The planned design for the Beacon Mountain Playground at Jefferson Park. Click this image to see a larger version of this design.
David Gackenbach forwards this appeal from Glenn Herlihy:
Dear Friends of the Playground,
This is a crucial moment for funding the Beacon Mountain Playground.
As you might have heard the levy money is now (this week) being allocated to different parks projects and Jefferson Park will receive a portion but where it will go is still up in the air. There is a good chance we might be able to fund the entire new Playground design if we can convince Parks Department Head Timothy Gallagher, and Parks Committee Chair Tom Rasmussen to allocate the levy funds to build Beacon Mountain Playground.
If we get them to fund and build the entire new design we will have a magnificent playground completed by next year. If they don’t allocate the funds toward the the new design it would be phased construction for the next few years.
It been a long road to get our design approved by parks and ready to build so with one last push maybe we could see this dream through to completion. Those of us on the Beacon Mountain Playground Team believe play infrastructure is a healthy and sustainable investment for the future of our community.
Please take a moment and write a letter stating you wish to see levy funding to build the entire Beacon Mountain Playground at Jefferson Park. Include your name and address. Thanks
Seattle Sounders versus Kansas City Wizards – 7:30 p.m.
34,000 + spectators
Match is at Qwest Field. Occidental Avenue S will be closed north and south bound from S King Street to S Royal Brougham Way. Due to construction in the area, motorists need to allow extra time and check for the latest update on the SR 519 project at www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects/sr519
For traffic on major city streets, check SDOT’s real-time traffic Traveler Information Map at www.web5.seattle.gov
“Great progress is being made every day on Jefferson Park and I know these photos don’t look like much, but they are significant because today they started taking down the looming former earthen dam that paralleled Spokane St. For those of us that live near by it feels a little like the Berlin Wall is coming down!”
First the blue wall, now this — feels like things are starting to happen, doesn’t it?
Removal of the earthen wall at Jefferson Park on Spokane Street. Photo by Joel Lee -- thanks for the photo, Joel!
Certain kids could have found a better way of spending their spring break on South Beacon Hill this morning. Two juveniles suspected of burglarizing a house in the 8400 block of 37th Avenue South ran from police, broke into a nearby home, and then refused to come out. The SWAT team came out and surrounded the house, and eventually the youths were taken into custody around 10:30 am. KIRO has a picture of the standoff, and the P-I has a brief story as well.
The “dramatic tale of oh!”, as Nancy Leson put it in her All You Can Eat blog at the Seattle Times, was not yet over. This week Claycamp sent out an email stating that King County has now given him permission to sell the Swinery’s bacon legally. But on the other hand, they have now lost their lease and “will be for sure out of the building by the end of the month.” Lunch Counter? Closed. (That was fast.) Swinery? Sort of closed, but they say they have “24 days to make and sell some bacon,” along with t-shirts that read “BACON PIMP.”
And this is where the situation gets even more convoluted. While the Swinery now has a permit to sell bacon (and only bacon, no other cured meats) legally, the annual permit to run a restaurant/food establishment from the Culinary Communion House on Beacon Avenue expired on March 31. The bacon-selling permit assumes that the bacon will be sold from a legally-permitted establishment, which CC House is not. Unfortunately, the fees to renew CC House’s restaurant permit are not pro-ratable, so Gabriel and Heidi would have to pay either a year’s fee or a six-month seasonal fee to be able to sell bacon they plan to sell for the rest of April.
Claycamp has also withdrawn his application to sell at farmers’ markets, so the Ballard Farmers’ Market sales mentioned on the Swinery web site won’t be happening, nor will any other market sales.
The one result we can be sure of at the moment is that the Culinary Communion House on Beacon is going to be very vacant, very soon. Perhaps a nice pizza restaurant could open there instead?
Normally, a permit is $45 per vehicle for a two-year permit, but to ease the transition to the RPZ program, the city will provide two no-cost RPZ permits per household or business through spring 2011, along with one no-cost guest permit. If you need more permits, you can purchase them at the normal price, $45 per vehicle ($10 for low-income residents). Applications for permits will be sent out in May, and enforcement of the new zone will begin in July when the light rail system starts operation.
Speaking of development near the light rail line, we meant to post this last week: a PDF of Sound Transit’s plan for the Beacon Hill light rail station area. The gray areas that say “future development” are not owned by Sound Transit and will be fenced off by chain link fence after the construction is complete. It’s up to the property owners to decide what to do with those areas, and their plans are unknown at the moment.
Also in the Times, Kusak’s Cut Glass, at the foot of Beacon Hill just off Rainier Avenue on 22nd, was founded in Seattle nearly a century ago, in 1914. The company was named “the Northwest’s family-owned small business of the year” by the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Seattle office last year. And now, in the recession, it is struggling, but determined, to survive.
On a positive note, the cherry trees are blooming! (A little late this year, aren’t they?) Photo by Joel Lee, in the Beacon Hill Blog photo pool on Flickr.
T-shirt slogan that many Beaconians can identify with. Photo by Will Glynn.by George Robertson
(Editor’s note: This commentary was originally sent as an email to several members of the Seattle City Council today, as well as to the Beacon Hill Mailing List. Coincidentally, this evening our Broadstripe internet service was out for more than one hour.)
After comparing notes with some of my neighbors about their internet service, I thought I should ask once again for some relief from the dismal internet service we have on Beacon Hill. I have written to council members before on this topic and I have uniformly gotten referred to some bureaucrat by whichever elected council member I wrote to. Each time the bureaucrat was very nice, asked a couple of questions, and described the service we have, and refreshed the picture of whatever stage the City was in at the moment in negotiations with the monopoly providers of cable. And then they would sum it up by telling me that we have great internet service. If this is going to be another replay of that merry-go-round, just delete this message. If you actually give a damn about the ability of this city to incubate new small business in the south end, then please read on and reply.
The first thing you have to take seriously is that there is a problem. The second is that it won’t be solved without adding new competitive service provider(s) to Beacon Hill. By competitive, I mean services with higher real delivered, as opposed to advertised, upload speeds than Comcast and Broadstripe offer to their business class customers now, and with much better net neutrality in bandwidth management practices. Continue reading Commentary: Beacon Hill’s internet service needs improvement→
The P-I reports on a sinkhole that appeared at 18th and Lander above the northbound light rail tunnel. Numerous trucks delivered fill material today to solidify the 18-inch hole that widened as it descended. Sound Transit is monitoring the area for any further problems.
(Edited: An earlier version of this post said that the sinkhole developed “due to Sound Transit construction.” The cause of the sinkhole has not been determined.)
