He’s Noah Pearson, and his work has imagined cityscapes, and tributes to New Orleans, which he loves. He calls his style “Persona Positive.”
You can find out more about his work at noahabrahampearson.com, or on Facebook. He says he’s out with his work most sunny afternoons.
Capitol Hill software developer, civil liberties advocate, member of the Hill’s Chamber of Commerce and, yes, frequent CHS commenter Phil Mocek announced this weekend that he was acquitted of all charges stemming from his arrest after refusing to show identification to TSA agents at the Albuquerque airport in November 2009.
Mocek was in New Mexico this week to be tried on misdemeanor charges including concealing his identity from officers who responded when he tried to pass through airport security without an ID in the 2009 incident. Mocek had been in the state to attend the International Drug Policy Reform Conference on behalf of the Cannabis Defense Coalition. He recorded video of his interaction with the TSA agents and police officers in the incident, a portion of which Mocek has posted online (and we’ve embedded in this post).
Seattle Weekly reports it took the New Mexico jury all of an hour to find Mocek not guilty.
What the confused and agitated officers didn’t know at the time is that Mocek has been flying without identification for years. The Seattle Times talked to the “Freedom Flyer” about his dedication to exercising his rights to travel anonymously back in 2008. With this acquittal, you can notch another victory in Mocek’s long march to fight for those rights. For more on the incident, see the Seattle Weekly’s Phil Mocek: On Trial For Being TSA Checkpoint Worker’s Worst Nightmare. You can also follow Mocek on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pmocek
A woman was struck by a driver in a pick-up truck as she crossed East Pine near Boylston early Saturday morning. The vehicle fled the scene but police were able to track the female driver miles away thanks to two observant witnesses at R Place who saw the collision.
We don’t have details on the woman’s condition at this time but she was reported to be down on the pavement in front of Linda’s Tavern, conscious but bleeding from the head.
Police tracked down the suspect in her pick-up on 23rd Ave near Dearborn. The two witnesses from R Place were driven to 23rd where they identified the pick-up truck and the driver. The female suspect was taken into custody and transported to the East Precinct where an SPD drug recognition expert was called in to evaluate her condition.
East Pine was shut down after the 2:15 AM crash as medics attended to the injured woman. It was re-opened around 2:30 AM as the woman was transported from the scene but quickly closed again just after 3 AM when the SPD Traffic Collision Investigation Squad was called to the scene to process the area for evidence and to interview witnesses.
An artist going by the name of blur says there are 100+ wheat-paste Waldos on Capitol Hill that you can hunt down and report finding on the seaWaldo site. Here’s more on the project — you can see a map of the “Waldo zone” on seawaldo.com
A bunch (about 104) hand-painted characters that are all similar in size (about 5 inches tall) can be found in the area mapped out (image of playfield to the right) on Capitol Hill in Seattle, Washington. Waldo is hiding somewhere, but after a bunch of hours sniffing the oil fumes while making these lil’ guys, we can say most of them are pretty freakin’ cool. Many of them are as interesting and strange as Waldo and, while they may not evoke as much nostalgia, they are worth a few seconds of attention.
For every character, there is a page that has their real name, some random shit they told us, and sometimes a little about their life. Each page has a few ways you can interact.
- If you find one of them on the streets (or are a damn liar! LIAR!), you can click the “Found me”button on their pages to help count their ‘sightings’.
If you think you have fallen in love with any of them, feel free to like him/her/it/them on the facebook thing (that way, your friends can ‘like’ that you like them. bwahahaha) or leave a lust note in the comments on their page. If you have fallen in hate with one, you should probably ‘like’ them and leave a comment anyway.
Though they are allies in the war on cars, streetcar tracks and bicycles tires do not always get along. As Seattle prepares to build its newest streetcar line down the heart of Capitol Hill on Broadway, a project team is working to design a route that will be safe for cyclists. And according to Mia Birk, CEO of Alta Planning and Design, who is blogging about her experience with the team, the all-star design squad is going to have to get creative to develop a solution for Broadway’s busy roadway:
Of particular concern is bicyclist/motorist interaction at intersections and driveways, steep grades, bicyclists’ turning movements, and, of course, interaction with tracks. Every decision will involve trade-offs with motorist movement, parking, or access. To be sure, like Portland’s emerging streetcar lines, debate and design-tweaking will go on long after the project is supposedly complete.
Last June, we reported on the Seattle Department of Transportation’s study of streetcar/bicycle safety and the plan to develop a “cycle track” to safely separate bike riders, cars and the rails.
Birk writes that the planning process in Portland eventually came to the conclusion these parallel bikeways are the safest approach for streetcar roadway design:
Our process of working through the details with the affected neighborhood, user, and business groups led to a consensus, in the case of NW Lovejoy, that a parallel bikeway was a better approach. The already-constrained environment (on-street parking, narrow bike lanes, extruded sidewalks/platforms, and two narrow travel lanes) would be made even worse with additional angled tracks and a two-way to one-way shift. To make it acceptable from a bikeway standpoint, all the on-street parking would have to be removed, an unacceptable trade-off from a business standpoint. Now that the parallel bikeway has been implemented, a fair amount of debate is underway in Portland’s cycling community. Part of that has to do with driver behavior on tracks, part has to do with the symbolism of removing an official city bikeway from Lovejoy, but it’s also about the details of the design, which are far from perfect and continue to be tweaked. In another case, streetcar design was modified to place the tracks and platforms in the middle to allow for right-side bike lanes.
According to Birk, the working group is being headed by Mark Dorn of URS Corp., the company responsible for engineering the infrastructure of Seattle’s streetcar system.
With civic budgets cut to the bone, we should doubly appreciate the indulgence that is Sound Transit’s expenditure on an art program to decorate the Broadway light rail station construction site. This photo from the CHS Flickr pool of artist Tim Marsden’s work on the big red wall is one of our favorite images inspired by the inspiring display of art and creativity between Broadway and Cal Anderson Park. We reported earlier this week on another interesting display going up at the work site in coming weeks.
The inquest into the death of JT Williams, a regular among the homeless men and women who live and spend time on Capitol Hill, ended Thursday as a jury provided answers to a set of questions that will help prosecutors determine if charges should be brought against Ian Birk, the Seattle police officer who shot and killed Williams on August 30th at the corner of Boren and Howell.
Of the key questions in the proceedings, four of the eight jurors said they believed Birk thought Williams posed a threat. Only one juror believed that Williams posed a legitimate threat while the other seven either believed he did not or said they were not sure. Here’s a brief round-up of the jury findings.
While the family says today’s decision affirms to them their brother was innocent, they now must wait, possibly until mid-February, for prosecutors to decide if Officer Birk will face criminal charges.
“I just got to let my brother keep journeying towards our Creator and not hold him back with tears,” said Linda Williams.
Ultimately, the Williams say they hope their brother’s death prompts changes in the way officers interact with Seattle’s homeless and with Native American and First Nation members.
Representatives from nonprofit developer Capitol Hill Housing and the City of Seattle are meeting this Friday for the first work session to analyze what is needed — and how much it will cost — to transform the East Precinct’s parking lot at 12th Ave and Pine into a mixed-use redevelopment providing housing, affordable retail and arts space, a public meeting space appropriate for community meetings and, yes, adequate infrastructure for the 150-odd parking spaces SPD says it will need.
The initiative is being called the 12th Ave Arts project.
It’s a discussion that has been going on for years, CHS has been told when covering the situation in the past. One main sticking point has been the parking infrastructure and concerns over the cost and the number of spaces the project would need to provide. We first reported on CHH’s push for the project in 2008. Now, representatives are sitting down to work out a plan that will put the 27,000 square-foot lot to better use and provide East Precinct with the resources it needs.
SPD spokesperson Sean Whitcomb told CHS it was too early to comment on the proposal at this preliminary stage.
Capitol Hill Community Council president Norma Jean Straw is enthusiastic about the progress:
I’m really proud of our community for stepping up to take action on this project. I feel that we were heard and supported from the City/Mayor [January 5th] and we will see this project moving quickly to the next phase. A special thanks to the great professionals at Capitol Hill Housing for doing such great work to pull this project together and keeping it alive over the last 10 years.
The CHH plan calls for the proposed project to have 60-70 units of affordable housing, two floors of commercial space designed to cater to local, nonprofit and arts-based organizations, the parking structure and a community space available for public meetings and gatherings. The CHH briefing document (included at the bottom of this post) shows a stage and an auditorium arrangement to represent this space. With the challenges faced in establishing this kind of space in the development at the Broadway light rail station, the 12th Ave community space might be the next best shot and creating a much-needed public meeting facility. No cost estimates for the project are included in the 12th Ave Art briefing information.
The revival of the initiative got underway earlier this month when members of the community council met with reps from CHH and the city to talk about the project. Here’s a recap provided to us by Straw:
Members of the Community Council had a very successful meeting yesterday with Daryl Smith, Ethan Raup, Steve Johnson, Fred Podesta and James Keblas at the City of Seattle to discuss the redevelopment of the East Precinct Parking Lot. We requested this meeting back in October when the Mayor did his Capitol Hill Walk. The project (in the works for over 10 years) has been stalled for 2 years due to a debate over the number of parking spaces that are financially feasible in the development.
The purpose of yesterdays meeting was to get the project moving again and begin a collaborative process between the community and the City to work out the parking space issue. The East Precinct currently parks 70 cars on that lot and another 30 on a private lot at 14th and Pine. The goal is to provide adequate secure parking for the Precinct while creating an incredible community arts and affordable housing development. The city and mayor’s staff has agreed to work collaboratively as we move forward on the project and hammer out the financing and parking issues. The great news is that this project will not add anything to the City budget so this is a win-win kinda project for the community and the city.
The development would represent another project for CHH to continue its initiative to improve the 12th Ave business district. You can read more about their projects in the area at http://12thaveseattle.com/
