Flowers abound at the Evergreen-Washelli cemetery on Aurora Avenue North, often providing a source of comfort for mourners. There are bouquets of red roses, potted azaleas, yellow marigolds and even purple leafy kale. But beneath the rosy surface lies an ongoing problem: Thieves have been taking flowers off of the graves, evading detection while angering patrons.
Lately, Fremont has lost places of worship. Our Lutheran church closed due to lack of attendance, and our Baptist church converted to "Community." We've never been heavily churched (unless you prayed at the altar of Budweiser), but these losses cut deep in maintaining a sense of unity.Luckily, the Nalandabodhi community found its way into our small circle and has renovated our old Presbyterian church into a Buddhist temple.
The Pacific Northwest has cultivated a tradition of edgy rock 'n roll since the emergence of The Sonics in the 1960s. The region's most notable contribution to the ever expanding tome of modern rock hit in the 1990s with the emergence of a power-chord heavy and melodic genre labeled grunge by the hipster press and personified in the clubs and concert halls by local heroes Nirvana and Soundgarden. Now, nearly 10 years after the death of grunge, a new musical movement is stirring in Seattle's underground.
Some conservative pundits like to compare W. Bush to Ronald Reagan. This makes Ronald Reagan's youngest son - a Seattle resident - gag.What he remembers from his father's Washington, D.C., funeral was a sign saying, "NOW THAT WAS A PRESIDENT!"Ron Reagan Jr., like his father, is a natural communicator. He can reel off the ways Bush doesn't measure up in stylish bursts embedded with words like Enron, WMDs and Abu Ghraib. But the bottom line is that the son of the most popular Republican president in modern times doesn't believe that the current president, also the son of a president, lives in the real world.
To many in the audience it was a familiar exercise. When Sound Transit held another light rail open house last week at Seattle Central Community College, the proceedings had an air of déjà vu. The Sound Transit event Oct. 25 was an opportunity to catch up with the status of the proposed North Link light rail segment, one intended to connect downtown to Northgate with stops included on First Hill and, notably, on Broadway.
The short e-mail message, sent out to a lengthy list subscribers, was succinct and to the point. Baring any late and unexpected changes, the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce will cease operations on Nov. 30.The closure ends roughly 80 years of business advocacy for the organization. The chamber has been in existence since the mid-1920s, beginning life as the Broadway Commercial Club and being named the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce in 1965.
One of the almost-fixtures outside the Upper Crust Bakery in Magnolia most mornings, rain or shine, is a kindly older gentleman in a Coast Guard ball cap. This is Wayne Gray.Gray isn't a real talkative sort, but after you've spent some time with him over numerous cups of coffee (or, in Wayne's case, tea), more and more stories about Magnolia's history get told. He's not the oldest Magnolia resident, but he's been around long enough to remember when what are now the Magnolia playfields contained the West Point Dairy Farm. There were other farms in the neighborhood he remembers, too.
I can still see my father on his front porch last Saturday, waving goodbye. He's starting to bend a little.Flipping through images of childhood, I find my toy rifle, dog and wooden skis before I ever see him.It's Christmas Eve in the Seward Park house. My brothers are raking in the loot. I've got socks and underwear. From the kitchen comes a commotion, and here's my father, rushing in on a Schwinn corvette bike.He goes by us trying to apply the foot brakes. Wrong era. It has hand brakes. He plows into the tree.
I'm writing this column through a fog of jetlag.I am a reluctant flyer at best, but there are some places, if you want to see them, you gotta fly.I spent 15 hours in the air yesterday. I just returned last evening from 17 days in Thailand.Not the tourist's Thailand.And I wasn't partaking of that segment of Thai tourism that draws the world's dirty old men, either.A Thai friend of mine who owns a business in Seattle invited me to travel with her and stay with her family in Bangkok. To see Thailand the way working-class Thais live in it.I'd never been, and so I jumped at the chance.
This is not an enviable position from which to take an informed survey of the landscape.I don't mean the upper lefthand corner of page 4. I mean this moment, early Tuesday morning, with the week's paper scheduled for an afternoon press run.This Tuesday - the one I'm looking ahead at and you're looking back at - is/was Election Day 2004. Like almost everyone else in the country at my particular moment, I can only guess who's going to win the Presidency ... or whether, in this 49-49, within-the-margin-of-error, multifariously litigious new nation-state of ours, either guy will have achieved a definitive, nonreversible victory by Wednesday, Nov. 3.I hope one has. Whichever one. None of us wants 2000 all over again (we'd probably get a metastasized version of it).But I also don't want 2004 again.
My recent three-month community college sabbatical, a whirlwind tour of the best college reading programs in the United States, was scattered among 14 colleges in 11 states. In anticipation, I packed two suitcases feeling like they contained a mini-Barcalounger, or two, apiece. "Be prepared" is my traveling motto, along with "Be gracious" and "Bring gifts to calm the infidels," my relatives. One never knows... The first stop, my favorite, was San Francisco in April. Two days of campus tours was punctuated by stupendously fun rides on the front of cable cars careening down Nob Hill or zooming towards Fisherman's Wharf. My room, a Holiday Inn with incredibly nice personnel, felt simple, clean, and New-ish. I belong to the "best surprise is no surprise" school of hotel selection. I believe traveling is about experiencing all the local culture and flavor to the fullest: Do it all!! Stay up late. Get up early. See everything.
The recent council vote to authorize spending over a million dollars to set the wheels in motion to convert Mercer Street in South Lake Union from a one-way street to a two-way street at a potential cost of a $100 million, exemplifies our fear of rejecting those who have lobbied for this physically attractive yet costly project, while we ignore the plain Jane transportation repairs that go unattended and out of the public limelight. For example, our bridges should be painted about every 8 years in order to avoid corrosion and later, more costly repairs. Unfortunately, they are being painted once every 19 years.
War, poverty, and genocide are some of the reasons a vast amount of people are coming to America. Eighty percent of these people, 13 million in various parts of the world, are women and children, and a significant amount try settling in the Puget Sound region each year.In 2003, over 2,000 refugees and immigrants in the Seattle area were helped by an organization called the Refugee Women's Alliance (ReWA).
It's a late sunny day and the primitive trail down the slope is slick clay, wet with recent rain. A river runs near but hosts no salmon. It is a concrete river, a route of commerce: Interstate 5. Each day, tens of thousands drive by Seattle's last undeveloped forest. For decades it was a hobo jungle, a common phrase from the Great Depression of the 1930s for camps of transients that dotted the American landscape. The name has been shortened, and the western slope of Beacon Hill is now simply known as the Jungle.
A tattered old sleeping bag, a bed of soggy leaves, a living room made of brush, these are the homes that welcome Seattle's homeless. They have nothing but the kitchen sink, literally. Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske pointed to one lying rusted on its side beneath Interstate 5. Kerlikowske and hundreds of other volunteers noticed such sad details during Seattle's One Night Count of the Homeless starting at 2 a.m. and lasting through the early morning hours of Oct. 22.
The Navy inked a deal with American Eagle Communities LLC on Monday this week to take over almost 4,000 units of military housing in the Puget Sound region, according to an Oct. 31 story by The Associated Press.American Eagle will reportedly pay the Navy $170 million in the deal, but missing from the AP story was any mention of Navy housing in Discovery Park. There was a reason for that, according to Seattle Parks and Recreation spokeswoman Dewey Potter.
Proposed plans for Queen Anne's Seattle Country Day School were discussed again in a public meeting last week. But unlike the sometimes-heated public meeting in August, the tone was calmer and the crowd about two-thirds smaller. The contentious issues remained the same, but Department of Development and Planning meeting facilitator Jim Metz successfully urged those at the meeting to maintain "a respectful environment" as discussion focused on the project's Draft Environmental Impact Statement.
Hunger in Seattle is not limited to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season, even though that's the main time when many people think about it, according to John Rockwood, manager of the Downtown Food Bank.The Food Bank serves between 900 and 1,100 people every week, according to Rockwood. Many of them live in the downtown area, or the part of Seattle from Queen Anne to the International District to Capitol Hill, but clients can come from all over the area.View the Pike Place Market News in PDF format
In 1926 a little shop called Morris Garages settled into what became a 54-year home in Abingdon-on-Thames, England. Their first MG auto, an MG Midget, was introduced in 1928. The car's "father" was a fine gent, Cecil Kimber (1888-1945) who, at only 57, was tragically killed in a train accident far before MGs reached world-wide popularity. Many glowing tributes to Kimber are still pouring in to this day. In 1936 the first of the new T-Series MGs appeared, called the TA. Three years later a new MG-TB came along, but car production stopped in 1939 due to the war. From June, 1936, to April, 1939, 3,003 TAs and 379 TBs came to be. Next came the MG-TC, the model that really started the MG immigration to the United States and the one known as "the sports car America loved first." Production of this version ran from 1945 to 1949.
One of the almost-fixtures most mornings outside the Upper Crust Bakery in Magnolia, rain or shine, is a kindly older gentleman in a Coast Guard ball cap. This is Wayne Gray.Gray isn't a real talkative sort, but after you've spent some time with him over numerous cups of coffee (or, in Wayne's case, tea), more and more stories about Magnolia's history get told. He's not the oldest Magnolia resident, but he's been around long enough to remember when what are now the Magnolia playfields contained the West Point Dairy Farm. There were other farms in the neighborhood he remembers, too.
