Results tagged “waterfront”

When police arrived, they found a chaotic scene of more than 100 people on the dock, many of them shouting and arguing. Officers then learned that some passengers were still physically fighting aboard the ship. Officers moved to the dock to begin clearing the ship, where they found a small group of people blocking the gangway and preventing passengers from leaving the vessel.

That would be Tay Yoshitani, director of the Port of Seattle.

In a 6-3 split vote yesterday, the City Council approved the idea of expanding the city's streetcar system. All new lines would run north of Jackson Street: one leading up into Fremont, another into the U District, a third along the Waterfront, and the final along Broadway in Capitol Hill. (Here's the map.) Of course, as Councilman McIver pointed out, "we ain't got no money" yet, and the plans don't mean a whole lot until the funding comes into place.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a viaduct decision. "After years of debates, arguments and advisory votes the replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct will finally be chosen next month," says the P-I. The viaduct is all over both dailies, with the Seattle Times pointing out that the state's projected $4.6 billion deficit isn't likely to affect transportation decisions as much as you'd think: "Transportation has a separate budget with its own source of revenue — primarily the gasoline tax, which is more stable than the sales tax." The surface street option still pencils out as the least expensive, fastest-to-buid choice, but at $800-$900 million and five years of construction, would still take quite a toll on the north-south commute.

From the Seattle Times: "Imagine a milelong building, filled with office and retail, 90 feet wide and 55 feet tall, stretching from King Street to Victor Steinbrueck Park." Or, imagine if they ever actually made a decision and did something with the Viaduct, rather than unveil plans and artists' drawings. The whole issue has been a joke, and has shown local politicians at their pathetic finest. (Sorry about the outburst, everyone have a wonderful fall weekend.)

CELEBRATE THE SALMON: The Pacific Northwest is known for coffee, technology, and Boeing these days, but three hundred years ago we were known--if you'll allow us some leeway in the use of "known"--for salmon and trees. A group of Northwest Indian tribal organizations throws an annual, multi-ethnic, three-day party down on the Waterfront to celebrate the spiritual and ecological importance of salmon in our region, and the party commences today. Along with the music, dancing, pow wow, and usual vendors, there will of course be a salmon barbeque--so bring your appetite!

The great thing about the Seattlest Flickr pool is that our citizen photographers are everywhere all the time. It's the only way they can capture things like this seagull performing "I Will Always Love You" (the Whitney version, natch) on the Seattle waterfront for, we assume, a small family of tourists. If you should happen upon such an unbelievable moment about town, take a picture and drop it in our pool.

The air smelled fantastic when we got off the Waterfront bus line at its northernmost stop yesterday. It was muddy, salty, with notes of decomposition and extreme biological activity. Low tide. Near-record low tide, and what would be described as a stench if it were in your house, for example, was overpowering and fantastic along the waterfront.

On our way out of Kirkland, we decide to stroll along the waterfront. While stepping through an alley (as dubious as they get in downtown Kirkland), we hear indie-acoustic music coming from the cappuccino haven on Seattle’s Eastside, Kahili Coffee. Without hesitation, we advance.

After enjoying last weekend's Washington Brewer's Oktoberfest, we are now preparing ourselves for this weekend's Fremont Oktoberfest.

There are all sorts of things a Port could do. But what should its focus be? Back when Seattle was prouder to be known as a blue-collar shipping hub, cargo containers lining the horizon, the Port used its property tax dollars to encourage things like rail transportation.

On the pier behind Steamers on the waterfront downtown there's a little parking lot and then some picnic tables that don't seem to belong to any particular business. They're just there, free to be used by Steamers patrons, sack lunchers or Seattlest. It's a nice little area to hang out in for a few minutes if you think that sitting next to the water and watching the ferries go by might do some good. We generally only stay for a few minutes, staring into the water until the head-explodiness recedes and while it's pretty ok for an afternoon business district escape the spectrum of wildlife we've seen goes from jellyfish to seagulls with nothing in between. Now, as someone who often visits this place on lunch breaks or I-gotta-get-away-from-this-damn-desk-or-my-head's-going-to-explode breaks we were more than a little surprised to learn that 1) the Muckleshoot throw nets in the water downtown near the Edgewater and 2) they caught a gray whale this morning.

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.

It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by poop. Finally D.C. contemplated taking Vermont's place as a state and marveled at the GOP lessons learned from the "Macaca Moment."

We knew Bremerton residents were the step-chilins of the Washington State Ferry System, but now that wireless access for the 55-minute run has been delayed again we're starting to suspect a conspiracy. Bainbridge has been happily browsing away on their 30-minute jog since like the mid-nineties or something, but can Bremerton catch any of that wifi gold? Hell no. At least not until July at the earliest. Of course, the Rich Passage is the official culprit according to Parsons which has the contract to provide wireless internet to Washington ferries.

Last night on the Discovery Channel there was a Deadliest Catch wrap-up-type episode where Mike Rowe had all the assorted captains gathered at the Lockspot in Ballard for some "why do you do it?" commiseration. It's like in their blood or something. There was no satisfactory answer, actually. Seattlest can understand why people fish crab up in Alaska. You can get hurt, sure, but you make some money and you don't have to put up with a lot of other people. Why do the Deadliest Catch guys do it, though? There's definitely a Heisenburg thing going on with the main characters of this show--for some reason the Seattle tubes are more or less vacant of any mention of the Deadliest Catch, but the show's near 24-hour domination of the Discovery Channel suggests that it is, in fact, wildly popular. These Captains and crew are reality TV stars. Not the kind of MTV/Fox stars who change careers to making pro bar appearances five nights a week after they get voted off the island, but reality TV stars nonetheless. If you could chose between somehow parlaying that reality TV stardom into some cash or continuing on in the world's most dangerous profession, well, you'd step to parlaying.

Before we get to today's boat, there's a half-assed explanation of the Empress of the North's Alaskan accident online as of yesterday--apparently they were making a turn and hit a rock... Well, cruise passengers should certainly slumber easily in their berths now that that whole thing has been exposed. There's also (another?) entirely fictitious accounting of the accident at The Spoof.

We haven't been banging on our Port drum lately because others are doing a bang-up job for us; in particular the Stranger's Josh "Bloodhound" Feit and the P-I's Kristen "Pitbull" Millares Bolt -- and Capt. Tobey, to be fair. In the wake of the brouhaha over The Case of the Commission-Approved Severance That Wasn't, Feit's been Slogging furiously, not so much gloating over the scandal as refusing to let the Port or the Seattle Times* -- "Commissioners need to make some apologies and get back to the people's business" -- gloss over the matter without learning from it.

But let's not lose sight of another change that's proved another vast improvement: Pentagram's reworking of SAM's brand identity.

We had a little trouble interpreting the results of the Viaduct public vote a while back. Clearly it was a vote against the tunnel. Was it a vote for a new Viaduct? Was it a vote for surface and transit? Was it a vote for "further political uncertainty?" None of the above, it turns out. It was actually a vote for "we're suffering from severe Viaduct fatigue and we don't want to talk about it anymore." A landslide, it seems. Once upon a time you could rally the whole office with any mention of the elevated roadway. Head over to the water cooler right now and say, "blah blah blah Viaduct." You'll clear the place out faster than if you asked for volunteers to train on the new TPS reporting system.

Hot damn, it’s nice out there. Seattlest just got back to the office after a long-but-too-short lunch break. There we were, reading a book in the sun down at the waterfront park, near the Aquarium – lifting our head every so often to peer out at the ferries making their way in and out of Elliott Bay. And the Olympic Mountains, of course, reminding us that it’s just about time to dust off our camping gear.

It’s been over a week since the Viaduct vote, and we’ll admit it, we have no idea what the new plan is. There was some sort of announcement right after the vote that the state will spend some $950 million to spruce it up over the next few years. So, is that it? After years and years of debate, plans, and drawings of ethnically diverse group of people enjoying a better waterfront, was the solution simply to make the existing Viaduct stronger? What are we missing here?

ELECTION NIGHT PARTY: Get happy with Cary Moon and the People's Waterfront Coalition, the prophets of the surface/transit waterfront.

Too late! That's what we'd scream at state reps McIntire, Pedersen, McDermott and Pettigrew if we had them gathered in a room together. Their statements yesterday--that it's time to discuss a surface option for the Viaduct replacement, that we should be talking about moving people and goods instead of cars--would have really helped get something we may have felt ok marking "yes" next to on the "just for funsies" ballot we signed, licked and mailed over the weekend. As it stands we looked at the stiff piece of paper, looked at the Viaduct in all its gray glory and emphatically voted no to every lifeless, unimaginative, ungodly expensive option we were presented with. In retrospect, maybe a blank ballot would have more closely aligned with our intent, which was to convey the fact that we haven't been sold on either the new Viaduct or the tunnel and that we're more than a little annoyed at all this micro managing of our legislators we're expected to do.

Unlike some other quitter we could mention City Council Member Peter Steinbrueck will be finishing out his current term, however, he will not be seeking re-election this fall. Instead he will dedicate his time to stopping a viaduct re-build and promoting the surface street alternative. (Although Seattlest Seth has a theory that he just wants more time off to watch his son play basketball for Seattle Prep in the 3A State Tournament).

This thing has been going around today that lumps Seattle in with New York, Boston, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Paris as members of the crappy waterfront club, and we're supposed to be shamed by it or something (it is the "Hall of Shame" anyway), but, for us, it's not really working. We kind of don't really mind getting lumped in with those other cities. Maybe none of us has the greatest waterfront, but so what? Show us a great waterfront, we'll show you a tourist town that's dead inside. These are world-class cities that Seattle is listed with here. These are all cities with proud port histories (except maybe Paris--at least we've never really thought of it as a port). They have waterfronts that reflect those histories. Sure, the business of shipping containers back and forth across the oceans has more or less been shuttled aside by now in all of these places, but once upon a time these cities floated boatloads of crap back and forth to each other's waterfronts. Receiving that crap and loading it onto trains was the reason the cities existed in the first place. And now they bear the scars of that past. Sometimes it isn't pretty in a "Let's go for a promenade in the park before tea" type of way, but it can be beautiful in a urban what-hath-man-wrought-upon-the-earth type of way. We're partial to voting No and Hell No for other reasons (although we haven't postmarked our ballet), but we want to make it clear that we're not going to be shamed into submission by The Project for Public Spaces and their Worst Waterfronts list.

Look, Nickels, a little strategy for ya. A little Tao of tunneling. You want a tunnel that bad, you gotta go with the flow of where the tunnel wants to go. Screw the waterfront thing that was crazy. But here you go -- concerned citizen Craig Dalby has found you a place for a new tunnel: the Montlake Cut.

Holy crap are we not getting enough sleep. We woke up this morning and did battle with the dueling alarms we have to set to enforce our five hours of shut eye, slugged ourselves to the bus stop, inched our way downtown to the soothing sounds of Don Edwards and then experienced our first radical optical illusion since a beach rave and a handful of mushrooms five years ago. We peered into a newsbox and the letters of the Seattle Times headline picked themselves up from whatever arrangement they were in and realigned to read "Viaduct fight: Could streets be the answer?"