Here are the top CHS posts from this week in 2013:
A downed wire and potential outage culprit near 20th and E John (Photo: Andrew Taylor)
A power outage shut off traffic lights and residential electricity for an estimated 3,400 customers around Capitol Hill and parts of the Central District Saturday afternoon. According to Seattle City Light, the outage was caused by at least one downed distribution wire near 20th Ave E and E Thomas. SCL officials said power would be restored around 9:30 PM.
Residents started reporting outages on social media around 4:30 PM. The boundaries of outage were between Mercer and Pine, and between 22 Ave and I-5. Not all customers in the area were affected.
You can check SCL’s outage map and service updates here.
UPDATE: As of 9:30 PM, the outage is down to around 1,900 customers — but there’s some bad news for the eastern-most blob on the map of around 440 customers: The new restoration time for that area is close to 1 AM. The restoration estimate for the other 1,400 and change to the west is currently categorized as “pending.” No worries! Tonight is the supermoon! 9:42 PM: City Light reports power is back for all but those unlucky 440: “Crews have encountered more damage around the 20th and John location. Estimate restoring for the final 440 customers around 1 am”
Crap. Estimated time of power coming back on was just updated to 1am for our blob. http://t.co/oRKWugoK18 #dark #quiet #scared @jseattle
— Anthony Hecht (@ahecht) August 10, 2014
The 2014 Seattle Street Food Festival at Cal Anderson Park continues Saturday with a second and final day of food trucks, pop-ups, and craft booths. Here, you can see scenes from Friday night’s festival action as crowds filled 11th Ave and the park for an outdoord screening of Dirty Dancing.
Check out seattlestfoodfest.com for a full roster of participants. Or don’t and wander around until you find the right combination of smells good, looks good, isn’t laughably expensive, and doesn’t have a mile-long line. Saturday’s schedule runs noon to 10 PM. It’s free to attend but there are myriad tickets and passes for sale to let you be a VIP and skip lines and use other people as napkins and such.
Meanwhile, the third annual Summit Block Party rocks Capitol Hill’s densely populated Summit Ave core until 9:30 PM. CHS told you here why the event is a special part of Capitol Hill music and art culture. Here is what it looked like in 2013. The lineup and more information is at summitblockparty.com.
More pictures of Friday night’s fun, below. Continue reading
(Image: Rayna Stackhouse)
The backside of Pike/Pine now has a French bakery. CHS told you almost exactly one year ago about the plans for Inès Pâtisserie to move up Madison to join the Viva building at 1111 E Union. Friday, the bakery and cafe made a quiet debut with reported 9 AM openings planned this weekend. We’ll have more on the new addition soon.
See something others should know about? Email CHS or call/txt (206) 399-5959. You can view recent CHS Crime coverage here.
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Jason shares the latest Capitol Hill street art commentary on the state of the neighborhood, above. He found it on 12th Ave though we’re sure it also appears at several other nearby locations. It makes a companion piece to this witty wheatpaste poster in the blocked-off doorway of the classic old building at 11th and Pine destined to become not another new apartment project but offices. CHS has been sent notes about the doorway art all summer but had hoped to wait to post it after we found out more about what happened to the young woman that called the doorway home in recent months. We haven’t been able to track her down. But here’s the painful poster anyhow. As we’ve noted before, Capitol Hill seems to die a lot. It’s true. And we get some funny art out of it. Again and again.
(Images: Dangerpants Photography)
Since moving to Seattle from the Midwest some 15 years ago, theater artist Scotto Moore has honed his skills as a playwright, and has primarily built his reputation writing science fiction for the stage in a city that offers more opportunities than most for producing the genre. However, for his latest play Balconies, which debuted at Capitol Hillâs Annex Theatre last weekend, Moore says he decided to foray in to the realm of realism, and to create something more accessible.
âI really wanted to take a little break from science fiction and do something that was a little zanier and just more light-hearted, but structurally still kind of interesting,â Moore told CHS. The play’s writer and the director of its debut production says Balconies was inspired by the 1968 film The Party, starring Peter Sellers, which is set in a single situation that becomes more and more chaotic throughout the film, “until by the end, they literally have an elephant dancing in a swimming pool.”
“I describe that movie as basically one long comic crescendo,” Moore said.
Moore’s version of this comic scenario involves two adjacent, almost adjoining, balconies, at a building in Albany, New York, and the “cultural clash” that ensues between a group of video game producers and their friends celebrating the successful launch of “Sparkle Dungeon 5: Assassins of Glitter,” and a group coming together for a political fundraiser for a state senator making a run for the US Senate. Continue reading
Dillard (Images: CHS)
Looking out his office door, Rich Dillard keeps an inquisitive eye on the cast of characters that stream in and out of The Summit Inn. As manager of the building, he has to deal with the typical issues of maintenance and rent, but managing an emerging artist collective and DIY house requires some unique people skills.
“You’re not just managing a building, you’re managing a community that’s wildly delinquent,” he said, re-wrapping his long dreads that sometimes cascade around the tattoos covering his neck and face.
The Summit Inn is a three story, 20-unit building that sits on a crime prone block between E Olive St and Howell — a sliver of Capitol Hill so far mostly untouched by the frenzied development of recent years. The current iteration of the Summit Inn began in 2009 under a simple premise. “We wanted a place where artists are able to sit down together and share a meal,” Dillard said.
On Saturday the third annual Summit Block Party will take place on and around the Inn’s stoop. Adair Tudor, who helped organize the first block party, calls the Summit Inn home. While the building won’t be open to the public, the Summit Inn is a major organizing force behind the event. It’s also a kind of spiritual center for the street where the festival makes its home.
(Image: 1711apartments.com)
The former Olympic athlete who developed a 12th Ave property into this four-story, 37-unit apartment building appears to have produced a gold medal-worthy return on the investment.
According to King County Property Records, the recently completed 1711 12th Ave building has sold for $9.9 million. Gramor Development CEO John Graham, “a three time Olympian competing in both track and field, and bobsleigh,” according to his Linked In profile, purchased the property just above Cal Anderson Park for $850,000 in July 2011.
Calculating costs based on one CHS source’s estimates of $160,000 per unit, Gramor would have spent around $5.9 million on the construction. The $3.15 million or so profit sketches out to a 370% return on the initial purchase of the property, by the way. Olympian performance!
Like 11th Ave south of the park where a sixth new building is planned, 12th Ave has been a hot bed for new apartment and microhousing projects large and small.
The happy new owner of 1711 — the entity paid $268,000 per unit for the building — is listed in county records as Capitol Park, LLC. A check of state records reveals no governing persons listed for the recently formed limited liability corporation. If you’re the proud new owner, let us know.
The high-end Gatsby Apartments on 10th Ave E would have cost you an even larger arm and a leg. The project sold this week for $35.5 million — $507,000 per unit. Of course, the buyer also gets to own one of the most notorious building brands in the new wave of Capitol Hill development.
All in all, owning multifamily properties on Capitol Hill seems like a pretty profitable venture. Though, during this latest boom, owning Hill real estate of any type might make you a buck or two.
