CHS got a tip that Ben Affleck is shooting scenes for a movie on Seattle Central’s campus all day Wednesday. Which is weird. Because Jason Biggs is shooting scenes for his Grassroots movie on Seattle Central’s campus all day Wednesday. We’ll go with Biggs and his tale of Grant Cogswell’s 2001 run for Seattle City Council and assume somebody thinks he looks like Affleck. Maybe they’ll both be there. You can be, too. Wednesday’s shoot, according to Seattle Central’s Facebook page, needs extras. You’re instructed to e-mail [email protected] for details. Your big break starts at 11:30 AM and goes until 5 in the South Plaza off Broadway and Pine.

The Seattle PI has a report from a briefing at this morning’s City Council transportation committee meeting where the locations for the city’s newest bike-friendly addition to the roadscape were announced:

Bike Box Originally uploaded by itdp

Bike boxes are painted behind crosswalks at signalized intersections. They’re about 12 to 14 feet wide and sit in front of traffic, giving bicyclists a place pull in front of vehicles while waiting for the light. Since cars must wait behind cyclists, it increases the cyclist’s visibility and reduces the risk of the driver hooking right and striking them.

 To start, SDOT will install bike boxes in the International District at Seventh Avenue South and Dearborn Street; and on Capitol Hill at East Pine Street and 12th Avenue South (sic) and East Madison Street where it meets 12th Avenue and Union Street, according to Charles Bookman SDOT’s director of traffic management.

There’s no such thing as an intersection of E Pine and 12th Ave South so we’re assuming they mean the intersection that the East Precinct and the state liquor store call home.

Add the planned bicycle features on Broadway, and our growing number of on-street bike parking stalls and you have the makings for a nice place for a ride.

UPDATE: Added a new and improved illustration of a bike box from flickr and left the original one from SDOT materials on the post (in shame).

“That store didn’t really go out of business, you just need to go to our other stores now.”

That’s what we were told after calling Cell Towns headquarters in Federal Way about the shuttering of the puny booth of a storefront the Verizon reseller operated at 219 Broadway.

No, they couldn’t tell us why it was closed. No, they didn’t know how long it had been there. All we know is it’s gone now. You can get a sense of the kind of stuff it sold from the company’s http://www.celltowns.com/ Yes, this is a good point in the article for a “Can you hear me now?” joke.

The Broadway Alley has grown into a funky collection of good things including Guanaco’s Pupuseria, Speck Printing, Pilot Books, Hana Sushi, Table 219 and Laughing Buddha Tattoo. There’s space up top for a retail or office tenant at $1,673/month. Now there’s an open slot on the ground floor, too.

Hat tip to Uncle Vinny, watcher of things great and small, for noting the closure to us.

Some of our first friends in Seattle were weirdos named Goddess Kring and Mike Hunt. If you like your media indie and local — and a little weird — here are two items from the CHS Calendar to keep you busy tonight.

channeling clint eastwoods squint underwater
Originally uploaded by shannonkringen

• SCAN rally at Miller Community Center:

Seattle Community Access Network (SCAN), Seattle/King County’s public access television, is at risk of losing its funding and is holding a public rally to gain support for its request to the City of Seattle.

Rally for SCAN’s Future
Tuesday, July 27, 2010, 6:00 p.m.
Miller Community Center, 330 – 19th Ave. E, Seattle, WA 98102

SCAN reaches nearly 450,000 King County cable subscribers on Comcast 77 and Broadstripe 23. Streaming online at www.scantv.org, our community’s message reaches beyond the region’s boundaries and can reach the entire world. SCAN programs tell the story of people’s lives, to communicate what is important to them locally, in their faith life, in their neighborhoods, and on the political front. SCAN preserves the history of our community for future generations and is a place where communities come together to share their message. Community producers create the content for the majority of SCAN programs, many in languages not available on mainstream television networks. In this era of media consolidation, it is important that a medium be available for the independent voice. SCAN is a commercial-free station, and embraces the notion of free speech.

SCAN engages and enriches the diverse communities of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest through television production, training, and serving as a community media broadcast center.

more..

• Sonicscgate filmmakers at Rock Paper Scissors:
  

Come out and hang with the Sonicsgate filmmakers as we celebrate the launch of the Rock Paper Scissors limited edition Sonicsgate T-shirts!

It’s in Capitol Hill right across from Chop Suey. Starts at 7PM, ends around 10PM. We’ll have a free entry raffle with some cool prizes and more. Invite your friends. Hope to see you there!

How can we have not posted until now about E Pike sports shoe boutique Rock Paper Scissors! Better late than never. You can find RPS at 1318 E Pike next to Bluebird.

The good news: It appears that no children robbed anybody at gunpoint last night. Also good news: Cal Anderson is getting a summer reprieve on a grass rehabilitation project that was to have fenced off a 3/4-acre of the park beginning next week. Your park forecast will be mainly about sunshine, temperatures in the 70s and no chain link fence, for now.

“The main point of this update is that the construction schedule has been pushed out further into late August,” said Randy Robinson, senior landscape architect for Parks.  That’s generally good news for park users.”

The reason behind the delay is budgetary. The grass repair project is now being moved forward under the Seattle Public Works Project process instead of being completed by a contractor who already has a deal for parks work. That means the job to complete the work has to go out to bid. We don’t even see the project listed yet on the city’s bid roster so it’s not clear if even the late August start target is likely at this point.

The $250,000 project will repair the conditions in a 3/4-acre area of Cal Anderson where Parks department officials say the grass has struggled since the summer the park was completed in 2005. CHS was told in May that Parks has been complaining about the screw-up for years. Officials blame the soil Seattle Public Utilities chose in the construction of the park on the lid atop the now buried Lincoln Reservoir and say it has poor drainage. The situation with the soil conditions is so poor that  a form of rush — a plant normally found in marshy wetlands — grows in tufty patches you see throughout the park.

The plan is for a 3/4-acre swath of the northeast section of the park — and a portion of 11th ave parking to be used for construction vehicles and stagin — to be fenced off once the project begins. The contractor who wins the job will then carefully remove three to five inches of topsoil while not damaging the sensitive reservoir lid. New drainage trenches will be created and a new layer of sand-based top soil and soil conditioner will be layered over it all. By September, Parks had hoped that the new grass would be planted and, if everything went as planned, later in fall the fences will be adjusted and the park pathways reopened. With the timeframe of the project pushed back a few weeks at this point, it doesn’t look like Parks will miss the optimal window for grass growth. But they’ll be cutting it close.

We don’t always get the opportunity to update you on what happens after our reports on CHS. Stories of “serious conditions” and “life threatening injuries” are sometimes all we get as we cover the news of Capitol Hill. But after we reported that the man injured in Sunday night’s serious truck vs. pedestrian accident on 12th Ave was in improving condition, we also have relatively good news about an incident we reported on in the first week of July when a woman was struck by a car while riding her bike on 24th Ave. Here’s an update on her condition posted by her to the CHS comments. We also now can share her name. Meet Holli Lyons:

I am the woman that was hit on the bike. I am okay. I have a broken arm and a contusion on my left leg. I am sufferring from a traumatic brain injury, but all in all, I am okay. I have no recollection of the accident at all. And I do hope, that the family that hit me are okay as well. Thank you everyone for your thoughts and concerns about my well-being.

And the driver was at fault, as I had the right of way. They were taking a left at a green light and I was going straight, according to the police report.

We also have found an expired Seattle Craigslist ad posted by Lyons in June: She was selling her ancient 1987 Honda Accord.

The seven baby ducks currently calling Volunteer Park’s koi pond home will soon have a new address. According to a park employee working at the pond on Monday, the mother duck and her ducklings — yes, good news, there are still seven — will soon be transported to the Arboretum to begin a new life on the shores of Lake Washington. Apparently, the koi pond and the reservoir don’t make the best place to raise a quickly growing duck family. If you get over there in time to see the ducks before they’re moved, you’ll note the cage set up inside the pond enclosure so the family has time to get used to the idea of the thing before they’re coaxed inside for the ride down the hill.

Over on our sister site FirstHillSeattle.com, we are reporting on another street hold-up where the victim has told police that the armed street robbers appear to be children.

The early Monday morning hold-up happened on the street near Boren and University and features two suspects with similar descriptions to the Sunday morning armed street robbery on Capitol Hill we reported over the weekend.

In that incident, a woman told police two black males, one aged aged 13 or 14 the other possibly as young as 10 or 11, pointed a pistol at her and demanded her purse. The First Hill hold-up featured the same modus operandi as the Capitol Hill theft. A woman was approached by two young black males on the sidewalk of Boren around 2:30 Monday morning. The males threatened her with a pistol and stole her purse.

SPD is investigating the hold-ups but we are not aware of any arrests connected to the crimes yet.

In April, a string of armed hold-ups across the Capitol and First Hill was ended when a trio of teenagers were busted following a robbery. The pistol in those hold-ups turned out to be an Airsoft air gun. We’ll check in on their statuses and and see where in the legal system the case against the group stands.

Dead Weather @ CHBP 7-25-10, originally uploaded by spratt504.

We joined “the crowd” — and took a few pics ourselves — on Sunday night to catch the Dead Weather performance from the Shell station parking lot. Below, you’ll find pictures posted to the Internet from the third and final day of Capitol Hill Block Party 2010. Like the rest of the weekend, day three was mostly smooth running with only a few 911 incidents and SPD callouts. And Monday morning, there were very few signs that the three-day music festival that may have drawn nearly 30,000 music fans to Capitol Hill ever happened. Below, photographic proof that it did.

Here are Day One and Day Two’s ‘pics from the crowd’ posts. We also know that some of the best stuff won’t come online until later this week so we’ll probably do a round-up of more crowd pictures — and video — then. Have something you’d like us to share? Let us know at [email protected]

Again, we’ve embedded most of the images per their services ‘native’ format just to make sure we’re compliant with terms of use. . If we’ve used your photo and you’d prefer we didn’t, let us know.

—-, originally uploaded by ADRIEN!.

Capitol Hill Block Party
Originally uploaded by jaycoxfilm

the Dead Weather Originally uploaded by joshc