Saturday, August 18, 2007

Streetscapes: Heritage Parade












What's that I see on Rainier Avenue?

A hot tomato and a super-stretch SUV limo??

Must be the Heritage Festival Parade!

What a blast! Friends, fun, and FREE CANDY galore!! Here are some highlights...I wish I could post them all!


Our neighbors from just down the road came by for a visit...















The White Ravens football and cheer teams, who practice regularly at the Rainier Playfield, showed their stuff. Go teams!














A couple of splashy dragons, and an encore visit from the Blue Angels (check out those fins!)



















Other notable entries--City Council member Sally Clark, up for re-election (the only politico at the parade, Jean Godden take note!)...the City Light truck and dance squad, who do the best darn electric slide in the city....dance squads and day cares and physically fit seniors, and the Unitarian drum team, and businesses and nonprofits and just generally everyone who's anyone in the valley and beyond showed up in the parade or on the sidelines.
I'm gonna get this published then run out for the Bite. Dibs on the Jones BBQ!
One last shout out to columbiacity.wikidot.com, another neighborhood website that flyered during the parade. Go check it out, dive in, and contribute!

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Going, Going, Gone: Columbia Plaza

The dizzying changes in Columbia City are most obviously reflected in its buildings.

Literally hundreds of buildings in the 2 square miles surrounding the CC business district have undergone major change in the last decade: reoccupied, reworked, renovated, torn down, built up. Consider the massive undertakings of Rainier Vista and Light Rail construction, the "tall skinny" architecture of infill development, the tri-level townhouses that have sprouted everywhere around the business district, the infinite variety of fixer-uppers great and small.

The buildings, they are a-changin'.

For-sale signs show no sign of disappearing. Property owners feel a great temptation to take the money and run as the neighborhood swells to its zoning limits. Some real estate listing agents don't feel the need to say more than "Call your builders." These places are going to be gone before you can say Alaska Street Mini-Mart.

Going, Going, Gone will be a regular feature of this blog, documenting and discussing the streets of Columbia City before the wrecking ball hits, and pondering and processing what the future will bring.

One of the seismic changes in Columbia City's near future is the redevelopment of the Columbia Plaza building. The building itself is a squat former supermarket surrounded by a sea of asphalt. The site on which it sits is zoned NC3-65, or "neighborhood commercial" permitted to be built up to 65 feet. Six stories! It is perhaps unsurprising that, as our urban village undergoes such a massive increase in density on the side streets, towering new development would come to the main thoroughfare as well.

HAL Real Estate group bought the site for $6.6 million dollars in June. Other projects that the corporation has enacted in similar situations in Seattle are the remarkably upscale, six-story Braeburn building on Capitol Hill and the even more chi-chi Site 17 in Belltown, (though the latter is probably a bit too "edgy" and "industrial-inspired" for our little burg).

If these are any indication of the shape of things to come, the skyline along Rainier Avenue is about to undergo some serious changes. Not to mention the median income. And the density of Zen gardens.

The story in the PI portrays company president Dana Behar as a local boy with fond memories of the neighborhood, and the tenacious Landmark Preservation Board as a formidable guardian of local character...but with time, money, and persistance the Landmark committee can be overcome (witness the demolition of the landmark Pink House building a half-block off Rainier on Angeline, with 9 townhouses currently under construction in its place). Notice also that Behar himself has served on the Landmark Board, and still does policing Belltown. Now there's a neighborhood that has perserved its historic character.

Looks like we are going to be the next Fremont, whether we like it or not.

Most media coverage of the sale and redevelopment has focused on the displacement of the Farmer's Market, which meets in the parking lot to the south of the existing building, and on the presumed banishment of the persistant lowgrade crime in the parking lot (punctuated by the appalling mid-day shooting last March). Virtually nothing has been written about the displacement of the legitimate and largely aboveboard businesses--clothes, portrait photos, music, car stereos and alarms, taco truck--that currently operate in and outside the building. The fact that minority-owned businesses and clientele are being sold out so rich (and of course, predominantly white) people can move in their businesses and expensive homes is by now so familiar that it doesn't even merit a mention.

Readers, what do you think? Will you miss the Plaza, the mural, the Market? Are you glad to see it going? Who'll occupy the penthouse of the new building? What would you like to see in the ground-floor retail?

New Neighborhood Association Forming?

Light Rail, the future of Columbia School, impending development--these changes and more have prompted a call for the formation of a new neighborhood association.

But first, a moment of silence for the dearly-departed Columbia City Revitalization Committee, 1995-2003(?). Much of the credit for Columbia City's recent boom times goes to the neighbors who worked together in this great grass-roots organization. A good summary of the CCRC and its legacy--including the Farmer's Market and Beatwalk--is here.

A meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday, August 28, from 6 to 7 pm at the CC branch library. Neighbors, families, and friends in Columbia City are invited to attend.

Be informed, get involved, make a difference!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Crime, By The Numbers

The Rainier Valley has a bad reputation.

Shortly after Mr. K and I moved to Columbia City in late 1998, we started getting the questions from our well-meaning friends back in north Seattle. "Do you feel...safe?"

Suffice to say that we saw no shortage of skeevy business during our several years on the other side of the Montlake Cut. And while we certainly have some stories to tell--some funny, some outright scary--about crime in and around Columbia City, in our experience, it's nowhere near as bad as our neighbors to the north seem to think.

The map above represents the 2006 "crime density" (crimes per square mile) of all major crimes--violent crime and property crime--across the city. The darker the color, the more incidents. Details and absolute numbers can be found here

Census Tract 101, where Columbia City is located, is circled. You could definitely do worse: downtown, Broadway, The Ave, the CD, and--what's that I see over there in Ballard and Fremont???

In fairness, word on the street is that this summer has seen an uptick in car and house break-ins. I also heard that a struggling local restaurant suffered a serious break-in last weekend, which saw all its liquor stolen and most of its glassware broken. Stuff does happen. How to stay informed? How to fight back?

The Beacon Hill News publishes lowlights from the South Precinct Police Log. For more "close to the ground" reporting, the new Columbia City wiki has an "Incident Reports" section in its forum section. Also the neighborhood email list keeps members up to date on the latest atrocities, as well as suspicious business that makes you say, "wha??" (Has anyone else recently been visited by the flaky-sounding white guy purportedly selling home security systems? Hint: when you're trying to scam someone, it's not very convincing when the brand name patch on your shirt differs from the brand name on your literature, which is different from the brand name of the security system you're speaking about.)

The community policing cops say that the best way to fight crime is for neighbors to be alert and involved. Many of us in the neighborhood keep our eyes open and the South Precinct on speed dial. There were at least half a dozen get-togethers held in honor of the Neighborhood Night Out last week. So...get to know your friendly neighbors, keep an eye out for stuff that's out of place, and call it in when it gets too weird. Same as any other neighborhood.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Streetscape: Columbia City Fitness takes center stage!

Take a look at those trophies! The Columbia City Fitness Center just opened its doors in downtown Columbia City, having moved from its former location just a few blocks away on Rainier a half-block south of Hudson. It occupies the spot that formerly housed the Seattle site of Revival Lighting.

Revival has a continued presence on-line and in Spokane. The author aspires someday to life the lifestyle that will afford such beautiful showpiece lighting in the home...

Now instead of window-shopping for artistically sculpted lamps, passers-by can window-shop for artistically-sculpted patrons, hard at work on these sleek machines. (Parenthetically, have you seen the Columbia City Flickr pool? Growing by leaps and bounds every day.)

If you're worried that peering in at the hardbodies is too creepy, you can say that you were just checking out that remarkable collection of trophies.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Altered Icons



The intersection of Rainier and Alaska marks the southern boundary of the Columbia City historic district, and is the site of two of our neighborhood's iconic landmarks: the Columbia City branch of the Seattle Public library, and Columbia Park.

The stately Colonial Revival building alongside the gently sloping "village green" have anchored the Columbia City area for nearly a century. They are front and center in any discussion of the area's rich history and are dear to residents and visitors today.

The library and the park seem to stand for what endures, even as the area waxes and wanes around them....

But do they, really?

The picture above showcases the most recent changes to these CC icons. Most obvious is the addition to the library, completed in 2004, a $3.5 million dollar project that roughly doubled the size of the building--much needed for the heavily-used facility.

The path that runs alongside the building is an even more recent renovation, the result of a $350,000 Pro-Parks project completed in early 2007.

But even the seemingly-eternal orca-fin sculpture that is our blog's figurehead--the kids in the pic are playing on the rock at its base--is a recent addition, in the grand scheme of things. Entitled "Spirit of Washington", created by amazing local artist Marvin Oliver, the statue was added to Columbia Park only as recently as 1991.

You know what they say: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or maybe it's the other way around?