Monthly Archives: March 2023

Coping Cookies — baked with a pinch of support for good causes — now open on 12th Ave

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(Image: Coping Cookies)

(Image: Coping Cookies)

(Image: Coping Cookies)

By Kali Herbst Minino

Serving cookies with flavors like Cocolemon, containing coconut, lemon, and white chocolate chips, a queer and woman-owned dessert shop has newly joined the Capitol Hill small business community. Co-owners and life partners Sam Padilla and Ashley Hernandez opened Coping Cookies on 12th Ave this week.

The company started in July 2020 as a bake sale for Hernandez’s coworkers at the Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her coworkers “bought” cookies by donating to different grassroots non-profit organizations. The sale was intended to be one-and-done, but as word spread around the mental health unit, more coworkers asked if she’d be selling them again. The second sale was bigger than the first, and eventually, the couple was selling their cookies at pop-ups around Seattle.

“Word just started spreading around the psych unit. They started sending [cookies] to their moms in other cities, sharing with their friends,” Hernandez said. “It kind of snowballed.”

With their founding theme of donating to non-profits, Coping Cookies donates a portion of its earnings to non-profits that align with the company’s values. Continue reading →

Seattle shapes $970M affordable housing levy renewal for November ballot

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A renewal of Seattle’s affordable housing levy will take shape in a $970 million proposal set to hit the city’s ballot this fall.

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the proposed levy Thursday and said it would support the development “of over 3,000 units of new affordable housing throughout the city” as well as making “first-of-its-kind investments” to “stabilize wages for workers who provide critical services to the lowest-income residents with the greatest supportive service needs.”

“The Housing Levy is a proven solution for delivering thousands of affordable housing options,” Harrell said in the announcement. “Rooted in our One Seattle values that everyone should have a safe place to call home, this plan invests to meet the scale of the housing crisis, doing more than ever to prevent homelessness.” Continue reading →

Broadway’s very busy ballot drop box makes 40-foot move

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(Image: King County Elections)

Democracy is on the move on Broadway. One of the busiest in the bunch, the King County Elections ballot drop box has made a 40-foot move to a new home on the Seattle Central campus.

The new spot for the big metal box is about 40 feet north of where it was first installed in 2016 to augment the county’s transition to by-mail voting.

Though this part of Central’s campus is lined up for eventual development and construction to build a six-story Information Technology Education Center on Broadway, the box’s move right now is more of a shuffle on the busy campus. Continue reading →

What will one-way Pike and Pine and their new bike lanes look like? A new Capitol Hill connection with downtown Seattle

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(Image: CHS)

Over the next 18 months, the city will install new bike lane protections and rework Pike and Pine in downtown and on Capitol Hill below Bellevue into one-way streets. The result could be an even more solid connection between the neighborhoods and a better experience for traveling over the gulf of I-5.

Downtown, work has already begun. There has been a brouhaha over the cherry trees near Pike Place Market and there are architectural renderings of those waterfront plans, but when it comes to what Pike and Pine will look like east of 5th Ave, the best the city can offer is a presentation made to the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board in October 2021.

Still, the changes are coming. The project from the City of Seattle’s Office of the Waterfront and Civic Projects in coordination with the Downtown Seattle Association and the Seattle Department of Transportation will “improve east-west connections between the waterfront and surrounding neighborhoods.”

Downtown, ground was broken last month. There is no schedule for the work to complete the $17.45 million Pike and Pine transformation across I-5 but here is what the plan entails. Continue reading →

Balancing the health of its ‘urban forest’ with ‘a critical need for more housing,’ Seattle shaping new tree protections

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(Image: CHS)

The Evergreen State’s largest city, Seattle takes its trees seriously and its city council is in the middle of a sprawling legislative process to create new and better protections for its urban canopy.

The council’s Land Use Committee heard updates on the process Wednesday to finalize legislation with a major set of new tree protections. Officials say the draft bill would create incentives and code flexibility to better protect trees, include more trees in the regulations, plant or replace more trees, and establish a payment in-lieu program to provide flexibility for tree replacement and address racial inequities and environmental justice disparities, amongst other changes.

The new protections would also create regulations protecting designated “heritage trees” that can’t be removed unless deemed hazardous or in an emergency. Continue reading →

Nue is staying open later — will Capitol Hill follow?

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We don’t want to make too much of this but, slowly but surely, a wider variety of Capitol Hill restaurants and stores are keeping later hours.

CHS will make food and drink spot Nue a symbol of the movement.

The 14th Ave eatery has announced relatively modest “late night” plans to keep its kitchen open until 11 PM daily, and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. “Nue after dark,” they call it.

At Nue, the days start with 11 AM weekday lunch openings and brunch starting at 10 AM on weekends. When it first opened in 2015, it rocked opening hours through at least 11 PM every day with 2 AM closures on the weekends.

Of course, grandma, we know that back in your day, everything on Capitol Hill was open until midnight. That was before the pandemic and changing work trends made late night hours a big challenge for small businesses. Continue reading →

Cook | Weaver, now 100% chef-owned, is growing its restaurant family on E Roy

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The carrot corn dog stays (Image: Cook | Weaver)

(Image: Cook | Weaver)

By Bjorn Lynge

A Capitol Hill food and drink partnership that has created one of the most creative corners in E Roy food and drink is splitting but it is an amicable break-up that will open new doors for Cook | Weaver as a chef-owned home for eclectic fine dining.

Co-owner and front of house manager Nile Klein recently announced his intention to step away from the establishment. After Klein and Zac Reynolds opened the restaurant seven years ago, the two have received continual admiration for their inventive cuisine and tongue in cheek approach to menus which Reynolds said is largely inspired by his experiences living and eating in Seattle. Now, however, Klein is ready to pursue something new, making Chef Reynolds the sole owner of Cook | Weaver.

Reynolds will also be stepping a little farther out of the kitchen with the change. Continue reading →

Saying reforms have worked, officials call for end of federal oversight of the Seattle Police Department

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(Image: City of Seattle)

The U.S. Justice Department and city officials say Seattle’s police reforms have worked and it is time to lift the consent decree put in place in 2011 after a civil rights investigation found evidence of excessive force and biased policing.

Officials asked a federal judge Tuesday to end most of the federal oversight of the Seattle Police Department saying the department has made “far-reaching reforms” over the past 12 years and is now a “transformed organization.”

The filing says SPD has made reforms in key areas including use of force policy and increased community participation and civilian oversight from the city’s community policing commission.

“We know there remains work to be done to reduce disparities in policing, and we are committed to doing so as a learning, growing organization, with a department culture where accountability, continuous improvement, and innovation are always at the center,” Mayor Bruce Harrell said in a statement on the filing.

But the fallout of the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, CHOP protests, and subsequent anti-police marches and property damage still shadows the department. The filing recommends continued federal oversight of SPD’s crowd control measures including “improving the use, reporting, and review of force in crowd settings” and improved accountability for its chain of command. Continue reading →

Mail carrier robbed at gunpoint in Central District as Postal Service faces wave of ‘arrow key’ hold-ups

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The cover of a United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General report on arrow keys

A Central District armed robbery of a United States Postal Service worker last week is part of a trend of hold-ups targeting mail carriers for their keys which can give access to package and mail-stuffed collection boxes.

According to Seattle Police, a carrier called 911 last Thursday morning reporting she had been robbed at gunpoint along MLK Way south of Dearborn. The victim told police the suspect approached her as she was getting mail and packages out of the truck, pointed a black handgun, and demanded her keys and phone. Continue reading →

This old Capitol Hill building is probably not a landmark

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From the report prepared by David Peterson Historic Resource Consulting

It may be the unlikeliest of the remaining major auto row-era structures on Capitol Hill to be considered, but the boarded-up, 1924-built Olive Way Improvement Company building lined up for a likely future of mixed-use redevelopment will get its day in front of the Seattle Landmarks Board.

A required nomination hearing for the nearly 100-year-old complex at the curving corner of E Olive Way and Denny will take place next Wednesday. The meeting will likely be prelude to a demolition, or, at least, a gutting.

CHS broke the news in January that Guntower Capital, a holding company formed by executives at two Seattle-area real estate and development firms, was in agreement to purchase the half acre or so property once home to a mix of businesses including the former In the Bowl, the departed Bus Stop bar and Coffee Messiah cafe and a sprawling dog lounge charred in a 2017 fire.

Its history, of course, goes back much further but the commercial building constructed by an Olive Way focused developer as a retail and automotive garage structure has seen better days.

Still, it has its auto row charms including massive heavy timber trusses, old brick walls, and some remaining decorative flourishes along the E Olive Way facing retail segment “clad in buff-colored field face brick with terra cotta ornamentation.” Continue reading →