Tag Archives: neighborhoods

Beacon Bits: Movie lights and skate park lights

Jefferson Park sidewalk. Photo by Joel Lee in the Beacon Hill Blog photo pool on Flickr.

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Local group Blue Scholars have a short film contest in progress to promote their album Cinemetropolis. See this video for details. Deadline is April 6.

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The Seattle P-I has a photo series, “What Seattle neighborhood are you?” Beacon Hill is represented, but we daresay they don’t know us very well: “BEACON HILL: You were happily climbing the social ladder until you found out the love of your life was two-timing you with then-grungy South Lake Union. Forget Amazon. You can do better than that, Beacon Hill.” Love of our life? Bah. They wish.

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Apparently the lighting at the new Jefferson Skate Park is less than ideal. But Seattle Parks is working on getting it right.

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Former Beacon Hill resident Roger Valdez published an article recently in the Seattle Transit Blog with a radical anti-zoning suggestion: “Beacon Hill: The Revolution Won’t Be Measured in Feet.” But then he followed up with another Beacon-centric post: “Zeroing in on Beacon Hill.” What do you think of his suggestions?

Beacon Hill vs. Ballard: the battle is on!

Publicola asked people from Beacon Hill and Ballard to explain why their neighborhood is the best place to live in the city yesterday. Peggy Sturdivant, a columnist for the Ballard News-Tribune, represented the one-time neighborhood of bungalows and old Scandinavians that has since sprouted condos, townhomes, and trendy shops. Beacon Hill was represented by Craig Thompson, author of the Beacon Lights blog at seattlepi.com.

Both writers found many reasons to support their neighborhoods. Sturdivant bragged about Ballard’s farmer’s market, hospital, music venues, and sunsets, while Thompson touted Beacon Hill’s affordability, accessibility, diversity, and feeling of community, along with Jefferson Park and other green projects. (BHB would like to point out that one thing we have that Ballard will not be able to match for many years was overlooked — Link light rail.)

What do you think? We know which neighborhood we prefer.

An open letter to the Seattle Police Department

Perhaps I am being grumpy, but we have enough crime in our neighborhood already. We don’t need to take responsibility for everyone else’s. I would consider it a simple mistake, but this is not the first time I’ve seen it happen.

Hello,

I have a concern about a post on your SPDBlotter website, titled “Shooting in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.”

The shooting was on Beacon Avenue, but it was not on Beacon Hill or in any way in the Beacon Hill neighborhood. Beacon Avenue continues well-beyond Beacon Hill, all the way to Renton. But Beacon Hill itself does not extend east of MLK way (which runs through the valley east of the Hill). The shooting site was southeast of even the most southern portion of Beacon Hill.

The Seattle city map calls that neighborhood Rainier View, and the shooting was near Rainier View Elementary School.

As someone who lives on Beacon Hill, it is frustrating to see crimes listed in our neighborhood that didn’t even happen here.

We would appreciate it if you would post crimes with more precise locations, and not give us “credit” for crimes that didn’t happen in our neighborhood.

Thanks!
Wendi
Beacon Hill Blog

Update: A suspect in the above mentioned shooting was arrested yesterday in the 5600 block of Beacon Avenue South — which is Beacon Hill.

Update 2: As of April 22, the headline on the original story has been changed to “Shooting in the Rainier View neighborhood”. Thanks, SPD!

“Beacon Hill est omnis divisa in partes tres…”

On the Beacon Hill mailing list today, Mike Cheney asked the question:

“Why has the hill been broken up into 3 sections? You have north beacon, mid beacon and south beacon. Seems like creating divisions in one huge neighborhood could lead to prejudice and a further division of neighbors. Aka my neighborhood is better than yours kind of thing then you end up with even a bigger problem.”

This is an interesting question. Why is Beacon Hill divided into three parts on the city’s neighborhood map, informal as it may be? Unlike Mike, though, I wonder why it’s not divided even more. The Hill is huge. Look at a Seattle map. Beacon Hill is too big to be one neighborhood–it’s really a meta-neighborhood, a large area containing several smaller neighborhoods. North Beacon has its own personality that differs from South Beacon and Mid Beacon. Each area has concerns that the others do not have. For example, North Beacon has sidewalks almost everywhere. South Beacon… not so much. So it makes sense that South Beacon would have sidewalks as a priority, while people in North Beacon would prioritize other things.

A successful, sustainable neighborhood is, ideally, defined by a five-minute or 1/4 mile walking distance from center to edge, and being relatively self-contained and walkable. It would contain about 5,000 residents, and local schools and businesses to serve them. Basically, it’s an area that is small enough that people can easily access local services within the neighborhood, while being large enough to support those services. (It sounds a little small by sprawling modern Seattle standards, but small neighborhood units like this used to be in place here. Look at any old Seattle neighborhood that was built-up before the 1930s, particularly along one of the old streetcar routes, and see how every half mile or so there is a small clump of old commercial buildings, now mostly used as residences. The rise of the car and modern zoning practices have killed a lot of the old neighborhood business districts.) Incidentally, this is approximately the same size as a census tract.

Look at a map: a walk down Beacon Avenue from north to south is more than five miles. To get some perspective–as the crow flies, five miles north of the North Beacon business district “junction” is the University of Washington. Five miles east is Mercer Island. Five miles west is Alki Point. Five miles northwest is Queen Anne. All very different places from Beacon Hill. You can see that Beacon Hill is a pretty huge area! Even dividing it into three zones gives you three “neighborhoods” that are larger than the ideal neighborhood unit.

Each area is going to have its own unique concerns and issues (for example — people in the area near Beacon and Stevens care about what happens to the Stevens Place (Triangle) Park on Beacon, but people who live three miles south on Beacon don’t have any particular interest in that issue), and I don’t believe that recognizing that is a bad thing. I think even smaller neighborhoods on Beacon Hill would be useful, if it meant that we had more of a “community” within our neighborhoods. Folks in South Beacon already feel somewhat marginalized by the focus on North Beacon, and eliminating divisions within the Hill would probably worsen that perception.

Please tell us what you think by commenting here on the blog.