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Freelance Seattle journalist & writing tutor. @CaseyJaywork

#LoveTheHill or #OverTheHill, project examining past, present, future of the soul of neighborhood planned for empty Broadway building

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Image of design concept courtesy of Radjaw.com

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Building interior (Image: Radjaw.com)

It may already be too late to save Capitol Hill’s soul, according to graphic designer and Hillebrity Gregory Smith. “I think it’s inevitable that it’ll be completely lost,” he says. “Once all these new [upscale apartment] buildings get filled with people, it’s going to be an Amazon hub — their work campus.”

But an era can end without being erased, which is why Smith, and fellow Seattle Central Creative Arts Academy student Jess Ornelas, will tell the story of Capitol Hill in an art installation at 1515 Broadway: its history, its present, and the hopes and fears of its residents for the future.

Tentatively titled “The Little Building That Could” and/or “Love the Hill,” the project will transform the community college’s “decrepit” building (next to Neighbours) into a site of public education and dialogue.

The Broadway building owned by the college was once home to Atlas Clothing and — for a time — all ages music. In early 2013, CHS reported that Seattle Central had iced plans to redevelop the property. Smith says the school planned to keep the building empty for at least a few years opening up the space for the planned installation project. Continue reading

Cop body cams coming soon to the streets of Capitol Hill

But, will Lost Lake serve him? (Image: Evidence.com)

But, will Lost Lake serve him? (Image: Evidence.com)

Body cameras are coming to a police station near you — to Seattle’s East Precinct, specifically, at E Pine and 12th.

The city hopes to have as many as 12 of these officers wearing body cams by mid-December, according to City Council member Bruce Harrell’s office. The only thing standing in the way of the one-year pilot project is ironing out policy details. “Everything else is ready to go,” said a Harrell aide tells CHS via email.

The body cam pilot will test two camera systems, TASER and VieVu.

“Testing these two will allow us to assess how we can transfer and access the video if we store it in a (a) cloud-based solution (TASER/Evidence.com) and how we can handle the video if we (b) do this in-house similar to in-car video system (VieVu),” said the aide. After the one-year pilot, the city will assess and work to expand the program. “Once the assessment report is completed around September 2015,” Harrell’s rep wrote, “we will work with SPD and the Executive on a potential budget proposal for 2016.”

Only a couple of weeks ago, the program was in peril as SPD struggled to comply with a slew of video-related public records requests without violating any privacy laws, reports the Seattle Times. But after the anonymous requester cut a deal with SPD in which he’ll help them figure out how to efficiently redact footage, the program is now back on track.

President Obama recently announced he’s asking Congress for $75 million to fund as many as 50,000 police body cams across the country, as part of a larger “three-year, $263 million spending package to increase use of body-worn cameras, expand training for law enforcement and add more resources for police department reform,” reports the AP.

The move is partly a reaction to the wave of anger over police brutality that has washed across the country (and Capitol Hill) in the past week, ever since officials announced that Darren Wilson, the white Missouri police officer who shot to death unarmed black teen Michael Brown in August, will not face trial.

Many Seattle protesters have called for body cams on officers; proponents say the cameras would protect both citizens from mistreatment and cops from false accusation.

A protest is planned Wednesday afternoon at City Hall as the council’s public safety committee meets to vote on applying for the federal funding:

MIKE BROWNS FAMILY wanted all police officers nationwide to wear body cameras called Mike Brown LAW..With body cams evidence will not be in dispute or tampered with We also need to demand that injustice, racism,oppression,police brutality is not ok and end it once and for all.

Part of that $75 million of federal funds could well be spent in Seattle. In a statement responding to Obama’s announcement, Harrell, a longtime advocate of body cams, called for the city to apply for the money:

I have long advocated for body cameras, a progressive game-changing effort to improve public safety, police accountability, and transparency. Body cameras provide impartial evidence and build trust with the community. The public deserves to have clear video evidence of police and civilian interactions, so we can more accurately examine incidents of police misconduct and produce video and audio evidence when shootings occur. One solution to allow us to better understand what happened at Ferguson is to deploy body cameras on all police officers.

Proposed $87 million Madison Bus Rapid Transit is like light rail — without the rail

After retreating from the edge of catastrophe, Seattle’s public transit system may be en route to becoming a regional leader by combining the efficiency and prestige of light rail with the cost and flexibility of buses.

It’s called Bus Rapid Transit (BRT): essentially, a bus system that works like light rail. The City Council has coughed up $1 million to study a proposed $87 million BRT “corridor” along Madison, running from the waterfront up to 23rd Ave (by Madison Temple church and that psychic boutique shop).image02

To explain the project and get feedback from locals, the Seattle Department of Transportation will hold a community workshop about the Madison BRT corridor on Thursday from 5-7pm at the Silver Cloud Hotel on Broadway. Using “interactive design stations” inside the meeting room, SDOT will “present community-developed design ideas that focus on key intersections or a potential station location within each area. Each station will be staffed with engineers, planners, and urban designers to allow for an interactive conversation and sketching of design ideas to capture community ideas and feedback.”

Is this just a re-branded bus route?
Nope. Former mayor of Bogotá Enrique Peñalosa describes his city’s BRT, TransMilenio, like this: Continue reading

Capitol Hill Arts District gets to work with promotion now, development incentives later

Council finance and culture chair Nick Licata at Saturday's ceremony (Images: CHS)

Council finance and culture chair Nick Licata at Saturday’s ceremony (Images: CHS)

The Capitol Hill Arts District was launched Saturday. It has plenty of work to do.

“There’s a chance that half of these artists, myself included, won’t be able to live here in five years,” says Amanda Manitach. She’s standing beside fellow artist Jesse Higman inside Hugo House, amid 11 fresh-baked artistic renditions of a day in the life of Capitol Hill: sketches, video, poems.

Manitach says she knows one artist who’s already considering homelessness in order to remain on the Hill. “It kill[s] me,” she says. “This guy has a job. In my opinion he makes some of the most thoughtfully political and aesthetically poignant art in the region.”

With property values and rents skyrocketing in the country’s fastest-growing big city, Manitach isn’t alone in her fear that development on Capitol Hill will wash away all the interesting poor people who made it desirable in the first place, transforming a countercultural gayborhood into a wasteland of luxury apartments and trite party bars.

Manitach

Manitach

But there’s some good news. The City Council is ready to vote Monday afternoon to christen Capitol Hill as Seattle’s first bona fide Arts District. The Office of Arts and Culture describes the district as “an attempt to bring cohesion” to the “constellation of arts organizations” splattered around E Pine and 12th Ave via a combination of community organizing, public advertising, and zoning incentives that will hopefully prompt developers to provision for the creation, and creators, of art. Continue reading

On the streets of the Capitol Hill Arts District, ‘contemporary artists’ and the Woo! Girl creator

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Criscitello (Images courtesy the artist)

“I hope no faggots look at me,” said the young man to his fellows. They were bar hopping through late-night Capitol Hill, strangers in a strange land. Funny thing: One faggot was looking at him — an angry one, local poster (and tattoo) artist John Criscitello. “I was like, ‘What are you doing here?’” he says.

Criscitello — middle-aged, lanky, more ink than flesh — offered this anecdote as an example of the drunk, out-of-town brats who are reportedly ruining the Hill’s nightlife — and believed by some to be behind increasing gay bashings. But the best in art comes from the worst in life. Criscitello turned this experience into a poster: a dude-bro swigging a brewski beside the words “No faggots better look at me.” Other pieces include drunk Kardashian lookalikes proclaiming “WOOO!!” and a sign informing would-be dilettantes that “WE CAME HERE TO GET AWAY FROM YOU.” (“You have the rest of the whole world,” Criscitello adds, referring to straight supremacists. “Try going to a club in Snohomish and doing some PDA with your [gay] partner, and see how that goes.”) After a Jagermeister mural at 12th and Pine was interpreted by many as glorifying homophobic violence with the tagline “Relive the Night You Became Legends On Cap Hill,” Criscitello responded with a “Legendary” dick pic.

Continue reading

Meet the Harvard Ave Neighbors mounting a fight against microhousing

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This probably isn't the first Capitol Hill triplex you'd choose to start a legal battle over (Image: King County records)

This probably isn’t the first Capitol Hill triplex you’d choose to start a legal battle over (Image: King County records)

Lawyers and money: neighborhood activists in Capitol Hill are deploying a classic arsenal in their fight against local microhousing. At issue is how to count the number of units in a microhousing building and, as a consequence, whether a proposed project at 741 Harvard Ave E. is subject to design review. In the wake of a summer ruling that effectively stopped the project — and others like it — the Harvard developers are fighting back with an appeal that could put the development back in motion.

To keep that from happening, the Harvard Ave Neighbors group has lawyered-up to prevent the project from skipping the review process.

Organizer Larry Nicholas says at question is whether wealthy developers with “an unending amount of money to throw at a project” are subject to the same laws as everyone else. Continue reading

Protesters Picket Against Subway Labor Practices

0924031310aFrom 11-1:20pm today, about 25 protesters picketed in front of a Capital Hill Subway in support of a former Subway worker and labor organizer who was fired earlier this month. At the end of the protest, one of the protesters, who is also a current Subway employee, was told by police that if she entered the store she would be arrested for trespassing.

Carlos Hernandez was a speaker and organizer involved in this summer’s strikes by fast food workers, who have demanded a $15 minimum wage and the right to unionize. He was ostensibly fired from the Broadway & Olive Subway on Capital Hill for giving a $0.66 cookie to a child without paying for it. Protesters under the aegis of Good Jobs Seattle, a labor organization, say that he was fired in retaliation for his organizing efforts.

Hernandez was among the protesters, as were his former coworkers Jessica Hendricks and Caroline Durocher. Durocher currently works at Subway, and was told by Officer Aaron Stoltz at the end of the protest that she would be arrested for trespassing if she entered the store. Durocher says that management of the local Subway franchise, owned by Hasan Zeer, made employees sign a contract saying that they would be fired for striking.

Jessica Hendricks, a former Subway worker, says that during her six months at the franchise, she was only allowed one break per shift for long enough to eat a sandwich. She often went for hours without toilet breaks, she says, and regularly worked overtime without overtime-pay.

The on-duty manager refused to talk with this reporter.

Throughout the protest, as many as seven Seattle police officers were present, three of whom guarded the door to the business against non-customers. When Durocher and other employees tried to file a police report for wage theft, officers refused to take them, directing the workers instead to the police station.

Labor law requires regular breaks of specified length, as well as overtime pay. It is illegal to forbid workers from organizing or striking.

(This story is reposted from CaseyJaywork.wordpress.com.)0924031307b0924031240a