Yesterday Seattlest broke out of the office at noon, grabbed a Tats'trami and headed to Occidental Square. There's nothing like passing a short hour with a book and a gut bomb in a square... Actually, had a book along, but it was only cover for our real mission which was to watch all the little people go about their little lives and they happily obliged by showing up and staring back at us. What? Just eating a sandwich and reading over here. Nosy freak. more ›

Occidental Square has always been kind of awesome and uniquely Seattle, to this writer at least. It's walled in yet open, yet cluttered, yet ordered. There's a distinctive sense of wood, but the predominant building material is stone or brick. There are no people, but there are trees! Have you ever been to a square in Europe? They're great in their own quaint little way, but they're somewhat of a celebration of treelessness. "Hell yeah there was a forest here when we showed up - We fucking hacked it down and replaced it with all these cobble stones and scary churches and shit." That kind of thing was cool a few centuries ago. more ›

-There was a positive development in the life of the woman who was once a P-I reporter and a spy, which is a change as you can imagine. more ›

Maybe we failed to give credit where credit was due yesterday in the Bumpershoots post. Some of the best stuff at the festival tends to not be music (notably the 826 thing from last year) and they have a lot of cool sounding events listed on their website that aren't music, but definitely are worthy of a mention. more ›

We walked down to Occidental Square for our Monday lunch field trip and unfortnunately didn't see much. Supposedly the cutting has begun in Pioneer Square and trees are being felled, but the area lacked any chainsaw buzz or shouted "tim-berrrrrrr"s around noon. We didn't stick around to gawk, though, so maybe they were between trees. A nice little pile of fresh firewood was sitting around. more ›

Seattlest doesn't really have an opinion on the tree-cutting scheduled to take place in Occidental Square. Strange, but true. We kind of like it as is, but it can be kind of dim even when there is actual sun shining. It seems to us that the only thing the park really lacks is foot traffic that isn't hustling to or from a stadium - Actual people and their random activities tend to work wonders on public spaces. Occidental always struck us as a perfect place to sit at an outdoor cafe and people watch, except, well, minus all the people. more ›