In case you forgot already, we did have a few sunny days not too long ago on Capitol Hill. Thanks to everybody for adding to the CHS flickr pool.

If August's rain and ridiculousness have you a little down on Capitol Hill, you should read author Charles Johnson's recent essay for Smithsonian Magazine.

My wife, Joan, born and raised on Chicago's South Side in a sometimes violent housing project called Altgeld Gardens, and I happily raised our children here. They can truly call this place—accurately described as a "city of neighborhoods"—home. On Capitol Hill two years ago, our daughter, Elisheba, a conceptual artist, opened Faire Gallery/Café, which features jazz performances and the occasional play or open-mic poetry night as well as art shows and comedy performances by young local talent. Faire is where I hang out these days, conducting my classes and keeping appointments in a vibrant atmosphere—straights and gays, students and goths—that recalls the freewheeling creative vitality of Berkeley in the late 1960s.

For Seattle is, whatever else, a place where the young, single, iconoclastic and open-minded seem to thrive...

Ah, that's nice. A few of you also...

Our friend Matt at Urbnlivn posted a link to a site poking fun at Cap Hill condos: Cheapshit Condos!

Dissing those triangle porches at the Braeburn? Loves it!

Today's link fest has only one theme -- Capitol Hill:

• The oldest house in the city is on Capitol Hill.
• DOT responds to Car Free towing: "We don't want to create negative problem for the neighborhood, and that was an unfortunate consequence."
• Daily Candy tells you where to find the height of sartorial treatment on Capitol Hill.
• Wet, crappy weather means death from above. That tree was aiming for you.
• Press release for creation of a Capitol Hill Barrio.
• We all missed Sounds Outside last weekend. Except for Capitol Hill Triangle.
• My hobbies increase. More about this soon.

I love this post over at Seattle's Tribe.net page requesting a summary of Seattle in just three words.

So, I have to ask...

How would you describe the hill in just three words?

Play along! Three words only! :)

Here's mine, um, it's a little cheesy:

Community with spunk

More about the Car Free breakdown and a few other links of note this autumn-like August morning.

• A 14th Ave E. neighbor speaks out on the Car Free debacle: "How much cooler would the whole thing have been if someone had organized a street-wide garage sale, a group jam session, or a scooter rally. Now that would have been cool, and all of those events could have happened at the same time on the same street to great success." FYI, the Capitol Hill Community Council talked to an organizer about this event way back in July but didn't hear back from her until a week ago with a mass e-mail looking for volunteers.
• PDX blogger gets high and mighty about Capitol Hill's yuppification by pointing squarely at Bimbo's: "Its new location, sans the lucha libre stain-gassed windows and south-of-the-border brick-a-brak, could easily pass for a martini bar."
• Blogging Georgetown notes upcoming neighborhood blog forum hosted by mainstream media blogger.
• The stories behind some of the neighborhood street art you've probably seen.
• And,...

Life on a Hill requires ascension.

• Volunteer Park Water Tower - 106 steps (source)
• E. Howe St. - 180 steps (source)
• Broadway QFC South - 1 escalator (source: author)
• Pine Street trail - 54 steps (source, also author. I think)
• Interlaken Steps - 10 steps (source: author)
• E. Republican Staircase - 16 steps (source)
• The Cuff Complex - ad infinitum (source: author)

Here is a map of all the stair locations and here is a handy Capitol Hill stairs running route.

Just a quick call-of-attention to a neighbor's excellent use of the communication opportunities we offer here at Capitolhillseattle.com -- neighbor Bill wants you to know about his yard sale this weekend so he posted this CHS event. Smart Bill.The event postings automagically appear on our calendar and over on the right side of our homepage. Got something coming up? Post your own Capitol-Hill related event.

If you're really ambitious, you can also take advantage of our Always-Free Ad inventory and get fancy with a CHS advertisement for your event. We don't show our freebie spots as frequently as the paid ads but your message will still be seen by thousands every week -- and, of course, for a few dollars, you can really pound the message home. Another cool thing about the free and cheap ads is you can feel free to include messages that fall outside of the useful purposes of a calendar -- for example, you can say Happy Birthday, congratulations or support your favorite cause. Wow, what will CHS think of next!

Twitter is finally reaching the point where it is interesting -- your mom and dad are using it. Saw this interesting Twitter page on fellow neighborhood blog My Ballard. Want to build something similar for Capitol Hill -- in the meantime, here are some of the latest Capitol Hill-related Tweets:

dieselboi: @tbridge tom, hit up a restaurant named Via Tribianali up on Capitol hill. Excellent pizza
Portland Oregon USA
about 17 hours ago · Reply · View Tweet

abrichar: Full of tasty tasty dinner and a dessert of eye candy. Thank you for being beautiful, Capitol Hill.
iPhone: 45.563324,-122.641327
2 days ago · Reply · View Tweet

JeanineA: OMG just spotted a fig tree on capitol hill while walking the dog & it is essentially public domain. No, I am NOT telling you where it is.
SEATTLE
2 days ago · Reply · View Tweet

HeroicAutobot: @cbarrett The bus system in Seattle is okay, but not great. If you get a hotel downtown/Belltown/Capitol Hill, you can easily walk to PAX.
iPhone: 47.631802,-122.356507
2 days...

While we're posting free commercials for happening dot coms, we should mention the debut of the very cool and very locally focused EveryBlock service here in Seattle -- here's the EveryBlock Seattle Capitol Hill page. On it, you'll find news, and fun items scraped from various public databases like the most recent 911 reports, construction permits, and, personal fave, health inspections (be careful with these -- some will put you off food for a week).

None of the content is unique to EveryBlock -- you can find this same info spread across the Internets -- but its value is in cobbling it all together and eventually, assume, learning how to bubble up the most important stuff so you don't have to dig through boring reports about the 15th Ave 7-11's lack of adequate hand-washing facilities. You'll even find a few posts from good ol' CHS in the mix -- though, it seems EveryBlock's fancy algorithm's chooses appropriate content by looking for posts with addresses in the text. So, if EB takes off, expect a lot of 432...

If there's one thing this world is lacking, it's good neighborhood infographics. Redfin's new neighborhood real estate data page for Capitol Hill has some useful visualizations of the local market. If you're considering making a move, the charts provide an overview of what is happening out there -- kind of like those partly cloudy weather graphics on TV.

This inventory chart is pretty simple -- shows two fever lines tracking the number of houses and condos on the market. What do you know! There's a dramatic uptick in condos available in the area.

These next two are interesting gauges of price conditions in the area. The red one is for houses, the second blue one shows condos. Both track a comparison of the average list price vs. the average sold price in $/square feet over time. Basically, the graphs show two indicators of price -- what people have been paying recently and what they're going to be asked to pay going forward. In the red home chart, you can see that the list line has crossed the sold line earlier...

We bet you were out of town this weekend. Even though the weather is usually beautiful, seems like Capitol Hill's residents evacuate the Hill on August's final summer weekends. So, are we right? Were you off visiting Bellingham on Saturday? Roll call, please. Select all that apply.

You may have noticed the row of stars and the report abuse link at the top of every post on Capitolhillseattle.com. On lots of sites, those kinds of tools are little more than eye candy and silly decoration.

But on CHS, the features actually do something so watch where you are pointing that thing!

• Report Abuse: This link gives you and the CHS community the ability to work together to keep the site content appropriate and the type of material you want to experience. If we get enough abuse reports on a post and other positive factors aren't there to counterbalance the flags, the content is automagically removed from the site. This works for inappropriate comments, too. Please use your power with discretion -- don't want this place to become a one-note agree-athon but it's good to know you have the tool when particularly distasteful material comes along. To date, btw, nothing has been automatically flagged of this site. I'd love it to stay that way.
• Rating Stars: This feature is a little less concrete in purpose. You...

Yes, it's a wonderful day today, but that wouldn't stop an earthquake/terrorist/etc.

The Seattle City Emergency Management folks would like you to know about their Fall series of classes.

They also have an online video that you can enjoy.

All the details:

http://web1.seattle.gov/dpd/luib/Notice.aspx?id=8636

In brief:

 PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The proposal is for the construction of two buildings including a four-story building on the eastern portion of the site (currently a surface parking lot) with 80 below-grade parking stalls, 5,000 sq. ft. of commercial use at the ground level and 45 residential units above and a six-story mixed-use building on the western portion of the site with 100 below grade parking stalls, 8,000 sq. ft. of ground level commercial use and 68 residential units above (for a total of 113 units).  The existing one-story bank building to be demolished.  The two buildings are to be construction in two phases. 

MEETING

Date:                                  Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Time:                                  06:30 p.m.

Location:                            Seattle Vocational Institute

                                           2120 South Jackson Street

                                           Room 102/103

Attached is the invitation for community meeting #4 for the John and Summit Park Development Project.  The meeting is Wed., September 10, 2008 from 7 - 8:30 at the Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church. 

But just how hilly? I still haven't found a good website to tell me how steep any individual street is, or even a good topological map of downtown + Capitol Hill. (I need to know this stuff because I'm starting to bike to work... ooooof!)

But here's something I've found that is handy: Bikely.com! You can browse around to see other people's bike routes, make your own, and most importantly, check the elevation changes on a route! Google maps has this info, but you need API fanciness to extract it; Bikely exposes this for us.

To see it in action, take a look at my Cap Hill --> P-I building route, or the reverse. Once it's up, click "Show", then "Elevation Profile".

One more fun link: Seattle DOT has a map of the 20 steepest streets in the area. If anyone can suggest a good browsable topo map of the area, please chime in!

So I've never actually been inside Club Lagoon, but I was very concerned once I saw it listed for sale . Is the infamous car perched on the rooftop of the 80's / Miami beach themed club part of their lease? Will it soon disappear and change the look and feel of Broadway? Will anyone notice?

Or maybe the Lamborghini belongs to Subway....

Capitolhillseattle.com is an experiment in community and journalism. A big part of that experiment is surviving and, hopefully, thriving. The goal is more than being interesting and documenting a piece of the day to day here on Capitol Hill. The goal is to last. And grow.

The plan for survival and growth, then, is to sell enough advertising to

1. Maintain a quality site
2. Share compensation with the people who put effort into making the site better (more on this at the end of this post)
3. Be able to afford providing free advertising for small, local businesses
4. Turn away advertising that is low quality and not locally focussed
5. Compensate myself with what's left over

Gettin' paid Along with our cousin site over at Central District News, we have been running a trial of our advertising system for the past several weeks, inviting local business and groups to test out the system by placing advertising for free. The response has been solid: 30 advertisers got their message out to about a thousand people every day interested in...

I'm guessing these three things were related... While walking to work yesterday I saw this broken planter, a knocked over scooter and two puddles of vomit within two blocks of each other. Someone was getting rowdy.

The planter is one of three in front of the The Elite on Olive. I didn't get a pic of the scooter. Or the vomit...