They started taking down the big blue wall around the light rail construction site today! They removed a few segments at 17th and Lander — right where Lander St. used to go through.
The end of the seemingly endless Beacon Hill Station construction project is in sight!
Culinary Communion is going to begin operating a weekday lunch counter. While the official grand opening isn’t until April 1, we will have a “soft opening†during the month of March and will be open for business on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays (with a few exceptions – please check our website at www.culinarycommunion.com) from 11am-2pm. We will offer a variety of sandwiches – using the Swinery meat (when available) and homemade bread –- plus, a salad, soup, and hot entrée of the day. Menu items will be priced between $6 and $9. Lunch is available to eat-in or take out. No reservations necessary. Questions can be directed to info@culinarycommunion.com or 206.284.8687. Look for more information about the grand opening soon!
Culinary Communion is located at 2524 Beacon Avenue South in North Beacon Hill.
Marybeth Turner with SDOT wrote to let us know:
SDOT will close a lane on the Jose Rizal Bridge (12th Avenue South, connecting Beacon Hill to downtown Seattle) on Thursday, March 5. The southbound, right-hand lane will be closed from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. to allow crews to inspect expansion joints.
Beacon Hill received a brief mention in the New York Times today:
The deep recession, with its lost jobs and falling home values nationwide, poses another kind of threat: to the character of neighborhoods settled by the young creative class, from the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Beacon Hill in Seattle. The tide of gentrification that transformed economically depressed enclaves is receding, leaving some communities high and dry.
It’s a bit odd, because Beacon Hill doesn’t actually seem to fit the pattern described in the article, of neighborhoods gentrified by “the young creative class” and then finding their new hipster shops and cafés collapsing from the effects of the recession. Beacon Hill is still a neighborhood seemingly on the verge of gentrification, but we haven’t yet seen an influx of shops “playing the Decemberists in a continuous loop,” as the Times puts it. We have a couple of newish coffee shops, and a couple of newer businesses that might have been on the cutting edge of gentrification up here, but, honestly, it sounds more as if the Times meant to name-check Georgetown.
OK, so it’s not a dusting. It is snowing pretty hard out there now. We now have more than 1.5 inches of snow here on North Beacon. Drive carefully, folks.
The dusting of snow we’ve gotten has made the streets slick enough for Seattle Public Schools to run two hours late today. Buses are on their snow routes, there is no door-to-door service, no breakfast service, no Head Start, and no half-day kindergarten. (Full-day kindergarteners will have the two-hour delay.) Most private schools in town seem to be two hours late as well. See schoolreport.org for details.
We’d like to welcome the folks at the SODO Agogo blog to the Seattle neighborhood blogosphere! Many of us pass through SODO on a regular basis, so a blog for that area should be useful to Beaconians. It may end up with a different feel than other neighborhood blogs, since it’s not really a residential neighborhood, but it has lots of businesses, restaurants, and entertaining.
(On another topic: I wonder why people spell it SODO. Why not SoDo since it was, originally, “South of the Dome” and now is “South of Downtown”? Sometimes I spell it with lower-case letters anyway because I don’t like the all-caps version.)
I was walking my dog this morning and noticed that they are taking down the gulag style chain-link and barbed wire fence that surrounded the now underground reservoir at Jefferson park. It has been a blight on the neighborhood for years and a major step in reclaiming the park as a public space. In the attached photo the fence you see at the bottom is just a temporary fence.
Exciting news! That huge open space up there atop the reservoir is going to provide great views and a place to lounge in the sun or run or toss a Frisbee or ball around.
The existing North Beacon Hill neighborhood plan for the light rail station area is in the process of being revised. As we have seen recently, the topic of density and transit-oriented development in the neighborhood is controversial. You can make your voice heard in the process of rezoning and changing North Beacon by attending the City’s neighborhood plan update meeting on Saturday, March 28, from 9:00 am – 2:00 pm at El Centro de la Raza, 2524 16th Ave South.
These photos are from the Beacon Hill Blog photo pool on Flickr. If you have photos or short videos of the neighborhood, you are invited to add them to the pool as well.
