If you like good pizza, good beer, and consuming both at the same time, The Masonry is your place. There are two locations, and we do have to give the edge to Fremont’s because there’s more space and a slightly longer menu, but you can still order their signature charred margherita and amazing meatballs at the Queen Anne spot. Pop in with a friend, and after waiting for space at one of the few tables, grab a pint from the massive tap list and the mushroom pie with pancetta.
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Sound Transit must reopen study of the Ballard 20th/Thorndyke Tunnel Portal option. The other DEIS options fail to serve Central Ballard and are hemmed in by industrial zoning that is unlikely to change. Ballard doesn’t need to rely on Transit Oriented Development to make a station work; it already boasts a desirable, populous urban destination. Ballard’s biggest and most productive small business strongholds along 24th and Ballard Avenues aren’t moving. This station is the only Ballard station in ST3 and is likely to be the furthest west Ballard station in the system forever – Sound Transit needs to get it right.
Neither 14th or 15th serve Ballard well, 20th Avenue is in the center of the urban village
Recommended Feedback: Open additional study of 20th Avenue Station/Thorndyke Tunnel Portal alignment.
INTERBAY:
Interbay Station must be built to ensure a tunnel is possible to a 20th Ave NW Station in Ballard. As such, we prefer the Thorndyke Retained-Cut station option.
Beyond making a 20th Ballard Station possible, Thorndyke Retained-cut is excellent on three important fronts: a shallow station that provides quick station access for riders, good TOD potential, and perfect location for great bus transfers from both Magnolia and North Queen Anne/Seattle Pacific University.
Recommended Feedback: Support Thorndyke Retained Cut [IBB-2a/IBB-2b].
SMITH COVE:
Like Sound Transit, we also prefer the preferred Galer Street Station option. It offers the most direct pedestrian connection to the Ferry Terminal and Elliot Bay Trail (but we’d like to see pedestrian connections further improved), the best location to connect with buses from West Magnolia, and a cool $200 million in savings over the other options. Currently it lacks the most direct access to Expedia’s campus, but building a strategically placed pedestrian bridge would bring riders to Expedia’s true campus front door in a way the other options never could.
Recommended Feedback: Preferred Galer Street Station/Central Interbay [SIB-1].
SEATTLE CENTER STATION
At 110 feet deep, the proposed Mercer station is just too deep. Though the 85 foot deep Republican Street proposal isn’t ideal, it’s not so deep that properly operating escalators would fail riders like a Mercer station would. Arts stakeholders representing the likes of KEXP, Seattle Rep, Intiman Theater, and Macaw Hall/PNW Ballet have expressed strong opinions against Republican Street station due to long construction impacts and tree removal along August Wilson Way. We want Sound Transit to further review if there is a way to mitigate these impacts while primarily focusing on serving future transit riders as well as possible.
Recommended Feedback: Prefer Republican Street Station and work to mitigate impacts to arts organizations as much as possible.
SOUTH LAKE UNION (SLU)
Neither SLU station option serves the neighborhood well and the Mercer Street option isn’t even in SLU at all. Failure to locate a SLU station as advertised to voters in 2016 within the neighborhood boundaries could even be considered grounds for transgression against voter promises. Luckily there is a better option that serves SLU and will likely be cheaper and faster to build: Westlake Avenue.
SLU station needs to serve SLU
Keeping the station on Westlake Avenue in the heart of SLU will enable a shallower crossing of SR-99/Aurora Avenue without the negative implications of a station there. A north/south station would make building for expandability easier as well. We’ll leave it to Sound Transit to find a specific solution, but a different station location that intends to serve South Lake Union is worth additional study.
Recommended Feedback: Reject both presented options, study a Westlake or similar alignment oriented north/south within SLU boundaries and as centered on South Lake Union as possible.
DENNY STATION
Tunnel Westlake Ave Station [DT-1] is the clear winner but it needs more work to become good.
Direct bus and streetcar connections, a central location, and proximal access to all of Denny Triangle including Amazon headquarters towers makes Westlake Avenue Station the best option of the two. However, the station is still too deep and overbuilt at 100 feet, which surprises us because the station lies directly under (what should be) a fairly unobstructed street right-of-way.
Recommendation: Westlake Ave Station [DT-1]. Update vertical conveyances and aim shallower.
WESTLAKE
Similar to Denny Station, one option is the clear winner but it’s still not good. Tunnel 5th Avenue Station [DT-1]. As we note in our transfers post, this station has slow transfers and detailed options for this location seem oddly under-studied for a station that expects over 70,000 daily riders.
Recommendation: 5th Ave Station [DT-1]. Update the elevator and escalator plan to improve ease of use and redundancy and additional find ways to speed up transfers and surface access.
MIDTOWN
Midtown Station is so deep (between 140 and 170 feet) that making it useful will be a challenge. A station in this location needs to be just as good for short trips within downtown as it is for long distance commuting. Our deep stations article notes that stations over 100 feet deep need to use fast elevators that skip mezzanine transfers and go directly to the platform surface. Sound Transit responded in a blog post that direct station access isn’t possible due to the line being directly under 5th avenue. This seems to assume that it’s either not possible to go under buildings at this depth or the platform has to be in the center. Our follow up questions have not received a response as of this writing. What happens at midtown seems to largely depend on what happens with CID station, so our recommendations are general.
Recommendation: Make the station as shallow as possible, design station for surface to platform elevators, build in ample elevator redundancy, and use modern interfaces to ensure nearly seamless elevator use.
CHINATOWN/INTERNATIONAL DISTRICT (CID)
Chinatown/International District (CID) Station is the Puget Sound’s single most important central station for its confluence of multimodal connections and transfers. Of the options presented, the best option is 4th Avenue “Shallow Alt (CID-1a)” but we can’t recommend it due to the excessively long transfer times.
A tunnel just as shallow as the existing CID Station along 4th Ave could be the best option that gets everyone aligned. If Sound Transit can find a way to do it, it would mean fast transfer times for riders, lower impact to the community around the CID, and likely lower costs and shorter construction timelines. We implore Sound Transit to focus on finding a way to make this potential win/win/win happen at this critical transit station and regional transportation hub.
Recommendation: Prefer 4th Avenue Shallow Alternative (CID-1a)alignment but it needs to be as shallow as existing station,study a shallow cut and cover option over existing Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel.
SODO
We prefer Mixed Profile Station (SoDo-2) for its preservation of the SoDo busway (50-70 buses/hour), lack of an awkward car overpass, and legible direct transfers for all riders. However, we want Sound Transit to study a Mixed Profile Station further north at the existing SoDo Station location to prevent demolishing the Post Office at great added expense.
Recommendation: Choose Mixed Profile Station [SoDo-2] and study construction further North at the existing SoDo Station location.
WEST SEATTLE (DELRIDGE, AVALON, AND ALASKA JUNCTION)
We are only discussing West Seattle’s three stations in one section because of the great degree to which each station directly affects what’s possible for the other. Alaska Junction affects Avalon specifically and Avalon affects Delridge specifically.
When it comes to the Alaska Junction and Avalon Station relationship, there is no better option than WSJ-5 41st Ave Medium Tunnel Option [WSJ-5]. It gives West Seattle the tunnel it wants, the centrally located stations it wants, and the shallow stations riders need – while maintaining price parity with elevated options. The only unfortunate aspect of WSJ-5 is that Sound Transit includes only one compatible option for Delridge Station: DEL-6, which is far from ideal. DEL-6 abuts a large steel plant and offers mediocre bus connections. Bus connections are perhaps the single most requested feature of a Delridge Station and must be excellent.
With a fresh crack at this engineering challenge, we are confident Sound Transit can finagle more and better options for Delridge than DEL-6 alone that can be compatible with WSJ-5.
Recommendation: Choose WSJ-5 with a request to study better DEL-6 that are compatible with WSJ-5.
General DEIS Feedback
Recommended feedback:
Do not eliminate any stations.
Work to make stations as shallow as possible.
Improve transfer times wherever possible.
Ensure escalators and elevators are (1) fast and (2) have enough redundancy to handle game day rushes and not fail riders in the event of failure.
Use fast surface-to-platform elevators (no mezzanines) when stations are more than 100 feet deep and align station design so that it’s possible.
Plan to build for future expansion in Seattle.
That wraps up our recommendations for this phase of the DEIS. We again implore transit-focused community members to give Sound Transit your feedback. Your efforts are essential to building a system that works for riders. We’ve created this easy to use Action Network form if you want to echo our comments or even if you just want to use our comments as a starting point. This is a critical moment and we’re still hopeful that Sound Transit can rise to the challenge and design a system that lives up to the promise of ST3.
COVID-19 may soon put rest to one of the most persistent myths of our national car culture: that restaurants need an entire ocean of parking right outside their doors in order to survive.
In communities as wildly different as Hartford, Conn. and Wheeling, W.V., cities that are easing their lockdown restrictions are finally allowing cafes to repurpose the excess asphalt outside their doors as socially distanced space for paying customers. Slate’s Henry Grabar penned a viral op-ed encouraging communities to go a step further, and let restaurants without dedicated lots close down part of the street to create instant patios, too.
And restaurants aren’t the only ones eager to reclaim streets from cars. Businesses and organizations of all kinds are “covidifying” their operating procedures for our new reality, such as customer-limited farmer’s markets to ease the pressure off of crowded grocery stores or outdoor church services. (No, we’re not talking about the megachurch that asked its congregants to show up in their cars and “honk once for Amen” – worshiping in person, six feet apart, in a parking lot sounds a whole lot less annoying for the neighbors.)
It may seem like an obvious idea whose time as come. In many cases, it undoubtedly is.
But before we start giving our public space over to private companies — yes, even that small business we all want to see thrive after this is all over — we should pause and ask ourselves some hard questions about how to do this right in our unique communities.
Here are three questions any city leader should ask herself before she allows that patio exemption — so we can make sure it lasts:
Is there still room for people to get around – and not just by car?
Here’s the thing about the restaurant patio renaissance: we can’t let it become just another way we push vulnerable road users off our sidewalks.
Even pre-COVID, people who use assistive devices have been skeptical of the sidewalk cafe for a very simple reason — a whole lot of businesses have no idea how to place their tables in a way that meets ADA accessibility standards.
It’s not hard to imagine how, if we let the patio extend all the way to the curb, street scenes like the above would get even harder for a wheelchair user to navigate. Even an able-bodied person might have a little trouble — especially if the road beyond the curb wasn’t rededicated as space for walkers, and outfitted with temporary ramps to make it usable for disabled people.
Every business should have the right to make use of the asphalt beyond its front doors as a safe, social-distancing-appropriate extension of its business — and when its does, every city should also dedicate space for walking, biking and assistive devices beyond that nouveau-patio. You can’t have the first without the second, and in a lot of contexts, you can’t have the second without removing a little space for cars. That’s a good thing, and we shouldn’t be afraid of it.
Did you engage the community first?
Even mostly beloved Open Streets events, like Oakland’s soon-to-be 74 mile “slow streets” network, have drawn gentle criticism from equity advocates for launching without a community engagement period first — a move that resulted in an event that some felt was a bigger boon to joggers than the working poor.
As our non-residential areas start to reclaim a little space from cars, it’s even more important that we learn from Oakland’s critics. Not everyone in the neighborhood may want the bar down the street to suddenly spill out onto the sidewalk — at least not without asking the neighbors and getting them involved.
Fortunately, there’s a strong precedent for how to do community engagement when traditional community meetings are impossible due to COVID-19 — thanks to the hard pre-pandemic work of equity advocates. Progressive community leaders have long pushed for more inclusive models than the traditional public-comment session at the public library, which might not be accessible to a person with three jobs and a variable schedule, or a deaf resident without a private interpreter, or a parent who can’t get childcare in the evenings. Many of those strategies are more applicable than ever during a pandemic.
Oxfam has a great list of community engagement recommendations that are specific to the recent lockdowns, ranging from virtual meetings to socially-distanced door-knocking campaigns and much more. It’s not easy work, and it’s certainly not efficient, but it’s absolutely crucial if we want these policies to have any sort of staying power.
Is there open space outside commercial corridors?
Here’s another, less intuitive peril of the sidewalk revolution: it’d be very, very easy to concentrate all that beautiful new street life into a handful of busy and well-to-do commercial corridors. That’s a problem for social distancing, and it’s a problem for equity, too, because if you don’t happen to live in an area rich with restaurants and shops, your neighborhood could get left out.
It bears repeating: the Open Streets model is fundamentally about giving public space back to the public good — and not just increasing foot traffic to businesses (even if that’s a happy side effect in a challenging economic moment). And that’s why we need to make sure that the covidification of American businesses doesn’t become a stand-in for robust, free open otreets policies — policies that exist primarily for sake of simple transportation, and recreation, and any safe, lawful, non-profit-generating endeavor the residents of that street might desire.
So let’s not just have beefed-up restaurant patios and miles of socially distant farmer’s market stalls. Let’s move our museums onto our streets and line our roads with non-interactive public art that’s designed for the COVID-19 moment.
Let’s legalize street performers, and stop criminalizing street vendors, and give anyone who would do business on our streets the space and community engagement resources they need to keep their businesses running with the collaboration and active consent of their neighbors.
Most of all, let’s get creative with the 50 to 60 percent of public space that we usually dedicate to storing and moving cars. There are a ton of extraordinary things the public — and non-profits, and even some for-profit businesses — can do with that valuable real estate.
This article appears in print in the March 2020 issue, as part of the “Best Neighborhoods” cover story. Click here to subscribe.
Home to the Space Needle and a host of other treasures from the 1962 World’s Fair, Lower Queen Anne has carved out an identity at the intersection of optimistic futurism and historical staying power. For busy, career-driven Seattleites who refuse to sacrifice livability in exchange for a quick commute downtown or to nearby job hubs in South Lake Union and Interbay, it’s a prime place to make a home, even—maybe especially—for those looking to rent. Recent zoning changes now allow the construction of taller buildings in the neighborhood, a shift that’s already sparked the development of a number of new apartment buildings, bringing more accessibility to a neighborhood that’s already in demand.
Unlike South Lake Union and Interbay, both evolving Seattle neighborhoods recently born out of industrial areas, Lower Queen Anne offers the feel of an established city within a city. The neighborhood’s centralility, along with ample historical charm and a degree of commercial resilience, fosters a special blend of work-life balance. Transportation is a breeze: A number of buses run through the neighborhood center around the intersection of Mercer Street and Queen Anne Avenue North; it’s just a 30-minute walk to Pike Place Market; and you can even take the monorail from Seattle Center to downtown for transit with a view.
Saurabh Chaure, a 32-year-old software developer for Expedia Group, purchased his Lower Queen Anne condo in 2018 primarily for its proximity to his workplace in Interbay. “When you have to work late, it’s a no-brainer. You can just put in that extra time and still get home in 15 [or] 20 minutes,” Chaure says. “The work-life balance definitely helps,” he notes, describing the perks of having easy access to everything from multiple grocery stores to waterfront biking.
Old and new businesses sharing a section of Mercer Street. Photo by Hayley Young.
In addition, abundant bars and entertainment opportunities make it easy to orchestrate a last-minute date night or overdue catch-up session when you realize you haven’t seen your friends or significant other in way too long. Lower Queen Anne is the cultural heart of the city, after all, host to traditional and experimental theaters, museums and an independent cinema, among other offerings—the combination of which fuels a steady flow of patrons to sustain the area’s restaurants, cafés and shops.
In the bustling center of the neighborhood sits Mercer Street Books, a used-book shop in a storefront that’s been home to various booksellers for decades. Adjacent to the bookstore is the newly opened Paju, a Korean restaurant dishing out innovative seafood-focused cuisine. Nearby Metropolitan Market, the later incarnation of an independent grocery store originally founded on Upper Queen Anne in the ’70s, hums nearly around the clock just a few blocks from KeyArena, a city landmark undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation to accommodate Seattle’s new professional hockey team, set to debut in 2021.
KEXP’s radio headquarters and in-house La Marzocco Cafe. Photo by Alex Crook.
Seattle police say a man and a woman were found dead in a burning home following a domestic incident that officers were responding to Wednesday morning.
Police received a call from a home in Seattle’s Montlake neighborhood around 8:30 a.m. Operators heard a man yelling and a woman in distress, police said.
Upon arrival, officers knocked on the door, and a man inside told them he was armed and would not come out, police said. Officers entered the house after the suspect told police a woman inside the house was injured.
The man barricaded himself in a room and told officers he was carrying a knife. Seattle Police Department’s Interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz later said that the man tried to stab the officers. Afterward, the officers realized the basement was on fire.
A SWAT team, equipped with oxygen masks arrived on the scene and entered the home to locate the suspect and victim, but the smoke and flames became too much, and they had to step back, police said.
A photo of the home is shown after firefighters put out the blaze on Sept. 15, 2022.FOX13Seattle crews were able to put out the blaze inside the Montlake home on Sept. 15, 2022.FOX13
Seattle fire crews extinguished the fire and entered the home where they found one person – believed to be the suspect – and a woman both deceased inside the home.
Four officers suffered from smoke exposure and were treated at Harborview Medical Center. The identities of the suspect and the victim have not been released.
The public is invited to share its feedback regarding the development plans for Montlake Elementary School located at 2405 22nd Ave E., Seattle, WA 98112. The Seattle School District is requesting modifications (also known as “departures”) from several City zoning regulations for:
Increased lot coverage.
Greater than allowed building height.
Reduced setbacks.
Reduced vehicular parking quantity.
Reduced loading dock depth.
New curb cut to service area without parking.
Reduced bicycle parking.
Simplified bicycle parking structures.
Signage/Changing Image Sign
The Seattle School District has a detailed presentation of the modifications which you can view on the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods website.
Upon receiving your feedback, the comments will be shared with the Director of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. After review, the Director will provide their recommendations regarding the proposed departures to the Director of Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections for the final decision.
Please submit your written comments by Friday, September 9 to:
Nelson Pesigan E-mail:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Mailing Address: Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, PO Box 94649, Seattle, WA 98124-4649
For additional information, visit our website or contact Nelson Pesigan at 206-684-0209.
The Major Institutions and Schools Program provides a way for neighbors of Seattle’s hospitals, universities, and colleges to be directly involved in the development plans for those institutions to ensure neighborhood concerns are considered when those plans are made.
