windstorm woes, and look ahead to how to avoid similar trouble next time. Councilmember Constantine’s office tells us this will NOT be televised live on public access, so if you wanna know, you gotta go. (It will be taped for broadcast online and on the air tomorrow.)
Highlighting here because you’d miss ’em unless you happen to check back on certain comment threads: First, the closure of El Chalan (ex-Ezell’s, ex-Wendy’s, south of White Center) is explained in a new comment on this post; second, those late-night half-closures on the WS Bridge are demystified by a commenter here. (Regarding the El Chalan site, records from the King County Parcel Viewer confirm the “Nickels Brothers Partnership” ownership — and an entry on this page from King County court records suggests some sort of recent court action was involved, elaborated on somewhat here.)
OK, we are completely aware this is a gimmick cooked up by Metroblogging Seattle to try to get more readers, by conning other blogs into a link, though we wouldn’t have known they were running a “Best Blog in Seattle” contest except for the fact one lone person followed a link from there to here. NONETHELESS — we don’t suppose it would do any harm if you drop by MS to vote for us on Monday. Seems the preliminary round is one day only (like those olden-days sales at Bon Marche Bon Macy’s). Even more important on Monday, don’t forget about this (we’ll be there too).
We wondered for a few weeks why our site logs showed a couple people every day finding WSB while searching for “Rolf Neslund.” We knew the name — in case you don’t, he’s the ship pilot you can thank for the West Seattle high bridge; he helped smash a freighter into the old WS bridge in 1978, accelerating the process of getting a new one (which sounds like it was as tangled a process, till then, as the current viaduct mess). Then Neslund gained double infamy as a murder victim whose body was never found. We eventually learned he’s back in the news, so to speak, because his tale is at the heart of Ann Rule’s latest true-crime book, which was on the bestseller lists till a few weeks back. (The author lives not all that far south of West Seattle, we understand; also we discovered she keeps a lively blog.)
We were going to post this a little while earlier, with a couple snarky comments, then thought better of it. But now we’ve reconsidered, thanks to a thoughtful reader who passed it along. And since our power hasn’t gone off YET, we might as well post more while we still can. So, we present, the city’s “alert,” which warns, “We know there will be outages.” (Tip #6 makes us chuckle ruefully, remembering the vague SCL web info from previous outages. Perhaps they are truly prepared for detailed info this time?)
Since we’ve been keeping an eye on WS this whole year, our 2006 WSYIR will be way meatier than our 2005 WSYIR, which was our 13th post (viewed on 1/1/06 by a grand total of 0 visitors, since this blog had existed, fanfarelessly, for all of eight days at that point).
Enough about us. Here they are, the year’s top 10 WS “stories” (as we see ’em, anyway):
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Old news to some, since apparently this has been out there for a few weeks, but we just happened onto it while making a periodic check of the site for the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association, the organization behind a variety of community improvements including most famously in the past year the Youngstown Arts Center transformation: DNDA’s longtime executive director Paul Fischburg is leaving, and they’re looking for somebody new. (We wrote to ask what he’s moving on to; he forwarded us a copy of his announcement memo, which mentioned that he’s leaving after 10 years with no particular plans, but will enjoy some down time while mulling the future.)
-Tonight is the 47th/Admiral pedestrian-safety meeting.
-The White Center Food Bank told us they appreciate all the pre-Thanksgiving help and would be happy to take donations as they get ready for a pre-Christmas distribution this Wednesday. More turkeys! Here’s where to find the WCFB.
Almost forgot to mention this before leaving our home away from home (thank God for Hotwire’s computers!) — The city has opened four shelters for people without power to “spend the night someplace warm,” and two of them are here in West Seattle, at the Delridge and Southwest Community Centers. Full info is on the same city page as all the updates on the power outages.
Usually we just bring you pre-weekend “here’s what’s happening” blurbs. But so much is going on this week before the weekend, besides basic holiday stuff, so here goes:
–TUESDAY NIGHT: An e-mail tipster reports that West Seattle’s own Mac “Santa Mac” Macdonald is producing “Rock ‘n’ Roll Christmas,” a benefit show at 7:30 pm @ McCaw Hall, and promises it’s “the most fun to be had this holiday season.”
–WEDNESDAY NIGHT: Cafe Rozella hosts author Layne Maheu @ 7 pm, reading from his book “Song of the Crow.”
–THURSDAY NIGHT: The next Junction Art Walk, 6-8 pm, starting at Divina, with 12 participating locations (we’ll post artist specifics by Thursday). Then get involved in civics and meander over to the Southwest Precinct at 8 pm as the city Design Review Board makes its pronouncement on the huge Fauntleroy Place development.
-Just back from our first official drive in search of WS’s best Christmas lights. Will post our findings sometime tomorrow. To generalize wildly — so far, the north side of WS appears to have many more lavish displays than the south side.
-Sorry if this is old news to Morgan Junctionites; just noticed the big CLOSED FOR REMODELING, REOPENING FALL 2007 signs in the windows of Washington Federal Savings at Cali & Fauntleroy. Somehow you gotta wonder, will they really reopen as a bank? That corner is so incredibly prime … you’d think those “mixed-use” developers would be clamoring for it.
-Earlier this fall, when we posted a few times about best-selling author Terry Brooks (who lives in WS at least part of the time), someone wrote to say that other best-selling authors live in WS, including a couple, Skye Moody & G.M. Ford. If that’s so, apparently they won’t be here much longer, according to her MySpace page, which mentions they’re moving to the Oregon Coast next month.
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