Tag Archives: capitol hill station

‘Left-turn Signals at Broadway & John’ only D3 project to survive crowd-sourced Street Fund process

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Cut from an earlier plan to improve the corridor for pedestrian, bicycling, motor vehicle, and public transit travel, one of the more challenging intersections on Broadway is lined up to finally get left-turn signals — eventually.

The Seattle Department of Transportation has released the final roster of projects approved this week as part of the crowd-sourced 2019 Neighborhood Street Fund process, an annual series of online voting and community meetings that allocates funding to projects identified by citizens and often including efforts with relatively significant budgets of $100,000 or more. Continue reading →

CHS Pics | Turn right on E Barbara Bailey Way

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If you are meeting friends at the southern entrance of Capitol Hill Station near Cal Anderson, you’ll now want to tell your phone to head to E Barbara Bailey Way. The new street name to honor the longtime Broadway business owner is now official after a Tuesday afternoon ceremony attended by Mayor Jenny Durkan and city officials.

Calling Bailey and “LGBTQ+ activist civil rights champion,” Durkan announced the plan to honor the founder of the long gone but not forgotten Bailey/Coy book shop earlier this summer. Bailey passed way last September at the age of 74.

The new street name replaces a stretch of E Denny Way that was updated as a “festival street” appropriate for closure for festivals and events near the light rail station.  The festival street was designed as both a one-way traffic route above the center of the underground Capitol Hill Station facility and through the development, plaza, and the AIDS Memorial Pathway that will open at the site in 2020. Continue reading →

Good news for bikes, more trains during rush hour, connection to the Central District, and more: What’s next for Capitol Hill light rail riders

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(Image: Sound Transit)

They grow up so fast, don’t they? This summer, Link Light Rail is celebrating its tenth birthday.

Back then, the Link covered 14 miles. The Capitol Hill and University of Washington stations opened three years ago, and ridership is now at 8,100 weekday boardings at the Capitol Hill Station. Sound Transit projects the number to rise to 18,000 daily weekday boardings at the station in 2026.

With the addition of more stations and lines, new trains and information system, a lot more is going to change. Here’s a look at what’s ahead for Capitol Hill Light Rail riders.

Where the Light Rail will take you: Pretty far. It won’t happen overnight, but the system will grow to 116 miles by 2041 with 48 more stations. In two years from now, Capitol Hill riders will be able to hop on a direct line to the new, underground U District and Roosevelt stations, and an elevated Northgate station.

By 2023, also on a direct line, Capitol Hill riders will be able to reach the new Judkins Park station smack-dab in the middle of I-90. From there, passengers will be able to take in views of Lake Washington and Mt. Rainier if you’re lucky by riding the train on the I-90 bridge (or more precise: the world’s first train tracks on a bridge that floats) to Mercer Island and South Bellevue. Lynnwood, Kent, Federal Way and downtown Redmond will be within light rail’s reach just a year later.  Continue reading →

No mystery — Capitol Hill’s mystery soda machine is still missing

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Last summer, the mystery of Capitol Hill’s mystery soda machine became mysteriously more mysterious when the mysterious machine mysteriously… vanished. One year and one week later, there is still no trace of the machine beyond its surprisingly robust social media campaign. And, while the clues are pretty much everywhere you look in the machine’s Instagram updates and around its previous home on the sidewalk of E John, the mystery remains.

While SDOT’s improvements to sidewalks along the John and Thomas corridor overlapped with the machine’s disappearance, construction concluded in December 2018, and the former home of the beloved late 20th Century-style soda machine outside Broadway Locksmith remains vacant.

“Wherever it is, we wish it well and hope that it is having a safe and fulfilling journey,” said Ethan Bergerson, SDOT’s media relations lead.  Continue reading →

Proposal would honor Broadway business owner with E Barbara Bailey Way festival street at Capitol Hill Station

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The Denny festival street

Seattle is working to rename the “festival street” portion of E Denny Way though the Capitol Hill Station between Broadway and Cal Anderson to honor a late Capitol Hill business owner remembered as a LGTBQ and civil rights champion.

The block-long Barbara Bailey Way will honor Barbara Bailey who founded Broadway’s much-loved Bailey/Coy Books only blocks away and passed away last fall.

“Barbara loved Seattle and she poured herself into making it better. She was an early pioneer for LGBTQ+ rights. Her bookstores were safe, welcoming places for the LGBTQ+ community,” said Mayor Jenny Durkan said in a statement on the proposed legislation that began its path through City Hall Monday. Continue reading →

Here’s what Sound Transit says about hottest June 12th in Seattle history light rail service problems

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The arrival of light rail service on Capitol Hill has, indeed, been like magic that puts Broadway within minutes of every stop on the line. But this week has been a rough one for Sound Transit service with a major disruption Wednesday and a series of smaller snafus that followed Thursday.

Sound Transit says don’t give up on the magic of Capitol Hill Station just yet — the week’s problems have been a coincidence of bad luck and a few holes in the system that are being actively — if not a little slowly — patched. With more hot days in Seattle to come, here is what Sound Transit says happened. Continue reading →

With selection of artist Chris Jordan and preview works going up for Pride, AIDS Memorial Pathway moves forward connecting Capitol Hill Station to Cal Anderson

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Artist Chris Jordan at the site where the pathway will begin (Image: Margo Vansynghel for CHS)

“I am trembling,” wrote Tacoma-based artist Christopher Paul Jordan on social media after the announcement that he had been selected from a pool of artists from all over the country to produce the centerpiece artwork for the AIDS Memorial Pathway. The pathway and plaza, expected to open in June 2020 along with the mixed-use, transit-oriented developments surrounding it, will connect Capitol Hill Station to Cal Anderson Park. When finished, the plaza will also host the weekly Capitol Hill Farmers Market.

Portland-based artist Horatio Hung-Yan Law shaped the art plan for the public-private project. “It’s not an AIDS memorial, but a memorial pathway,” Law told CHS. “We have the luxury of not trying to express everything in one memorial. There are so many aspects to [HIV/AIDS]; that’s hard to sum up or put in one piece.” Continue reading →

CHS Pics | ‘CAPITAL HILL STATION’

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It is best to just give up when it comes to things like Twitter and Facebook and accept that “Capital Hill” happens. But enjoying classic forms of the typo remains a solid shared joke and cultural marker. We’ve been blessed with some good ones lately. Some we hope stay perfectly flawed forever. Others need to be repaired. Continue reading →

Capitol Hill Station is getting a late third birthday present: stairs!

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Preparation work has begun on Capitol Hill Station’s “back of house” stairs beneath the Denny entrance to the busy subway platform, Sound Transit tells CHS:

Once back-of-house stairways are open, riders will be able to use them during all Link light rail operating hours. One important note: work on back-of-house stairs will occur one stairwell at a time, with follow-on work happening for a while. This means after we open BOH stairs, riders may notice some stairways closed while work continues.

When it opened on March 19th of 2016, Capitol Hill Station was born with only emergency stairs connecting to its arrival and departure platform. It was designed to be accessed by escalator or elevator with the emergency staircase to be put to use in, well, only emergencies. Continue reading →

Happy third birthday, Capitol Hill Station

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Some 7,698 light rail boardings take place every day at Capitol Hill Station. Tuesday marks the three-year anniversary of the opening of the busy Broadway subway station that has forever changed getting to and from Capitol Hill.

Saturday, March 19th, 2016, then-Mayor Ed Murray and King County Executive Dow Constantine broke out the giant ceremonial scissors to cut the ribbon opening the $110 million station and the start of service on the $1.9 billion, 3.15-mile U-Link extension connecting downtown to Husky Stadium via Broadway. 16 to 18 trucks per day were used to haul dirt away from the site during construction. Sound Transit officials said some 19,900 trucks plied the streets of Capitol Hill hauling muck churned up by the boring machines. Continue reading →