An effort to highlight Capitol Hill’s creative spaces got started Sunday with the first-ever 11th Avenue Street Fair where painters, clothing designers, and all other types of artists came to display and sell their work.
Sponsored by the Capitol Hill Community Council, and street representative’s Vermillion, Blue Cone Studios, Imminent Mode, and John Criscitello Studios, the festival closed the street to traffic and let the artists mostly do their thing. Continue reading
(Image: Jim Bennett/CHBP)
The Capitol Hill Block Party has announced its full slate of 100+ acts for the music festival that fills E Pike every July. Included in the update is a new headliner to close down the 2018 edition of the event with a Sunday night of psychedelic rock.
New Zealand’s Unknown Mortal Orchestra leads the roster of new names added Wednesday to the 2018 CHBP lineup. Producers also announced some of the plans for adjoining fun at this year’s festival including DJ sets, “activation” of the Chophouse Row development on the edge of the festival’s footprint, and “wellness programs” like morning yoga and workout classes. Continue reading
The 2018 edition of the annual Capitol Hill Block Party will include headliner Father John Misty returning to the festival where he also played main stage in 2015.
The Pike/Pine event showcasing a mix of local acts and national bands and groups on the rise takes place starting July 22nd this year and will also include Dillon Francis, Brockhampton, OW, Goldlink, Cashmere Cat, Alvvays, Sol, Bettywho, Quinn XCII, Ryan Carraveo, Two Feet, Yaeji, Bully, TR/ST, and The Dip. More performers will be announced as the July event approaches.
Block Party producer Jason Lajeunesse and booker Eli Anderson took to the airwaves at KEXP again this year to announce the lineup. “I think it’s the best music festival in the state,” Anderson said. Continue reading
(Image: Lit Crawl Seattle)
Powered by grants, volunteers, and the written word, Lit Crawl Seattle will again fill Capitol Hill and nearby venues with authors, poets, bloggers, and, yes, even a journalist or two Thursday night.
October 19, 2017: You’re booked.
35+ events. 15+ venues. 1 awesome night.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates.
Lit Crawl Seattle is a series of uncommon literary events — readings, performances, panel discussions, and beyond — that take place in pubs, museums, cafes, libraries, and a host of other spaces throughout the Capitol Hill and First Hill neighborhoods in Seattle.
The best part: most of the events are FREE.
See the full schedule HERE!
2017 maps will be distributed to participating venues soon.
In the meantime, check out all the confirmed readings on our Facebook page and be sure to Like us for updates.
From the first crawl in 2012, the annual event continues to be marked by an eclectic mix of participants and venues from bars to co-working spaces to technical bookstores to a new eyeglasses store on E Pike. The Seattle Public Library also joins the party — this year, check out Booktoberfest: Library After Dark: Scary Stories in the Stacks at the Capitol Hill branch.
Lit Crawl receives funding from Shunpike and is a grant recipient of King County 4Culture and the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
With more than 15 venues, it’s a busy night. The Seattle Review of Books is helping out with a few suggested itineraries. Looking for the big crowd? Stop by Neumos sibling The Runaway for a session with Stranger reporters as they record a live edition of their podcast, Trust Issues:
Trust Issues is a podcast about facts gone wrong, hosted by Sydney Brownstone and Heidi Groover. Each week, we go down an online rabbit hole to discover a fake story, conspiracy theory, or alternate history of the galaxy and try to understand why so many people believe it’s true.
For the latest updates and details on the night’s venues, best to check out facebook.com/seattlelitcrawl/
We have also posted the planned schedule for the night on the CHS Calendar:
By Tim Kukes for CHS
The APRIL Festival and Book Expo is breaking with tradition. For the first time — and the last time — the uniquely Capitol Hill literary festival will be confining its celebration to one day only — April 1st.
The Authors, Publishers, and Readers of Independent Literature festival, traditionally held in the later part of March to honor National Small Press Month, is coming to the end of its tale after a six-year journey of bringing eclectic reading events and diverse small press publishers to the people of Capitol Hill and Seattle.
“We feel like this is a good time to end the festival,” Frances Chiem, acting director, said. “We’ve done a lot with it and the small press community is a lot more vibrant than when we first started. We feel there are other community voices that will step in and fill the void.”
The story of the festival starts with Pilot Books, once located on Broadway, and Willie Fitzgerald and Tara Atkinson. The small press bookstore had a reputation as a vibrant community space and hosted a Small Press Festival in 2011 — essentially the first APRIL event and renamed after Pilot Books closed in the summer of 2011. Continue reading
By Tim Kukes for CHS
“I think the Seattle Fringe Festival is really taking on the role of mentoring and offering up opportunities for the artist to learn things,” Jeffrey Robert said.
Robert, who performs as The Gay Uncle, will be part of the 2017 version of the rebooted festival featuring “more than 30 producers of Theatre, Dance, Improv, Burlesque, Musical, Opera, Drag Performance, Solo Performance, Experimental, Clown, and Performance Art” at Capitol Hill’s Eclectic Theater and the Seattle Center Armory. Tickets run between $10 and $15 per show.
Robert is one of many local artists participating in the 2017 Seattle Fringe Festival but he may have gotten a later start than most. A standup comedian turned performance artist/storyteller, Robert didn’t dive into the artist life until his fifties.
“I always wanted to attempt it, but I was afraid to,” Robert said. “I always wanted to do artwork and sort of toyed around with it. I studied it in college, but I never ever made a career out of it.” Continue reading
Brass musicians march at a past HONK! Fest 4th of July show (Images: Mike Antares)
HONK! Fest West is extending its reach to Capitol Hill.
The free outdoor music festival started in Seattle in 2008, and this year it runs from June 16 to 19 with a visit to Capitol Hill in the middle. Capitol Hill will have its day Friday with professional brass bands playing free live concerts at four locations on the Hill. Festival organizer Mike Antares estimates that about 26 bands will play on the Hill.
“HONK! Fest is about the accessibility of music, which is why they’re in parks, streets, and public spaces,” Antares said.
This is the first year that the festival has included Capitol Hill. Festival organizers were brainstorming earlier in the year about how to reach out to other communities in the Seattle area. “Capitol Hill was at the top of the list,” said Antares. Continue reading
Months of planning and seven years of growth weren’t enough — organizers of the Capitol Hill Pride Festival, an upstart celebration of LGBTQ cultures that some say harkens back to the early days when Broadway was the center of queer Seattle, have been denied a permit to expand the street fair to Sunday — the same day as the city’s huge downtown Gay Pride parade. In a spirit that also might harken back to days when Seattle was a smaller, simpler place, the organizers are vowing to fight on and go forward with their planned expansion.
“Our position is to go forward with Sunday,” a brief statement sent to media Tuesday reads. “Authorized or not.”
City officials say the festival lost out in a Pride weekend numbers game — there’s just too much going on that Sunday. Continue reading
The 2015 Capitol Hill Pride Festival reportedly drew 35,000 to Broadway (Images: CHS)
The Capitol Hill Pride Festival will continue to grow into its eighth year as organizers plant to expand the Broadway street fair to a second day in 2016.
Planned for Saturday and Sunday, June 25th and 26th, the festival that got its grassroots start in 2009 has grown into an annual event that organizers say last year drew more than 35,000 to Broadway to celebrate Pride, enjoy performances and a doggie drag show, ride ponies(!), and, local merchants hope, visit restaurants and bars for food and drink.
Organizer Charlotte Lefevre, who used to operate the Seattle Museum of Mysteries on Broadway and has maintained a connection to the street’s older generations of businesses, must work with area businesses to secure approval for the second day of the festival, according to a discussion of the festival with the Seattle Special Events Committee. The Department of Neighborhoods has also asked the festival producers to invite Broadway business owners to have a “greater participation in planning” the annual event.
Capitol Hill used to be the center of Pride weekend’s activities. In 2006, the big parade moved downtown as it outgrew Broadway and expanded to be a bigger part of Seattle culture. While the parties and bar celebrations remained mostly on the Hill, the “official” events grew to spaces beyond the neighborhood.
This is the second year of growth for the Capitol Hill Pride Festival which added a Broadway parade and rally in 2015 and has continued to draw crowds despite the introduction of a competing event in Cal Anderson from the producers of the PrideFest event at Seattle Center. In 2013, Seattle PrideFest expanded its activities back to the Hill with Family Day in Cal Anderson and later added a street festival on 11th Ave. This year, PrideFest will also plans to expand its offerings on Capitol Hill on Saturday, June 25. (We’ve corrected and updated this paragraph — sorry for screwing up who was who with Seattle Pride and the year in which PrideFest returned for its first Cal Anderson family day.)
With a second day of the Broadway festival on Pride Sunday, revelers will face a choice about where to celebrate after the downtown parade — or whether to head downtown at all. A new light rail station just outside the Capitol Hill Pride Festival footprint will make the journey an easy one.
In the meantime, there are some logistics to work out. Last year, there was “sign confusion” due to high amount of construction projects in the area that caused a headache for organizers. And SDOT complained that Broadway’s Julia’s set up “a margarita cart selling to passing public.” That, unfortunately, is against the rules and won’t be allowed in 2016.
Capitol Hill’s scrappy, all volunteer run literary festival has been an undeniable success among Seattle’s most ardent indie book lovers. As it enters its fifth year, APRIL Festival organizers are now charting course to expand its weeklong slate of events and meet a growing demand for tickets.
“We’re kind of in this awkward growth phase now,” said Francs Chiem, one of the organizers of the festival that spans multiple venues around Capitol Hill. “We’ve been around long enough to show we know what we’re doing.”
The annual festival of Authors, Publishers and Readers of Independent Literature kicks off Tuesday with an opening party at The Pine Box. Continue reading
