The FBI’s Seattle office and SPD detectives are searching for this man who they say robbed the Wells Fargo in the Safeway at 15th Ave E and John on Saturday afternoon around 4:39 PM. He is described as an Asian man, around 35 years old, 5’3″ and extremely thin.

The man entered the in-store bank area near the east entrance to the 15th Ave Safeway, handed the teller a note implying he had a weapon. The teller handed over an undisclosed amount of cash and the man fled the scene before officers arrived.

The location of the Wells Fargo has been reported by the Seattle PI as inside a Capitol Hill QFC but this appears to be erroneous as the address given in information from the FBI and SPD is in the 1400 block of E. John. CHS is working to confirm the location with the FBI’s Seattle bureau.

UPDATE: FBI confirms that the robbery took place at the 15th Ave E Safeway.

Can’t write the word ‘pandemic’ without freaking everybody out. So let’s try to be as rational as possible. Here is King County’s plan to handle a pandemic influenza outbreak. The PDF was updated in October, 2008, fortunately. Nice work on that KC. It’s fascinating to read about some of the containment concepts like ‘social distancing’ and will give you some confidence that there is a plan. It gives you some sense of what to expect in your daily life if a serious outbreak did occur — for example, at what level they close schools — and, yeah, it will freak you out.

Here are some of the more interesting sections. The first describes the phases of a pandemic — we’re in Phase 4 if you’re scoring at home.

This section describes how ‘social distancing’ will be implemented through the various phases to reduce contact. Things don’t get freaky until Phase 5 hits with local, sustained transmission in King County — that’s when they start closing schools and you consider moving to Sequim.

King County’s “social distancing” phases

Sorry if this post causes a lot of anxiety. Hopefully, swine flu behaves like avian flu and just hangs out to give us the creeps every now and then. All I know is that I’m washing my hands more today and got curious about what happens if the Purell doesn’t work.

There will be a final design review meeting for 2026 E Madison St, the old site of Deano’s,  on May 6th at Seattle Central. Dominic Holden recently wrote a nice piece about this site, but I thought I would do a little more analysis on the project here on CHS.

First the project details: 222 residential units, 9,576sq ft retail, and 229 below grade parking spaces. As always, the parking seems excessive, but at least it’s underground.

View Larger Map

This project, along with the old Twilight Exit site across the street, and another lot south at 23rd and Union, are all being developed by prominent local architect Jim Mueller. Mueller is perhaps best known for his work with Vulcan in South Lake Union. He’s had a hand in pretty much all recent development down there, including two projects I have found refreshing, 2200 and Alley 24. As Central District News relates, Mueller has gone above and beyond the Design Review to engage the community about his developments, which is always nice. The design for this building was done by Weinstein AU (of Agnes Lofts at 12th and Pike)

So how does this project stack up? Personally, I think it’s pretty well done (except for the amount of parking).

---

The design calls for a 6-story structure with a public courtyard in the center. The courtyard will be accessible from a double-height passthrough on Madison, as well as two East-West breezeways that approximate the alley that ran through the site. There will be four or five retail spaces, which will mainly face Madison but will wrap around a bit onto E. Denny street. Most spaces will also have entrances from the courtyard area. The rest of the ground floor will be two-story walk-up townhomes with street entrances, as well as courtyard entrances. Both the townhomes and the public courtyard seem pretty ambitious to me, based on the history of the location, and I really applaud them for that. They could have done something like the Summit at Madison Park, with a fotress-like wall facing 23rd and a single, huge retail space.

For more info on development in this area, check out Andrew Taylor’s very informative google map.

View Madison Street Developments in a larger map

While everybody else thought “Ice cream,” Musely thought, “Donut!”

Surely this has been done before. No? Nobody? Musely is a genius (ERIK98122, you’re pretty swell yourself). Thanks for sharing in the CHS flickr pool.

 

 

 

 

---

Neighbor Rina reports a hit and run accident Sunday night near 18th and Howell:

Hey-there was a crazy hit and run around 9:00 tonight.  A black mini van and a black Dodge Durango were involved in some sort of altercation that ended with the Durango hitting the mini van.  The Durango then slammed into a red Honda Prelude.  There was quite a bit of damage to the prelude, he probably won’t be able to drive the car away, and I won’t be surprised if the Prelude is still there in the early morning.

No entry in the 911 log so looks like nobody was injured. We’ll give SPD a call to see if they can tell us what went down.

UPDATE: Not a lot more clarity from SPD but they did confirm that the accident was a hit and run involving two vehicles smashing into a third. The drivers of the dark blue Durango and the minivan both drove away from the scene and could not be located after an area search. SPD confirms that were no injuries.

Here is a Capitol Hill-related crime item that fell through the cracks and didn’t make it into our latest police blotter update.

A 36-year-old man was arrested and charged with indecent exposure after dropping his pants after he was caught climbing an apartment wall near Seattle University with another man around 9:30 PM on Saturday night, April 18th. Both men admitted to climbing on the wall in the 10th Ave incident. According to the report, during the investigation, the Everson, Washington man dropped his pants and shouted “Are you going to arrest me for indecent exposure?” He was booked into King County Jail on one count of indecent exposure.

---

Turns out, there’s a third event in today’s Pine/Cal Anderson Olympics — Gay Field Day is underway. Here’s coverage of the very competitive egg race.

---