It’s not quite ready for business yet but 23rd Ave’s coming soon Raised Doughnuts couldn’t let the celebration pass by unmarked.
Friday in celebration of National Doughnut Day, Mi Kim’s crew will be ready starting at 7 AM with half-dozen boxes all set for you to grab and go from in front of the about to open shop on 23rd Ave at Spring. Continue reading
Mary Wesley is ready for the next step in 37 years of flowers along 23rd Ave (Images: CHS)
In 1981, Mary Wesley moved her flower shop to a corner space on 23rd and Jackson. She renamed her shop Flowers Just 4 U, hoping a friendly name and two windowed walls would establish a community-centric atmosphere, drawing foot traffic in. 37 years later, Flowers Just 4 U has found a new home on the corner of Cherry and 23rd.
Wesley and her longtime employees Patricia Ross and Emily Steele are looking to continue their shop’s legacy as the store relocates to make way for the construction of a new, six story affordable housing development on its former site. Despite initial difficulties involving the lighting, floor plan, and moving flower fridges into the new space formerly home to 701 Coffee, the crew at Flowers Just 4 U is optimistic about the move considering their close proximity to Garfield High School, Garfield Community Center, residential homes, and other new shops and development opening in the surrounding area. Continue reading
23rd Ave south of Jackson
The process to overhaul 23rd Ave from one end to the other between 520 and I-90 is preparing for the next stages as construction is prepared to begin next month in the southern stretch of the corridor while a big change is being made to the plans in the north.
Wednesday night, the Seattle Department of Transportation will hold a “pre-construction open house” for the southern Phase 2 of the 23rd Ave Vision Zero project:
Phase 2 construction will happen along 23rd Ave S between S Jackson St to Rainier Ave S. While we don’t yet know an exact start date, we anticipate Phase 2 construction beginning as soon as May 2018 and lasting approximately one year. We will share more details about the construction schedule and phasing once the contractor is on board.
Wednesday’s meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, April 18 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, 2401 S Irving.
This summer, SDOT will also dig in for a few weeks on slimming down the 24th Ave E end of the corridor through Montlake. But a big component of the plan has been dropped:
In another unfortunate setback for Vision Zero and the Move Seattle Levy, SDOT has elected to remove the dedicated bus lane planned for 24th Avenue to give more space to cars. 23rd/24th Avenue, home to the 43 and 48 routes and used by over 6,000 bus riders daily, is one of Seattle’s supposed “transit priority corridors” (a phrase that grows ever more meaningless), slated for RapidRide buses in 2024.
“The 2015 Transit Master Plan called for bus lanes from Thomas St. to Roanoke St., almost all the way to the Montlake bridge,” the Seattle Transit Blog reports. “As the plan has evolved, neighborhood opposition has increased and the bus lanes have been walked back, until this month, when they were scrapped entirely.” Continue reading
Tuesday is the deadline for you to weigh in on what might seem to be one of the more unlikely candidates to become a neighborhood landmark — Seattle City Light’s Brutalist, brick-walled East Pine Substation.
The E Pine at 23rd Ave facility will go in front of the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board Wednesday “to determine the historic status of the property prior to a SCL proposal to increase the substation’s capacity, security and reliability for the surrounding Central Area, First Hill, and Capitol Hill neighborhoods,” according to the department’s nomination document (PDF) on the property.
The nomination document describes the era of City Light’s investment in architecturally significant infrastructure: Continue reading
(Image: Raised Doughnuts)
Change and redevelopment around 23rd and Union are shaping up quite nicely — but we’re not too sure about your belly. Popular pop-up Raised Doughnuts has found a home in the Central District.
The new doughnut bakery and counter is set to transform the old Collins Gold Exchange and minimart that was once lined up to become a Central District burger joint on 23rd Ave at E Spring. Continue reading
Education leader Jesse Hagopian gathered with educators and students in front of the Central District’s Garfield High School Monday afternoon to rally for the Black Lives Matter at School effort in Seattle and beyond.
“Last year, one of our demands of the Black Lives Matter movement in schools was to have ethnic studies implemented across the Seattle school district,” Hagopian said in front of the rally and assembled media. “That effort turned out not to be hollow words.” Continue reading
They both have become familiar faces whenever Central District small businesses are being discussed — usually in the context of the next big development or the next big infrastructure project promised to bring change to the neighborhoods their cafes have called home. Neighbors are now saying their goodbyes to Felix Ngoussou’s Jackson St. Lake Chad Cafe and Sara Mae’s 701 Coffee.
The 23rd and Cherry cafe owner Mae said she takes personal responsibility for 701’s closure but said she also lays blame with Seattle City Hall and District 3 representative Kshama Sawant for what she predicts will be a wave of Central District closures:
701 is just one in a line of real small businesses in the Central District that have been forced to close. We aren’t the first, and certainly won’t be the last. I firmly believe this trend will continue. There’s certainly no elected official—Kshama—that is going to give two shits about the plight of Central District Small Businesses. We have an elected official in the Central District who isn’t willing to devote some of her time and political capital to assuring that there is prosperity on the horizon for Central District small businesses. Instead she has created a movement that is based on resentment, and divisive political rhetoric that serves no purpose but to hold power, and keep people who are struggling trapped in a cycle of spinning their wheels, waiting for her precious cake. Frankly, all we have received in the aggregate from Kshama in all of this is Central District small business circumstances that has worsened under her reign.
In 1967, Seattle City Light was so proud of its new substation, it held an open house.
Seattle City Light is telling neighbors around the East Pine Substation at 23rd Ave and E Pine about an important planned project to expand and upgrade the critical facility. Architects and historical preservationists will also want to take note.
Here’s what the Society of Architectural Historians has to say about the 1967-era “fanciful” brick fence that surrounds the 8,000 square-foot facility and Fred Bassetti, the ambitious architect who designed it:
This complex and fanciful masonry fence recalled that of an Archaic Egyptian fortress, like the reconstructions of the Complex of Djoser at Saqqara (c. 2800 BCE) or the later Fortress of Senusret III at Buhen, Sudan (c. 1860 BCE). These ancient Egyptian sources had become topical in the mid-1960s. Gamel Adbul Nasser’s widely publicized Aswan High Dam project (1960–1970) was a centerpiece of his domestic program and an important symbol during the Cold War, representing Egypt’s independence from the West. The dam caused enormous environmental changes in the Nile Valley, and submerged the Buhen region when it was completed. Prior to its flooding, British archaeologist Walter Bryan Emery (1903–1971) began excavations of the site in 1957, and prepared detailed records of the remains. He included drawings of the Buhen fortress in his book, Archaic Egypt (1962), published by Oxford University Press’s mass-market Pelican imprint. Bassetti scheme has both corrugated walls and watch towers interspersed at intervals that are comparable to those found in the Senusret Fortress.
City Light says the expansion project is in its early design phase and “would improve electrical reliability to the neighborhood and area hospitals on First Hill and Capitol Hill by modifying/expanding the north and west perimeter walls toward the property line.”
The expansion will make room for future equipment upgrades and build-outs, according to City Light, including gate access and security as well as “seismic integrity” of the substation. Continue reading
On the corner of 23rd and Madison, away from the busy bars of the Hill, there’s a window with jars of crystallized salts for chakra balancing and a large sign offering discounts for palm readings. The Capitol Hill Psychic Boutique has been around for six years and it belongs to neighborhood psychic Ashley Adams.
Adams has felt her psychic abilities since birth and began reading tarot cards before she ever learned how to read a book. The talent spans back through her maternal bloodline. Adams’ great grandmother is well known in Santa Monica where young Adams sat watching and eventually performing the readings on the pier. It is such a calling that Adams didn’t finish high school, leaving to go continue her family business.
“I felt like I was able to help people get to the next step in their life, get past their fears,” Adams said. “I felt more connected to this path than any other path.”
Now, 26-year-old Adams travels back and forth between her business at the nexus of the Central District and Capitol Hill and her other one in Burbank called Lola Psychic Shop, named after her mother. Adam’s great grandma was a healer, a psychic and clairvoyant but Adams herself specializes in chakras, spiritual healing and past presence. Adams is not a clairvoyant.
That doesn’t mean she can’t talk to the dead, though. Continue reading
A new round of changes is coming to 23rd Ave corridor between John and Roanoke streets starting next year. Yes, technically, it’s 24th Ave between Helen and Roanoke. Phase 3 construction of the 23rd Avenue Vision Zero project is likely to start in the spring or summer of 2018, but it won’t be nearly as disruptive as the first phase of the project, between John and Jackson streets, which took 21 months to complete, city officials say.
Phase 3 will continue the Seattle road diet strategy in an effort to reduce accidents and make roads safer for pedestrians. The biggest change in this phase will be between John and Boyer streets. Currently the road is two lanes in each direction. The redesigned road will have one lane going northbound (downhill), a center turn lane, and two lanes going southbound (uphill) the lane closest to the curb, however, will be bus only. SDOT hopes the new design will help address speeding in the corridor.
The bus only lane is designed to help keep bus travel time reliable, in advance of potentially placing a rapid ride bus on the road, though that’s not likely to happen until 2024. The bus only lane will continue to 23rd and Madison, where it will transition into the single lane southbound lane there now.
The stretch between Boyer and Roanoke will continue to be two lanes in each direction, a nod to the traffic volumes in that area around state 520. That area will get some improvements, along with the rest of the corridor. Continue reading
