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Urban Planning

Opinion: Bringing a food forest to Jefferson Park

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Click on this image to see a larger version of the Jefferson Park Food Forest plan.

By Glenn Herlihy

Pictured here is the first of several design options for the proposed Jefferson Park Food Forest. First and foremost, this would be a community garden where neighbors could interact and grow their own food. It would be a garden run and managed by community members and citywide supporters, to achieve a bit more food security by having a local food production facility. Second, it’s about creating a healthy park environment for all to enjoy. Third, it’s about promoting gardening as a sustainable recreation. Please remember this is a “design in process” as we look forward to more input from the community.

A food forest is a gardening technique or land management system modeled after a woodland ecosystem, but which substitutes trees, shrubs, herbs, and vegetables which have a higher yield for humans. It’s a polyculture method (as opposed to monoculture) of planting in guilds (combinations) that nurture each other through nutrient—soil fixing, attracting pollinators and self-mulching. The result is an edible woodland with meadows, pathways, and a grand source of fresh air.

The Jefferson Park Food Forest is located on the southern part of the western slope of Jefferson Park and covers about four acres. In the map pictured here, 15th Avenue South is shown on the left (west), South Dakota Street is near the bottom (south) and the reservoir playfield is up on the right (east). Seasonal water collection is shown in blue. The blue areas would be wet in the rainy season and dry in the summer. Paved areas are shown in orange with 16th Avenue South serving as a water collecting swale. Trees are shown in green with most of the forest on the hill to the east. The green areas are swaths of mixed plantings mostly consisting of berries and natives. Green colored P-Patches have curved paths (orange) through them. The yellow circle is a community shade structure with tool shed sub-grade.

The City-adopted North Beacon Hill Neighborhood Plan (2000) for this property calls for a forested, naturalized terrace with pedestrian pathways, educational facilities, and view accesses (Action PE2). This project builds on that adopted concept to create a food forest that is natural and educational, but more focused in producing food with recreational gardening. It also builds on the adopted recommendation in our neighborhood plan for distinctive park entry improvements in this area (Action PE4). The Jefferson Park Alliance did outreach to the larger community at the last Beacon Hill Festival (2009) on this concept and received significant positive interest from people who would like to garden and support urban agriculture in the park.

We will be presenting this design and answering questions on April 1 at the North Beacon Hill Council meeting and at the 2010 Beacon Hill Festival on June 5. We have a Food Forest meeting scheduled for April 6, 7:00 pm at the Lawn Bowling Clubhouse (4103 Beacon Avenue South) if you would like to hear more. Thank You.

Glenn Herlihy is part of a group that is guiding the Food Forest proposal through the application process for the city’s Parks and Green Spaces Levy Opportunity Fund.

Urban Planning

Opinion: A bold idea for Beacon Hill’s Central Park

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Do you have an opinion? We welcome opinion articles on topics related to Beacon Hill. Please email us your articles.

by Andrea Leuschke and Tim Abell

What if you could start from scratch and locate the Beacon Hill Central Park, the neighborhood’s focal point, anywhere on Beacon Hill—without disrupting existing businesses, without relocating current residents, without demolishing any of the many buildings of character on Beacon Hill? Ideally it would be located on Beacon Avenue, in the heart of the Urban Village, close to the transit station… and that is exactly what we are proposing.

The Parks and Green Space Levy Oversight Committee announced that there are funds available for the acquisition and development of park space. The intent of this project is to acquire the land surrounding the light rail station (see a map of the area here) to create an urban park in the heart of the North Beacon Hill Urban Village.

Neighbors enjoying a park's wading pool in the summer.
Our neighborhood has seen great changes in the past few years with the addition of a new library and the recent opening of the Beacon Hill light rail station. As both the adopted North Beacon Hill Neighborhood Plan (NBHNP) and the 2009 Draft Plan point out, the central area of our neighborhood is still missing public spaces that provide opportunities to play for young (play structure) and old (chess table), talk to friends and neighbors (benches, picnic tables), and for community gatherings (plaza). The adopted NBHNP points out that with the existing population North Beacon Hill does not even meet the minimum city standards for the ratio of open space to residents.

A park-like setting in the core will also help alleviate the lack of tree cover and vegetation. It would give residents and visitors a great opportunity to connect with nature, the environment, and the larger landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and for all to share the spectacular Beacon Hill views.

With community backing, this acquisition would most likely score highly due to the central location in our community, the consistency with the adopted plan, the coupling with the transit station, and the vacancy of the desired land. All these factors combine to make this an unique and creative opportunity.

Please comment on this blog about what you think and what you would like to see in the Beacon Hill Park. This proposal will be submitted to the North Beacon Hill Community Council for endorsement at the meeting on Thursday April 1, 2010. Please come out to express your support!!

Andrea Leuschke is a landscape architect who has worked on the Beacon Ridge Improvement Community (BRIC) stairway project. Tim Abell is a resident of Beacon Hill and an architect who designs and develops work force housing in Seattle.

(All images courtesy of Andrea and Tim. Click on each thumbnail image to see a larger version.)

Urban Planning

14th and Bayview design guidance meeting notes

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Al Terry, member and architect for Findlay Street Christian Church, presenting at Design Review Board meeting. Photo by Melissa Jonas.
by Melissa Jonas

(Melissa attended the design guidance meeting held Tuesday, February 23 at the Wellspring building on 23rd and Rainier. Approximately ten Beacon Hill residents were in attendance, and an additional five people were in the audience from the Findlay Street Christian Church congregation. Findlay Street Christian Church is the property owner and hopes to develop 18 residential units on top of a combination church/community space on the corner of Bayview and 14th.)

Introductions and clarification of process

Michele Wang introduced Board members and Holly Godard (206-615-1524), the DPD staff contact for the project. Godard explained that this was a preliminary design review only and emphasized that this is not the appropriate venue for sharing SEPA concerns—including concerns regarding parking, traffic, etc.

Bev, a congregation member, shared information about the congregation, focusing on their history, philosophy and goals. She opened with a slideshow. The church is interested in developing 18 units of affordable housing—Bev clarified this was not subsidized or low income housing. The location was chosen in large part because of proximity to light rail and the church hopes to attract professionals (teachers, nurses, etc.) who will use mass transit. The congregation also hopes to create a space the community will use. She mentioned the potential of using the sanctuary as a theater or meeting space. Bev noted that the congregation is currently meeting in Mount Baker and has about 80 regular attendees, with a goal of about 125 maximum. They are intentionally a smaller congregation, not a “big project church.” Findlay Street Church was established in 1906 and has a long history in SE Seattle. When they sold their Hillman City property, they sold the parking area below market rate for use as a P-Patch to promote green space in perpetuity. They are currently meeting in Mount Baker while they develop their new, permanent space.

When questioned further about why the congregation had chosen North Beacon Hill, the response was that the site was available, affordable, and met the needs of the church. The congregation is also attracted to the vibrancy of Beacon Hill and is interested in being part of the community.
Continue reading 14th and Bayview design guidance meeting notes →

Clean and Green

Valentine’s Day street clean-up follow-up

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Bags of garbage collected
Some of the 50+ bags of garbage collected Sunday in the Valentine's Day clean-up. Photo courtesy Pat McGannon. Click for more photos from the album.

Pat McGannon wrote to follow-up on the outcome of the Valentine’s Day clean-up effort between Alaska and Dawson near MLK yesterday (emphasis added):

The weather could not have been much better for the 17 volunteers that participated in the Valentine’s Day neighborhood cleanup that covered Mt. View, S. Edumunds, 30th Ave S., S. Ferdinand Street stairs, and Dawson St. in Mid-Beacon-Hill’s eastern edge. Temperatures climbed into the 50s and the sky held back its rain. Mother Nature even thanked volunteers with an occasional sunbeam breaking through the clouds.

Volunteers worked from 10:30am through 4:30pm to collect over 50 bags of garbage, one large bin of recyclables plus 7 car tires, 6 bikes, 3 children’s big wheels, 3 CRT computer monitors, 3 computers, 2 printers, a microwave, 5 buckets, and 2 lawn chairs that had been thoughtlessly dumped on this neighborhood’s streets. Seven hypodermic needles were also removed from the streets. Additionally, contents of a stolen purse were recovered.

Thank you to all the volunteers who helped to make this Seattle neighborhood a much cleaner and safer place to live! A thank you also goes out to Seattle Public Utilities for supplying the garbage bags, safety vests, work gloves, grabber tools, and post-event trash pickup! Please continue to keep the neighborhood clean by picking up litter on the street near your home each week on garbage day. The neighborhood looks great today thanks to all the volunteers!

If you’re interested in organizing your own street clean-up, Pat also mentioned that you can get free supplies through Seattle Public Utilities.

Great work everyone!

Opinion

Opinion: The appeal process and not showing your hand

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by Frederica Merrell

There has been significant interest in the appeal that I filed with the Hearing Examiner’s office on January 29. I love that people in our community are engaged, reading, and looking at what is going on around them. Our Beacon blog is an amazing venue for keeping up on stuff that’s important to us and not likely to be followed anywhere else.

An appeal is a quasi-judicial process with rules and procedures. The Hearing Examiner runs the show and our examiner Sue Tanner is very capable and experienced. She is charged with impartiality, efficiency, expediency, transparency and equal access to all, even those without a lawyer or legal training (like me). There are lots of areas where appeals are used, including the appeal of an environmental determination (SEPA appeal) like mine.

So there is the person filing the appeal (me), the agency or party whose action triggered the appeal (the city’s Department of Planning and Development, or DPD) and the Hearing Examiner. Other people can enter into the discussion too, and anyone can come watch any step of the process down at the Hearing Examiner’s office on the 40th floor of the big tower at 700 Fifth Avenue (Seattle Municipal Tower). I assume the records on the process are all open to the public.

Last week, I had my Prehearing Conference. This is a time to meet, go over the paperwork that is being filed, make sure everyone has each other’s addresses, and create a mutually agreeable calendar for the steps being taken. I noticed that most of the time was taken up with the calendar. In order to do the calendar all the likely steps in the process have to be laid out. Right now, DPD is going to find some information for me and also try to narrow the scope of the appeal. They felt it was too broad. I will get some time to look at the information they provide and respond back. We will both draw up a list of “exhibits” that we want to share with each other in the hearing. We will both draw up a list of “witnesses.” The time frame for all these steps are laid out and we came to agreement on a hearing date of April 7 at 9:00 am. Anyone who wants to watch the hearing can come.

The excellent media folks at our blog asked me some specific questions about the appeal. An appeal is kind of like a poker game. One important strategy for winning the game is not showing your hand. So I’m not going to answer a lot of specific questions right now while I am in the middle of the process because I want to win my hearing determination! I do encourage you to read information that is readily available. If you haven’t read the full appendix of the North Beacon Hill Update, you might want to do that.

Some other great stuff to look at: check out City Council committee meetings on a good computer where you can see the videos. I recommend the last couple of meetings of Councilmember O’Brien’s Seattle Public Utilities and Neighborhoods Committee (SPUNC) and Sally Clark’s Committee on the Built Environment. Her last meeting was particularly interesting and I am going to go back and look at the whole thing again. This is a very interesting process to me because I have never filed an appeal before. I am learning as I go. If you want to know why I filed the appeal, come to the hearing! That is where I lay out my arguments before the Hearing Examiner and DPD makes their arguments too. Until then, we don’t reveal our arguments. Hope to see you on April 7!

Frederica Merrell was the North Beacon Hill neighborhood planning co-chair from 1998-2000, and is the co-author of Seattle’s Beacon Hill.

Clean and Green

Valentine’s Day cleanup Sunday

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Cleanup map
Meet on 30th between Edmunds and Dawson

Pat McGannon has organized a litter pick-up and clean-up event along the east edge of Mid-Beacon Hill. Pat’s announcement follows:

Do You Love Our Neighborhood as Much as We Do? Then Join Us!

For What?: A neighborhood cleanup. We will be collecting litter from the streets and public stairs.

When?: Valentine’s Day, Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 10:30am

Where?: The cleanup will include Dawson (between MLK and 30th Ave South), 30th Ave South (between Dawson and S. Edmunds), S. Edmunds (between 30th Ave S. and Mount View Dr.), Mount View Drive (between S. Edmunds and Alaska), and the stairs that connect 30th Ave S to S. Ferdinand below.

Why?: To make our neighborhood a cleaner and safer place to live.

How?: Gloves, grabber tools, orange safety vests, and garbage bags will be provided to make litter collection safer. Once the trash is collected, bags will be brought to a central location for the city to pick up.

Details: Meet at the top of the S. Ferdinand stairs (on 30th Ave S) at 10:30am to sign in and get your supplies. Gloves can be kept, but the grabber tools and safety vests will need to be returned to Pat McGannon at 2942 S. Edmunds St. by the end of the day. Donate as little or as much of your time as you would like. If you live on a bordering street not covered by our current cleanup, but would like to personally clean that street, then you are welcome to get supplies from us.

Questions? Contact Pat McGannon at pmcgannonmail-cleanup@yahoo.com or at 216-236-4321.

Opinion, Urban Planning

Opinion: Beacon Hill’s Post Alley

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The view of El Centro down the alley from McClellan. Photo by Joel Lee.
by Joel Lee

I was walking to light rail yesterday when I noticed that the alley behind the station is a perfect straight shot to El Centro—it almost frames the building like a painting. I had not thought about this alley much in the past. I imagined it someday being a little-used space filled with dumpsters and graffiti, tucked between two large condo buildings where the only use it might get would be the occasional employee taking a smoke break.

But seeing it yesterday helped me re-imagine the space. What if instead of it being a forgotten space behind some buildings, it became Beacon Hill’s Post Alley filled with micro businesses? It could be an extension of the planned courtyard at El Centro and a useful arm of Festival Street. For those of you that don’t get downtown much, Post Alley is an offshoot of the Pike Place Market. It is a pedestrian-friendly sort of mini-market where many smaller businesses have been able to take root in its less-than-prime real estate. It includes Seattle’s famous gum wall.

Photo of Post Alley at sunset by zenobia_joy.
Rarely do neighborhoods get a chance to redefine their “downtown” the way that Beacon Hill will with light-rail and El Centro’s future development, and I’m hoping that with imagination and thoughtful planning, we will be able to maximize our potential.

Joel Lee maintains the Beacon Hill Public Art website.

Do you have an opinion? We welcome opinion articles on topics related to Beacon Hill. Please email us your ideas.

Local Events

“Beacon Hill Music” series dates selected

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Paul Ray reports on last Monday’s organizing meeting for a music series at the new Lander Festival Street: 

We have decided to apply for permits for afternoon concerts on four Sundays, June 13, July 11, August 8, and August 29, for afternoon concerts. The Special Events Permit Committee meets early in February so we should find out soon if those dates are approved.
 
Partly due to comments made (and the points in those comments) on the Beacon Hill Blog about our meeting announcement, we decided to name the group “Beacon Hill Music” because for some people the term “BeHi” just rubs them the wrong way and others may not automatically realize it stands for Beacon Hill. But we reserve the right to still use “BeHi Music” for some purposes, such as cool t-shirts.
 
The music series itself will be called “Beacon Rocks” but with a tagline something like “and swings, raps, jams, sings, strums, etc.” to be clear about the diversity of musical styles we intend to include.
 
Thanks for everyone’s interest and as we reach any milestones (such as getting permits approved, starting to seek out musicians, etc.) we will definitely keep the community informed.

Site News

BHB partnering with Times in local news network

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We are happy to announce today that we will be joining a partnership with the Seattle Times as part of their network of community news websites. (See the other sites here.)

This is not an acquisition or anything remotely like that, but instead, a collaboration between the Times and local independent news sites to make use of the strengths of each organization and improve news coverage for all of our readers. We remain independent as always.

We look forward to serving our neighbors on Beacon Hill better through this partnership, and we’re excited about the possibilities of this journalistic collaboration between old (the Times has been around for more than a century) and new media (the BHB has been around since October 2008, in a medium—blogging—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago).

— Wendi and Jason, editors, the Beacon Hill Blog

Crime

Crime notes: Middle school emergency management, Police Academy XII, bad JitB

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“He called me from a school phone to tell me that he was going to stay late to finish his math test. I waited, then noticed none of the other kids were coming out.” Beacon Hill neighbor (and frequent BHB photography contributor) Bridget Christian and her son had a frightening experience yesterday, when Washington Middle School was put under a “shelter in place” (similar to a lockdown) after a man in the area called in a threat to kill kids. You can read her story on Flickr.

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DOA, CSI, I&R and more explained. The Seattle Police Department is now taking applications for the Community Police Academy, an evening class starting Thursday, March 18th, 2010 once a week for 10 weeks.

From the SPD Blotter:

The Community Police Academy is designed to provide Seattle residents with an opportunity to learn firsthand about the job of a police officer and how the Seattle Police Department works. Classes focus on patrol procedures and operations, internal investigations, the criminal justice process, crime scene investigation, bias crimes, narcotics, SWAT, use of force, defensive tactics, firearms/mock scenes, domestic violence, elder abuse, and arrest procedures.

Apply early as space is limited. Applications must be submitted by Friday, January 29th. Visit the SPD Police Academy website or call 206-684-8672 for more details.

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3am taco and jalapeno popper craving? SeattleCrime.com has a feature on our nearest Jack In The Box, “The Worst Jack In the Box In the Country”.