Results tagged “parksdepartment”

Today the PostGlobe followed up on our own sterling reporting about how the Parks Department doesn't want you, your baby, or your dog in the water features at Cal Anderson Park. There are tiny little signs!

Ok. We're as sick as you probably are of hearing about Sunday's pillow fight in Ballard. But a few comments on our post yesterday about it and an e-mail from Brooke, the organizer, prompted us to put up one last item about it. Namely, we'd like to ask those who think the pillow fight organizer is "self-absorbed" and worse to please calm down.

The local blogosphere has been talking today about the fall-out (literally and figuratively) from last Sunday's flash-mob pillow fight in Ballard.

Seattlest likes parks. Especially the big ones with plenty of room for family picnics, Frisbee, flag football and lots and lots of gay sex.

Gas Works Park may not recover its former place as our #1 greatest park ever after its little tar leak last week. We took a walk over there yesterday and wandered around what was basically an empty space on a gray and prematurely cold day, pressing our nose up against the chain link here and there and dwelling on what exactly this park sits on top of: benzene, mercury, lead, etc. It's gross.

Yesterday, when a reader informed Seattlest of an enclosure going up at Gas Works park for a private event, we posted some smart assey thing about the park's recent unfriendliness towards private events. We were aghast that public property could be employed as someone's personal party space, but, you know, not really. We pictured a dog run-like chain link fence enclosure near the back of the park, maybe in that newish area that no one really uses. Someone's having a party--a birthday party, according to our intrepid commenters. Or possibly a wedding... Who cares! Gas Works park is only a couple of blocks away from Seattlest's place of residence, but we couldn't quite muster the indignation to haul ourselves down there last night to check it out.

The buskers are an expansion of the city's effort during the past two summers to change the flavor of downtown parks. As downtown draws more residents, parks officials have said it's important to get more use out of the parks, which largely have been taken over by homeless people and drug dealers -- intimidating office workers and downtown residents.

You don't need us to tell you what it's like out there right now. But you could tell Seattlest what you've been doing now that we're all San Diego temperatures and whatnot--drop it in the comments if you're the sharing type. In the meantime, we hit the streets with our camera cruised Flickr photos tagged "Seattle" that weren't in our already glorious Seattlest pool, to see what people have been provoked to do by that big ball of fire in the sky.

Because not everyone is content to wait around until the Earth's natural geologic activity outpaces Seattle Process by burping up a lava flow miraculously formed into the shape of a skatepark, Grindline and River City Skatepark are going it alone. Sorta. They're attempting to put together a privately developed public skate park in the heart of South Park (because, yeah, we were wondering about "River City" too). When it's finished, there will be a huge bowl section, an extensive street park, and offices for the skatepark design company Grindline. They just got finished clearing the lot.

It may be one of the subjects the P-I used to deride the City Council lately, but we're happy to see someone paying attention to a form of recreation in this city that doesn't involve fleece, lycra or gortex. Skateboarding exists in the collective mind of the city government - That's a good thing.

-This photo is obviously a fake. There are no tornados in Kirkland, sorry.

No thanks to the Seattle Art Museum or their contractor, Sellen Construction, for making it easy to attend Hempfest this weekend. Their obstinacy in complying with terms of a Parks Department permit wasn't resolved until midweek.

After an exhaustive search of the city and the surrounding internets Seattlest has finally located the site's first patron saint. It's this random guy, Charlie Schaubel, a middling golf pro who's wanderings happend to place him in Seattle at times over the course of a long and random life. His greatest accomplishment? Making golf sound cool.

Listen people, skateboards are not a tool of the devil. Wouldn't you rather have your kids outside, getting some exercise in a publicly-sanctioned location, rather than either sliding down your neighbor's handrails or off doing much worse? Not if you live in the Greenlake/Wallingford neighborhood, it would seem.

Mayor Greg Nickels delivered a State of the City speech on Monday that hit on a bunch of Seattlest's favorite talking points, but failed to mention the growing divide between the mayor's office and the parks department and various neighborhood groups in the city. That's gotta be a tough one to swallow for neighborhoods whose primary complaint seems to be the lack of acknowledgement of their complaints.

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.

Suddenly a couple of council members aren't so sure it would be a good idea to have Summer Nights concerts in Gas Works park after all. Maybe it's better to have them at South Lake Union where the views suck, but at least there's no entrenched ninja NIMBYs chucking lawsuits like chinese stars. Licata and McIver are asking the parks department to take another look at South Lake Union, and although events the size of Summer Nights weren't originally in the plan for the park there we're gonna go ahead and say that Vulcan probably owes the city council a few and things can be arranged.

That hot weather we've all been clamouring for finally hit Seattle over the weekend, but not before two area beachs could slam their doors in your face. Gene Coulon Memorial Beach and Matthews Beach tested a little too positive for fecal coliform and both been closed to swimmers.

All we needed was one day of sun, wind, and no precipitation and our thoughts turned waterwards: it's time to think about sailing.