AFT Seattle Local 1789 says faculty at Capitol Hill’s Seattle Central College are walking out Tuesday as part of a “day of action” calling for higher wages, better support for part-time instructors, and more counseling and support for students as enrollment trends continue to plunge for community colleges.
The faculty union says the Broadway campus “teach-out” will take place from 10 AM to noon. Continue reading
A Korean restaurant that sat on the sidelines during a massive federal lawsuit brought by Capitol Hill developers and real estate owners around the CHOP protest zone has jumped into the legal fray after its owner said the city did not live up to promises to compensate the business for its losses.
11th Ave’s Oma Bap, part of the Hugo House mixed-use development across from the park, held a challenging position in the history of the 2020 protest zone with its location directly across from campers in Cal Anderson Park and near the corner a newly filed lawsuit calls “the epicenter of its public-sanitation support of CHOP” where city departments set up rows of chemical toilets and trash collection to try to keep the protest camps from adding to the public health crisis in the city as the COVID-19 virus spread.
In the new federal lawsuit, owner Peter Pak said, with the encouragement of city officials aware of the situation at Oma Bap, he filed a smaller claim in September 2020 “for a conservatively estimated $76,616” in damages from the city from the months of protests and disruptions around CHOP and the protests camps. According to the suit, City Hall countered with an offer of $500 — an amount Pak said left him “shocked and offended.” Continue reading
A new project planned for the 600 block of 13th Ave E will continue the area’s transition away from most of its remaining single family-style housing. This week, the project takes its first bow in front of the East Design Review Board.
Under the project, three adjacent 120(ish)-year-old houses and a detached garage on 13th between E Mercer and E Roy will be torn down. In their place will rise a four-story, 50-foot tall building with about 36 apartments, a trade officials in the housing squeezed city say is necessary for Seattle to address ongoing affordability and homelessness crises.
The developer, Leschi Lakeside Property Management, working with Kirkland-based Milbrandt architects, are proposing the usual three options for how the building might be shaped. As this meeting is the early design guidance phase, most details are focused on the basic massing and layout of the planned development.
All three proposals call for parking access roughly in the middle of the building, and therefore, mid-block, which is less than ideal, but really the only option. All three are roughly rectangular in shape. There are plans to plant new trees along western edge of the property – the back of the building – to give the existing neighbors more privacy. Continue reading
(Image: Gay City)
The Seattle Office of Arts & Culture has announced Gay City and Africatown are part of the mix in the award of $1.1 million in “neighborhood recovery” funding “to support arts and cultural organizations impacted by the pandemic and increase citywide recovery efforts.”
The two core Capitol Hill and Central District-focused nonprofits have made the list, the city says, to “sub-contract with neighborhood-based organizations and small businesses to carry out inclusive and creative activation projects and events that further the neighborhoods’ and city’s pandemic recovery process.”
The city says these fourteen organizations are now in their Request for Proposal (RFP) processes to select neighborhood-based groups to be part of this “one-time funding” from the JumpStart “Payroll Expense Tax approved by the Mayor and Seattle City Council” in 2020 to help the city stabilize and recover from the pandemic. Continue reading
/film-on-the-hill/ is a new monthly or so Capitol Hill film column. Have ideas for future editions? Let us know in the comments.
By Kyler Knight
The Make Believe Seattle: A Genre Film Festival just finished its run on Capitol Hill. While the festival is a testament to the city’s pandemic recovery return to an exciting indie film exhibition scene. There will be room for more like The Nightmare Emporium, a collection of horror anthology short films which ran around Halloween for three years in Seattle’s Central District and Capitol Hill. From 2017 to 2019 the festival gave local filmmakers the chance to watch their short films on the big screen with an audience of like-minded horror fanatics and lovers of indie cinema.
How do these kinds of projects experience a resurrection — and come back from the dead?
While participating filmmakers were more or less given free reign to make their short films however they liked, there was one condition in order to tie all the wildly disparate narratives together: each short film had to utilize a specific prop like a baseball, a knife, or a pair of handcuffs. But these weren’t just random props per se. Narratively speaking, these were artifacts hand-picked from a decades-old collection of strange relics by the Nightmare Emporium’s host, a sinister Shopkeeper played by Mark Waldstein. Between each short film the Shopkeeper would set the stage by dusting off one of his oddities and presenting it to the viewer like the Creepshow Creep or the Crypt Keeper in Tales From The Crypt.
Speaking to Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, the festival’s founder Danny Cork said the idea for The Nightmare Emporium snowballed from what was originally a personal project. Continue reading
Here are the top stories from this week in CHS history:
M2M: After years of H Mart dreams, Capitol Hill Station’s grocery finally arrives
The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board agreed. The old, boarded-up auto row-era Capitol Hill building at the corner of E Olive Way and Denny is not a landmark.
The board voted seven to one Wednesday on a motion to deny the nomination of the property. CHS reported here on the nomination of the 1924-built Olive Way Improvement Company building, a formality in the process to redevelop the nearly 100-year-old complex that first rose as the street was being touted as an exciting new alternative connecting Capitol Hill to early 20th century downtown Seattle.
Wednesday’s vote will help clear the way for Guntower Capital, a holding company formed by executives at two Seattle-area real estate and development firms, to begin its plans. Past attempts to ask the company’s owners about its vision for the property have not been responded to. Continue reading
A flowering plum (Image: CHS)
Seattle City Council committees will have a busy Friday before the coming “spring break” week marked by many of the area’s schools and families with Kshama Sawant’s proposed legislation to limit late rent fees and new protections for the city’s trees on the agenda.
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(Image: Capitol Thrill)
By Kali Herbst Minino
Tucked into E Pike and displaying an array of Pride flags, designs created by owner Jeff Gonzales, and a neon sign, Capitol Thrill is marking its second anniversary supporting independent brands owned by underrepresented groups with a new selection of queer-created merchandise.
The Little Queer Pop-Up Shop is growing into a small but lively corner of the store with goods from LGBTQ+ brands, designers, artists and authors.
“The plan is to really do a deep dive and try to find what things people from our community can create,” Gonzales tells CHS.
But finding brands to feature in the pop-up has not been an easy task because a lot of smaller, local artists aren’t set up to do wholesale. They can be found in markets around Seattle, but not in physical stores, Gonzales says. Continue reading
Part of the Ribbon of Light installations (Image: AIDS Memorial Pathway)
Rasmussen
One of the driving forces behind the creation of the AIDS Memorial Pathway will help lead a tour of the art, history, and activism highlighted along the route connecting Cal Anderson Park to Capitol Hill Station.
Former Seattle City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen will join the Capitol Hill Historical Society for a May 7th walk along the pathway:
We will meet at the Station House Cathy Hillenbrand Community Room, which does not have an official address, but is at 10th Ave E and John Street. Once gathered, we will hear from Tom Rasmussen and then walk the pathway to learn about the stops along the way. The tour will run rain or shine, so come prepared for both scenarios. The walk will be slow and fairly flat, with some slight inclines, but attendees should be prepared to be on their feet for roughly an hour and a half.
“The project has three goals: to use public art to create a physical place for reflection and remembrance, to share stories of the epidemic and the diverse community responses to the AIDS crisis, and to provide a call to action to end HIV/AIDS stigma and discrimination,” the group writes about the tour. “Today, this beautiful series of art works weaves its way through our every day neighborhood spots, from the farmer’s market to Cal Anderson Park. Here is a chance to explore the people and history behind the art and learn how it all fits together.” Continue reading
