Madison Park Blogger

B of A ATM fire NOT arson

2012-02-02T19:52:00.000-08:00

$150,000 in damage apparently accidental

It turns out that what at first appeared to be an early-morning arson fire, burglary attempt, or political statement at the Madison Park Bank of America branch in November was probably something much more mundane. The Seattle Fire Department reported last month that its arson investigator concluded that the cause of the fire was likely an ATM malfunction, possibly an electrical short in the cash machine's wiring. The SFD estimated the fire damage at $150,000.

We didn't see any news report about all of this, but we were taken to task today by the SFD public information officer who noted that the fire-investigation results had been posted on the Department's blog on January 5, almost a month ago. He was reacting to our recent posting on the Wells Fargo branch vandalism, in which we suggested a possible link to the BofA branch arson. Well, apparently there was none.

We stand corrected.

[The Madison Park Bank of America Branch is located at 4100 E. Madison Street.]

News for foodies

2012-02-01T20:10:00.000-08:00

Belle Epicurean launches Provisions

They didn't quite get the doors open in time for the holiday rush, but Madison Park's newest (and, by self description, "Seattle's premier") patisserie did manage to inaugurate its specialty food and fine wine shop, Provisions, just in time for the New Year. Occupying the eastern half of what was once the Island Video location (3109 E. Madison St.), Provisions is both a wine bar and purveyor of "high quality food stuffs" such as special cheeses, olive oil varieties, doughs, condiments, and frozen bakery items.

According to chef/proprietor Carolyn Ferguson, the concept is for Provisions to be a sort of well-stocked pantry and wine cellar for those who enjoy the kind of food available from Belle Epicurean. That means that the products on sale are principally those which are used as ingredients by the patisserie.

Ferguson, who is nicely profiled in this month's Madison Park Times, asked us to be sure to report that Provisions will be hosting weekly wine tastings each Thursday in February (5-8 pm), with her husband, co-owner/oenologist Howard Ferguson, acting as sommelier. French regional wines will be featured and will be paired with cheeses and pantry items.

* * * * *

Cafe Parco recalibrates lunch, asks for menu input

It seems that a lot of Madison Parkers, who might otherwise be lunching in local cafes, leave town for the winter. So Cafe Parco, which since its opening had been serving both lunch and dinner each weekday, has decided to limit its lunch schedule for the time being. According to a recent email from the restaurant's general manager, Nic Norton, "until the weather warms up" those interested in lunching at Cafe Parco will have to call and make reservations no later than the day before. If a minimum of six people have asked to dine (not necessarily as a single group), lunch is on for that day and an announcement will be placed on Cafe Parco's website (at which point it's come one, come all).

Chef/owner Celinda Norton, meanwhile, is asking for advice from patrons on the kind of cuisine they prefer. On the restaurant's blog, Norton notes that some diners are asking for lighter fare, though "ordering patterns tell a different story" given that richer food seems to outsell simple, healthier food. "Even with a mix of simpler dishes in the menu the servers still have people ordering the richest offerings available and then complaining the food is inedibly rich. Yes, they chose to order the most decadent item on the menu," she reports.

Norton sums up her dilema this way: "I need to offer what my guests are willing to visit regularly and purchase. I need to prevent Annihilation via Yelp. I need to get excellent reviews from Seattle's press." She says she's open to input and you can provide it by emailing her: chef at Cafe Parco.

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Jason Wilson of Crush connects with Google

The Puget Sound Business Journal's latest issue includes a front-page story on Crush chef/owner Jason Wilson's unlikely role as the designer of cuisine for the employee restaurants at Google's Kirkland and Bothell campuses, which reportedly feed 1,100 people each day.

It seems that Wilson is a friend of Google's Kirkland campus general manager, who believed that Wilson's "cooking style and priorities--supporting locally grown produce and naturally raised meat--would be a good fit for the company known for employee amenities and free food."

Among the menu items created by Wilson: orange-flavored Skagit River Farms beef stir fry, and Lamb Tagine with tomato, eggplant, peppers and olives. Of his positive experience working with Google, Wilson is quoted as saying "it's not like working for a monolith."

[Cafe Parco is located at 1807 42nd Avenue E,, and Crush is located in Madison Valley at 2319 E. Madison St. Photo of Chef Wilson from the Crush website.]

Wells Fargo branch vandalized

2012-01-30T19:47:00.000-08:00

Part of a pattern?

It was almost three months ago that the Madison Park Bank of America branch was struck by an arsonist. In that incident, there was apparently no message left by the perpetrator, so it was unclear if the act was political, simple vandalism, or a botched attempt at extracting money from a cash machine. In today's incident at the Madison Park Wells Fargo branch, the vandalism is perhaps a bit more straightforward.

According to KIRO-TV, which reported the story this morning, vandals smashed a window at the bank and left graffiti reading "No banks, No cops" and "Occupy! Oakland!". Also spray painted on the building, KIRO reported, was an anarchy symbol.

The vandalism occurred on Sunday night or early Monday morning and, according to the Seattle Police blog, the damage was discovered by the Wells Fargo branch manager upon arrival this morning. The graffiti was on the building's exterior doors, and the smashed window was near the doors. The graffiti had been removed and the window repaired well before we arrived on the scene. The Stranger got there ahead of us (we hate it when that happens) and posted some shots of the actual damage, which can be found here. (We have a fairly strict policy of not stealing photos from other news sites.)

The police are requesting help from the public in tracking down the suspect(s). Those with information are asked to call 911, the police blog noting that "anonymous tips are welcome."

[The Madison Park branch of Wells Fargo is located at 4009 E. Madison Street. Thanks to KIRO-TV photographer Jim Waltz for cluing us in to this story.]

Madison Valley designer gets reality show gig

2012-01-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

Madison Valley's own Lisa Vian Hunter has been chosen to appear on a new reality show, Fashion Star, which will air Tuesday nights on NBC beginning in March. Hunter has been a clothing designer and retailer of vintage 1950's and 1960's clothes for several years. With her husband, Scott, she established her clothing line, Vian Hunter, in the Bay Area in 2006. They opened their retail shop in Madison Valley three years later.

Fashion Star, hosted by former supermodel Elle Macpherson, is designed to be a kind of American Idol for fashionistas (defined as avid followers of the fashion scene). According to the Hollywood Reporter, "each episode will feature a fashion show complete with musical performances, dancers and models shot in front of a live studio audience. The contestants will be faced with a weekly challenge. Immediately following the episode, the winning designs will be available on the Web and in U.S. stores."

Hunter, who is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) in San Francisco, was a finalist two years ago to be on the eighth season run of the popular Project Runway reality show, though she ultimately was not chosen. This year when the reality-show producers came calling the outcome was different.

[Vian Hunter is located at 2814 E. Madison Street. Photo: John Russo/NBC]

Fourth Quarter Real Estate Report 2011

2012-01-23T18:57:00.000-08:00

Sales were level, but inventory is way down

Madison Park’s real estate market ended last year on a fairly positive note, with eleven houses and condos changing hands during the month of December. That’s better than the overall 8.5 average sales per month during 2011, but it was not nearly the barn-burning performance that the market generated the previous December. In that month, 16 sales occurred. As it happened, however, that high yearend sales volume was not predictive of market performance in 2011. In each of the first two months of this year there were only four sales. As we begin a new year, the market will be hard pressed to do much better than it did last year, since the story right now is lack of inventory.

At this time 2011 there were 53 houses and 22 condos on the market in Madison Park, 75 total units. Right now, the number of for-sale houses has fallen to only 30, and the number of available condos and townhouses is down to 17. That means there are 47 residences currently available, a 37% decline year over year. Based on the 2011 absorption rate (101 houses sold), the market now has only a five and a half month supply.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s currently available in Madison Park (Washington Park and Broadmoor included) as provided by Redfin, using information from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service:

Houses

Listings: 30
Median List Price: $1,985,000
Median Sq. Ft.: 4,190
Median Price per Sq. Ft.: $474
Average Days on Market: 91
Percentage with Price Reductions: 27%
New Listings: 10
Pending Sales: 5

Condos

Listings: 17
Median List Price: $510,000
Median Sq. Ft.: 1,041
Median Price per Sq. Ft.: $490
Average Days on Market: 179
Percentage with Price Reductions: 71%
New Listings: 1
Pending Sales: 0

The number of pending sales was down to only five as the year ended, compared to 15 at the beginning of the quarter. The low number of pendings obviously does not bode well for an immediate uptick in home sales. The real test will come, however, as we move into the spring. Some houses that were withdrawn from the market could return, and potential new sellers could decide to test the waters, increasing both inventory and market interest.

As has been true since the beginning of the downturn, there was a clear distinction between the median price of homes sold last quarter and the median price of those that remained on the market. The houses that closed were, on the whole, much smaller and less expensive than those that did not.

This is what the fourth quarter looked like in terms of sales:

Houses

Sales: 22
Median Sale Price: $1,264,000
Average Sq. Ft.: 3,215
Average Price per Sq. Ft.: $429
Average Days on Market: 129
Average Discount from List Price: 13.0%

Condos

Sales: 5
Median Sale Price: $319,000
Average Sq. Ft.: 1,321
Average Price per Sq. Ft.: $455
Average Days on Market: 169
Average Discount from List Price: 9.7%

The median sales price of the single-family residences that changed hands, $1.2 million, was a full 36% lower than the almost-$2 million median list price of those that remained unsold. The houses currently on the market are, in terms of the median, 30% larger than those that closed in the fourth quarter. The largest residence on the market, a mansion in Broadmoor, has over 10,000 sq. ft. of living space, and 70% of the available houses have 3,000 or more sq. ft.

The most expensive house to be sold last quarter was a 3,150 sq. ft. waterfront teardown located in Washington Park (shown below).

Originally listed at $5,180,00, it sold after only 50 days on the market, but at a much-reduced $3,950,000. The least expensive house was a 770-sq. ft. 1926 cottage located north of Madison Street, which had been on the market for 166 days. It sold for $440,000, having originally been listed at $525,000. Nine of the 22 house sales were under $1 million, and only three of the sales were for $3 million or more.

Condo sales, meanwhile, were at half the level of the same quarter the previous year, when ten units sold. The most expensive condo sold in the fourth quarter was a $1.3 million unit in the Washington Park Tower. The least expensive was an 825 sq. ft. unit next door in Lakeview Lanai, which sold at $232,500.

Finally, a note on discounts from original list price, which are currently averaging more than 10% for sold homes. The vast majority of condos on the market have had price reductions since inception, with about a quarter of the houses falling into that group. A “reduction from list” seems to be the norm, although one homeowner during the fourth quarter actually was able to score 104%-of-list at sale, and two others received 100%, one of whom realized his offer price after his house had been on the market for almost 200 days. At the other end of the spectrum was the unhappy Broadmoor homeowner who took a 30.7% discount from the original list price, selling a Broadmoor house for $2,070,000 after 498 days on the market.

[Thanks to Wendy Skerritt of Windermere Real Estate for her help in compiling the sales data. Lower photo courtesy of Redfin.]

Beautiful but treacherous

2012-01-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

Bus route detoured

9:00 am: Freezing rain has complicated the already difficult transit of vehicles in and out of Madison Park this morning. A driver on Metro Bus Route 11 just reported to us that E. Madison Street is in bad shape between 23rd Avenue E. and ML King Way. As a result, the buses have been detoured to ML King Way, with a later turn up Union Street to Olive. Unfortunately, there is now a bus reportedly blocking Olive, which may necessitate a detour of the detour he told us.

This is what Madison looks like at the top the hill at this point:

The condition of Madison Street through the neighborhood is not horrible, given that city crews have repeatedly used "plow trucks with salt spreaders" on the roadway, according to SDOT's roadmap. But the street is far from being clear, with a good inch or two of unmelting slush in the best places, and ice, exacerbated by freezing rain, in the worst.

As we recommended yesterday, don't brave the streets right now unless you have a good reason to do so. It's still freezing out there, and you will have an unpleasant trek unless properly fitted out, both in terms of attire and vehicle.

Note also that snow followed by freezing rain creates dangerous conditions for those walking under tree limbs:

Just a few words to the wise.

Send us your snow photos

2012-01-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

If you happen to have taken any interesting or beautiful photos during the past few days of snow and wish to share them, please send them along. As always, we appreciate submissions but reserve the right to "publish" or not.

[Upper photo by Adele Clancy; lower photo by Margo Spellman.]

Snow day !!!

2012-01-18T09:01:00.000-08:00

It began coming down sometime around 3:30 am, and since then the snow has not stopped falling on Madison Park. At this point (8:45 am) SDOT reports it's just sent a plow truck down E. Madison Street, which is a second-priority route for snow-removal crews. This is the scene (as captured on SDOT cameras) on E. Madison, looking west at 23rd Avenue E., the top of the hill:

Conditions look a bit treacherous, a fact confirmed by the Number 11 bus driver we spoke with, who described conditions on Madison coming down on her way to Madison Park as "not good."

People were definitely making it into the Park, but fewer cars were attempting an exit strategy when we checked the streets this morning.

As noted in our earlier snow posting, current information on cleared routes is available on the SDOT website, along with feeds from strategically placed cameras (though none near Madison Park), which can help you plan your route should you need to leave the neighborhood. This is what the map (available on a real-time basis here) looks like at this point:

Routes shown in red represent streets where recent (in the last hour) plowing and salting have occurred. A suggested route out of Madison Park might be down E. Madison to ML King Way (which was plowed earlier this morning) and then an intercept with another plowed street to get wherever you're headed.

Best advice on this end: stay home and enjoy the snow. Starbucks, Tully's, Bert's and the other neighborhood conveniences are open. And Mr. Washington was out diligently shoveling snow and putting down rock salt in front of the Scoop du Jour when we meandered by. He opens today at noon--and based on his experience in the last big snow, he's says he expecting to have a busy day.

Afternoon update (2:00 pm): Madison Street is relatively clear and drivable all the way up to 23rd Avenue E., but from there on it is a bit more treacherous. We drove straight up Madison to work this morning (in a four-wheel drive vehicle) and found it doable until we reached Sixth Avenue downtown, where all of the smart drivers turned onto alternative roads. On our journey we noticed a lot of pedestrians crossing against the lights in the face of oncoming traffic, as well as several drivers running red lights in order not to have to stop their cars on inclines. If you go out, be watchful!

The U.S. Weather Bureau reports that Seattle received 2.5 inches of snow in the latest dump, and no more snow is expected from the recent storm. However, overnight temperatures are expected to be in the 30's, so ice conditions on the roadways are likely for tomorrow's commute.

Let it snow !?

2012-01-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

Of all the City's neighborhoods, Madison Park is probably the very best one in which to become snowbound. The "winter wonderland" setting, plus the combination of a relatively flat topography and the immediately accessible (for most) amenities, can make a few days of waiting out the snow here a rather pleasant experience. During the last couple of days, with snow in the forecast, we encountered plenty of people hoping for the seemingly-unlikely possibility of being snowed in. With the snow falling fast and furiously this afternoon and a couple inches of it already on the ground, a snowbound scenario looks a bit more likely than it did just this morning. It's white out there.

If you need for some reason to get in or out of the Park, however, the situation now is becoming a bit more problematic. As of early this afternoon, traffic was moving slowly and warily on E. Madison Street in both directions, though there didn't appear to be any blockages.

There was very light traffic on Madison Park's side streets, and some of the traffic on Madison seemed to be related to quick trips to Bert's, Starbucks, and other essential destinations in "The Village." Neighborhood eateries didn't appear to be packing 'em in when we made our site inspections around lunchtime.

With tomorrow's Marting Luther King, Jr. Day a holiday for many (including the students of McGilvra Elementary), the need to be on the road will be lessened. For those who must travel, assuming that today's snow accumulations are still on the streets tomorrow as expected, they should check the Seattle Department of Transportation's weather response map for details of street conditions (the map, incidentally, was not working for us when we tried accessing it this afternoon using multiple browsers).

And as we reported last year, Madison Street, at least in our part of town, is not considered a top-priority street for snow clearing purposes. It is designated a "Level 2" street, which means that when SDOT gets around to clearing it the standard will be one lane in each direction "bare and wet," which is all we really need. Level 1 streets are indicated in yellow on the snow-removal map, with Level 2 streets shown in blue (click to enlarge):

The complete City map is available here. Bus weather-alert information, meanwhile, is available here. Note that the snow removal for Madison Park includes all of route for Metro's Route 11 bus. And if you need help in the snow or want to volunteer to help others, please contact the Madison Park Snow Brigade (information available here).

Is Madison Park ready for “greenways”?

2012-01-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

They have a well-developed network of them in Portland; and even in Seattle, there are neighborhoods that are already benefiting from them, or at minimum have planning underway to put them into place. But in Madison Park they are, at best, an idea in the germination stage (perhaps with only fallow ground in which to grow). After all, introducing them would mean change right here in the Park.

What we’re talking about is neighborhood greenways. In case you don’t already know about them (we didn’t), here’s the definition lifted directly from the Seattle Neighborhood Greenways site:

“Neighborhood Greenways are dedicated residential streets, often paralleling an arterial, with low traffic volume and traffic speeds. Neighborhood Greenways are mapped to be an extended connection between parks, schools, libraries and neighborhood businesses, while providing a quieter, slower paced place where bicycles, pedestrians and neighbors’ safety are all given priority. Cars are still able to drive on Neighborhood Greenways though by implementing various traffic calming measures the streets become safer for non-vehicular users."

In Madison Park the movement for greenways is being led by Bob Edmiston, who is something of a one-man band at this point. Nevertheless, he has high hopes that he can enlist others in his crusade and ultimately see greenways become a reality here. “Perhaps this is really a ten-year vision,” he says, “but it will only happen if we begin now.”

Bob Edmiston and his commuting apparatus

Edmiston’s education effort began with an hour-and-a-half presentation at the Madison Park Community Council meeting earlier this week, in which he pointed out that greenways are not about establishing more routes for dedicated bike enthusiasts. Rather, greenways are designed to create easier, safer biking connections and encourage people who might otherwise not venture out on a bike to consider the possibility and then go for it. He calls these non-enthusiasts the “Willing But Wary” and notes that a recent study showed that they may comprise 60% of the able-bodied population (the other types being the “No Way/No Hows” comprising 33%, the “Strong and Fearless” comprising under 1%, and the “Enthused and Confident” comprising 7%).

Edmiston, who bikes to work, puts himself into that latter category but recognizes that many if not most of his neighbors are of the “Wary” type. Making things safer for bikers will encourage at least some of these people to take up this better form of transportation and make parents feel more confident in letting their kids do so, he told the Council. To prove his point he brought along several people to give personal testimonials at the meeting. They validated his argument that at least in some cases perfectly usable bikes sit in dusty locations, un-ridden for fear of neighborhood streets (or, more correctly, the car drivers who make use of those thoroughfares)

So what makes a street into a greenway? “Traffic calming” is one aspect: slowing down car traffic by creating speed bumps, traffic islands, barriers, lower speed limits, and other controls such as stopping cars at non-arterial intersections along the bike route. Another approach is to create dedicated bikeways, an example of which is shown in this illustration from a bike route in California:

What we might decide to do in Madison Park could involve one more of these possibilities, Edmiston says, but would obviously only happen after a lot of discussion and ultimate agreement. What’s required is an “engaged community” he notes, and that’s what he’s aiming for.

The Council was convinced to buy into the greenways concept---at least to the extent of passing a resolution, without dissent, to study the matter further. Several members, however, noted that change does not come easily in Madison Park, mentioning certain earlier battles they had witnessed.

Those interested in getting involved in the dialog can voice input to the Council, or join the greenways effort by contacting Edmiston (lenswork64 at gmail.com). There is also a Facebook page in support of Madison Park greenways.

[Middle photo lifted without permission from a story on Edmiston at the UW Today site. Photo of California bikepath taken by Jonathan Maus lifted without permission from the BikePortland Flicker photostream.]

Yes, yes: another weekend closure for 520

2012-01-13T06:37:00.000-08:00

Be prepared for a now-almost-routine bridge closure this weekend. SR 520 will once again be out of service from 11:00 pm Friday night until 5:00 am on Monday. This weekend construction crews will be installing more than two million pounds of concrete girders for two lidded overpasses above the roadway. The photo above shows work at the Evergreen Point Road during an earlier road closure in November. Work will continue at this location as well as at 92nd Avenue NE. Wide, landscaped lids will ultimately exist at both locations, as well as at 84th Avenue NE.

Note that additional 520 closures are planned for the weekends of February 10-13 and 24-27. Additional information, including details of I-90 Express Lane schedule changes for this weekend, is available here.

[Graphics courtesy of WSDOT]

Redistricting Commission confirms legislative & congressional status quo for Madison Park

2012-01-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

The Washington State Redistricting Commission formalized the State's legislative district boundaries in a report to the State Legislature yesterday, confirming that Madison Park will remain within the 43rd Legislative District. The only significant changes to the 43rd occurred north of the ship canal, where there were minor modifications to the District's boundaries on both the east and west sides. In addition to Madison Park, the 43rd encompasses Downtown, Capitol Hill, Montlake and Eastlake on the south side, as well as the University of Washington, Ravenna, Wallingford, Fremont and Greenlake on the north side. The 43rd's legislators, Senator Ed Murray and Representatives Jamie Pedersen and Frank Chopp, comprise a pretty powerful Democratic delegation, given that Murray is Chair of the Senate Ways & Means Committee and Chopp is the House Speaker.

As was widely covered in the local press, the Redistricting Commission last month approved the boundaries for the State's Congressional Districts, adding a 10th District to the mix. That re-mapping resulted in creation of a "majority minority" district near the borders of Madison Park. The 9th Congressional District was pushed north into Seattle's Central District as part of the effort to give it a majority of minority voters (50.3%). The newly drawn 9th now extends all the way to the south side of E. Madison Street---though along with Madison Park, Madrona and Denny-Blaine remain in the 7th District.

The 7th District (shown in green on the map above), used to include all of Seattle, as well as Vashon Island, Renton, and Kenmore. Now the District extends from Vashon and Normandy Park in the south to Edmonds in the north. Meanwhile, the 9th District, which used to extend from Olympia to Renton, now begins in Federal Way and extends to Bellevue, taking in much of southwestern Seattle as well.

This closeup of the 7th District map gives a better view of Madison Park's new proximity to the 9th District boundary (the area in white):

Madison Valley is now cut in half by new Congressional boundary, the northern portion remaining in the 7th District, while the southern portion joins the 9th.

The 9th District is represented by Democrat Adam Smith, who is in his eighth term and is expected to be easily re-elected in spite of his district's new boundaries and borderline "majority minority" status. Our 7th District, of course, is represented by Democrat Jim McDermott, now in his twelfth term.

The Commission, as part of its report, released demographic information on the various districts. The 43rd Legislative District, is comprised of 75% whites and 25% "people of color," while for the 7th Congressional District the numbers are 73% and 27% respectively. Those interested in knowing more about the Commission's workings and final report can find detailed maps and data at the Commission's website.

It's McGilvra Auction time again

2012-01-05T20:00:00.000-08:00

Big event February 4/ticket deadline January 10

One of the great things about our neighborhood's John J. McGilvra Elementary School is the active involvement of the parents and other friends of the school, including the high level of financial support they provide to enhance McGilvra's educational mission. The school's biggest fundraising activity by far is the every-other-year auction, which attracted 350 supporters and raised close to $140,000 when last held. Planners of this year's auction, the school's eighth, hope to do even better financially than that record.

The 2012 auction, which includes a sit-down dinner, will be held at the Seattle Design Center on February 4. Among the major donated items that will be auctioned are:

• Great White Shark Adventure
• Progressive Dinner along the Pike/Pine Corridor
• Portland Weekend (at the Nines)
• Key Peninsula Beach House
• Mt. Rainier Cabin
• Suncadia Ranch
• Washington Coast Hosted Clamming Weekend
• Nicaragua Guesthouse
• Family Pizza Tugboat Cruise
• Mariner's box seats, Sounders memorabilia
• Recording Session at Crackle & Pop Studio
• Stay at the Principal's Condo on Marco Island, Florida.

In addition, there will be a wine wall, a desert dash, dancing, and a lot of student art on display. This year's art theme is Architecture:

The event gets underway with the silent auction (and the opening of the hosted bar) at 5:30 pm, followed by the dinner and live auction at 7:30 and dancing at 9:00. Ticket prices begin at $75.

More information about this fun event is available at the McGilvra Auction website. A link to an early version of the auction catalog is available on the site. Items are still being donated---so it's not too late to get in on that action if you'd like to participate.

'Peeping Tom' disturbs the Edgewater

2012-01-02T11:51:00.000-08:00

This story was news to us when we received the following email yesterday afternoon:

"I was just wondering if you knew anything about the “peeping tom” reports at the Edgewater Apartments recently. There were signs posted on the doors on or about Dec 18th alerting tenants and visitors. I didn’t see anything in your Blog and wanted to know if there was anything to this, as I drop my kids there for playdates and was concerned. You seem pretty tuned into the happenings in Madison Park. ;-)

Thanks,

Concerned Mom"

We happened to be out of town when we received this email, but within five minutes of our return to the Park we learned that the Peeping Tom story is, unfortunately, all too true. It just so happened that a resident of The Edgewater was jogging by our house as we arrived back home, and she stopped to relate the following story:

It seems that notices about the threat were posted by Edgewater management sometime last month, so residents were alerted to be on their guard. She, however, did not personally know anyone who had seen the voyeur, so she wasn't sure how seriously to take the warnings. But when she went to open her curtains one morning during the holidays she was shocked to discover a man standing outside her window evidently attempting to look into her apartment. She said she immediately called 911, and several police units quickly responded. Though a search was made of the grounds, the perpetrator was not apprehended.

Our informant told us that while she was giving her story to the police, other residents, seeing the police presence, began coming forward to report suspicious incidents that they had witnessed over the past few weeks. She said it quickly became evident that her Peeping Tom incident was part of a wider pattern of activity at the apartment complex.

The Edgewater Apartments, located at 2411 42nd Avenue E., is a 22-building, 316-unit complex which sits on 12 acres of prime waterfront real estate at the northern extremity of Madison Park. Completed in 1939, the Edgewater is home to an eclectic mix of university students, retirees, and urban professionals (young or otherwise). It's known for its homey atmosphere, lack of modern amenities (such as dishwashers and air conditioning), and too few available parking spaces. If anything, the Edgewater's crime rate is even lower than for Madison Park as a whole, with a few car prowl incidents reported and occasional cases of theft. Each of the buildings in the complex has a secure front door accessible by punching in the appropriate code.

We've been told that there were at least two previous incidents over the last few weeks involving a probable voyeur at the Edgewater. In the first case, a resident walking outside noticed someone standing and peering into an apartment unit, but the man ran when spotted. He was described as tall, youngish and wearing a hat with a "W" on it. In the other incident, a resident saw a man dressed all in black lurking near one of the apartment buildings at 6:30 in the morning. He also ran when spotted.

Unfortunately, though we heard directly about the perpetrator from one of the victims yesterday, we did not have our journalistic hat on at the time and failed to ask for a description of the guy. Our bad. We invite any Edgewater resident who's aware of these Peeping Tom incidents to provide us with further details (you may click on Comments below to leave feedback). Because of the holiday, we were unable to connect with the police to get the incident report on the most recent invasion of privacy at the Edgewater.

[Editorial Aside: This first posting of the New Year is the 500th story we've "published" since Madison Park Blogger was inaugurated in April 2009. Note: the noir-like graphics used in this posting are culled from the internet and are not actual depictions of voyeuristic activity in Madison Park.]

Yearend musings on the real estate scene

2011-12-29T15:38:00.000-08:00

What goes down must come up?

As we’ve learned to our dismay in recent years, real estate values cannot permanently defy that old adage, “What goes up must come down.” Having endured more than four years of declining values since the bubble burst in the summer of 2007, Seattle-area homeowners may be forgiven for now wondering “Are we there yet?” For surely at some point we’ll reach bottom, this demoralizing downward trend will reverse course, and appreciating homes values will again be the natural order of things.

The Case-Shiller Home Price Index for Seattle shows the peak for single family home values in the Seattle area and the almost imperceptible double dip that followed. (Click to enlarge)

It’s probably too soon to say that the fundamentals, either on the national or local levels, have changed dramatically enough for an immediate reversal of the negative home-value trend. But there is some solid evidence that the Seattle market could come back faster and stronger than most of the rest of the country. The primary reasons for hope are the trends for employment growth and rising personal income in the region.

Last month the federal government reported that Washington led the nation in personal-income growth in the third quarter. This was driven principally by gains in the software, aerospace and manufacturing sectors, among others, which are occurring in our part of the State. The U.S. Labor Department places King County’s current median household income in the top 20% nationally. Meanwhile, unemployment in Washington fell from 9.3% in August to 8.7% in December. Seattle’s unemployment rate is closer to 8%. Positive news about future employment increases at Boeing and in the software industry adds to the overall picture of an employment recovery in the Puget Sound region.

Unsurprisingly, there is a direct correlation between personal income and home prices. In general, when people have more money to spend, more demand is created for housing, and house values are bid up as the supply goes down. So the good news about local employment and income trends should ultimately have a direct impact on the housing market here. In fact, a recent forecast by Fiserv predicts Seattle will experience a 13.7% increase in house values for the year starting with the second quarter of 2012. Most forecasters agree, however, that the local market has a bit further to fall before the uptick begins.

One of the reasons for this is that even with a 30% decline since the peak, the median-home value here is still above historic highs as measured relative to personal income. According to a recent analysis by Zillow, the Seattle market mirrors the national market in that home prices are still 14% above the historic norm, which before the real estate bubble was 3.0 (home prices being three times the level of personal income). Today that number is 3.30 both locally and nationally, says Zillow. On the positive side, however, our market is in significantly better shape than many (Boulder, Colorado is still 43% higher than the historic average, for example).

Seattle also remains a market where, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, the “own versus rent” decision comes down in favor of renting (along with San Francisco, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.).

Prices in Seattle continued a steady decline in the period between September and October this year, although the 1% decrease is still less than the 1.2% average decline for the 20 largest U.S. metropolitan areas.

However, with interest rates at an historic low (under 4% for a conforming 30-year fixed mortgage this month) and foreclosures down in the Seattle area, conditions for a real estate renaissance are definitely strengthened for this market. Seattle is also one of the few major cities where the percentage of homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages is low (about 16% here versus over 60% for Las Vegas, for example). This makes conditions less ripe locally for escalating foreclosure levels than is true for much of the nation.

The bottom line is that the market may soon be ripe for upward movement, assuming that the employment and personal income pictures remain positive. The inventory of homes for sale is very low, so increases in demand could lead to price appreciation. Though 2012 may well prove to be a transition year for the local market, it‘s much too soon to be singing Hallelujah.

Greetings of the season

2011-12-25T15:26:00.000-08:00

Best wishes to you and yours from the Madison Park Blogger for a happy holiday and a great end to the year.

We took a little tour of the neighborhood Christmas decorations earlier this week, and here present some of the more outstanding examples of the lighted trees in the Park.

While there are also some great lighting displays on Madison Park homes, we found that getting the proper perspective from which photograph them was difficult in the absence of a cherry-picker or an enforcement order removing all parked cars from city streets.

We suggest that you get out one of these nights and check out the displays for yourself.

Another cottage comes down

2011-12-23T12:52:00.000-08:00

Progress or simply deplorable?

The wrecking crew was on site early this morning, and once the work got underway it didn't take long for the tiny, brightly-painted house at 2032 41st Avenue E. to bite the dust. The 590 sq. ft., one-bedroom home---now just a pile of rubble---would have celebrated a Centennial Anniversary if it could have remained on site for just another couple of years. But that was not to be. Built in 1914, the house was one of the Madison Park originals. Now it has gone the way of so many other cottages in the neighborhood, swept up in the tide of progress.

MPB reader Jana Wilkins, who sent us the above photo, describes the cottage's destruction as a "horrible event." But for others in the neighborhood the house's demise is probably is not a sad occasion. The cottage was certainly a stand-out, with its violet-and-purple hues and boldly-painted flower embellishments. Though fun and interesting, it was not precisely the kind of neighborhood attraction that adds to the property values of surrounding homes.

The house was purchased earlier this year by Isola Homes, a Renton-based residential property developer. Isola will be building a 3,219 sq. ft. modernistic structure on the site, scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2012.

The new house, which will be Built-Green, will feature four bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and a detached two-car garage on the 4,000 sq. ft. site.

Those who choose to take a positive view of the cottage's destruction and ultimate replacement can find solace in the fact that the transformation of this property represents a vote of confidence in Madison Park by an outside developer. At a time when much speculative residential development has ground to a halt and several developers of Madison Park properties are no longer in business, there are now multiple speculative developments underway in the Park, this one just the latest to come to our attention. At least in the opinion of some builders, Madison Park continues to be an attractive neighborhood with potential for major house sales.

This fact may not provide much comfort, however, to those who deplore the neighborhood's ongoing gentrification and the gradual loss of the village-like aspect of the Park's character. Unlike Madison Park's more exclusive Broadmoor and Washington Park enclaves, the area "North of Madison" began life as primarily a working-class community, one characterized by cottages and bungalows. Beginning in the 1990's, many of these modest homes began giving way to the development of megahouses, a Madison Park trend that The Stranger once termed House Bloat. While that trend has certainly slowed as the result of the real estate downturn, today's teardown at 2032 41st shows it definitely hasn't been terminated.

Though this cottage certainly has been.

Vandals strike again

2011-12-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

In what was more likely a wanton act of destruction than any kind of political statement, a person or persons unknown broke both of the plate glass windows at Spa Jolie last night---and for good measure broke a window in the vacant space adjacent to the spa as well. This is the building, owned by Constance Gillespie, that was vandalized in the same manner earlier this year.

The structure's middle space, unoccupied for years, is once again open to the elements, though with some plastic sheeting now standing in for one of the two replacement windows that had been installed this summer. The Spa Jolie space was being fitted this afternoon for temporarily plywood coverings. Patrons getting manicures, pedicures and other personal services at the salon did not seem unduly concerned by the commotion or the cold air blowing temporarily through the storefront. It is, after all, critical to look good for the holidays!

[Spa Jolie is located at 4114 E. Madison Street.]

Police Blotter 12/15/11

2011-12-21T14:40:00.000-08:00

A crime rash of another kind

Last week KOMO reported on one of its websites that Madison Park has been experiencing a "rash" of burglaries over the past few weeks. That was news to us, since the Seattle Police had reported only one such break-in during the four-week period ending 12/15. We quizzed KOMO about its report and found that the station had apparently confused our neighborhood with Montlake and/or Madison Valley (it's just so confusing, after all, since all three neighborhoods exist in the same general vicinity and share the very same first letter of their names). Suffice it to say that the number of home break-ins in Madison Park has actually been at an unusually low level. Let's keep it that way.

What the neighborhood is experiencing is a "rash" of car prowls: 16 cars in the past month, which must be some kind of record. Before we get to the list of break-ins, perhaps a refresher in how to minimize the chances of having your car broken into might be in order: 1) lock your vehicle--and if it is in a garage, lock the garage door as well, 2) don't leave valuables in the vehicle that are visible to passersby, and 3) park in a well-lighted area if it's not possible to secure your vehicle in a garage. The Seattle Police Department's tips on avoiding car prowls are available here.

Here's where car break-ins occurred for the one-month period ending December 15: On the 2400 block of 41st Avenue E., the 2000 block of McGilvra Boulevard E. and on the 600 block of 36th Avenue E. on November 18; on the 2300 block of McGilvra Boulevard E. on November 20; on the 3100 block of E. Madison Street (two cars) on November 24; at the intersection of 43rd Avenue E. and E. Lynn Street on November 29; on the 2000 block of McGilvra Boulevard E. on December 1 (two cars); on the 2000 block of 43rd Avenue E. on December 3; on the 1800 block of McGilvra Boulevard E. and at the intersection of 43rd Avenue E. and E. Galer Street on December 5; on the 1400 block of 42nd Avenue E. and the 1000 block of McGilvra Boulevard E. on December 7; and on the 2000 block of 43rd Avenue E. on December 10 (two cars).

A house break-in did occur on November 21 on the 1100 block of 39th Avenue E. In that incident, a brick was apparently used in a forced entry through a back door. The homeowner was actually returning to the residence when she heard the glass shatter and saw the suspects running across the patio and away from the house. The burglars apparently did not have time to snatch any items before fleeing the scene.

The house invasion that we reported on last month (shown on the map above with a blue circle icon) is being treated as a trespass case and not a house break-in since it was not forced entry and there was no evidence of a burglary attempt. We understand that the suspects have been referred for prosecution.

Con Alert

There have been multiple reports in Washington Park and Denny-Blaine over the past few days of an individual or individuals apparently posing as representatives of Comcast and knocking on doors in the area during the evening or at night. It appears to some residents that the purpose of these visits is not to connect cables but to scope out the homeowners' possessions for later retrieval.

[The map above shows crimes occurring in Madison Park during the period from November 16 through December 15. The starburst icon shows the location of the break-in and the car icons represent locations where car prowls occurred.]

Christmas ships attract big turnout

2011-12-18T09:15:00.000-08:00

It was clear skies and smooth sailing for the arrival of the Christmas ships off Madison Park Beach last night, as hundred of spectators lined the shores, stood on the pier, or watched the show from the windows and decks of condos and apartments along the water. The balmy-for-December air temperature may have been responsible for what was certainly the largest crowd to attend this annual event during the last decade---and perhaps ever.

The Christmas ships have been making an appearance at Madison Park for over 60 years. Lola McKee, former proprietor of Madison Park Hardware, tells us that she can remember the ships coming for 55 of those years. This year she was content to listen to the water-borne Christmas music while standing just outside the doorway of the hardware store ("it's too slippery down at the beach.")

Those who made it down to the water got to see the parade of twenty-or-so gaily-lighted boats arrive from the North and, after a twenty-minute musical interlude, depart for the South. The music this year was provided by The Dickens Carolers, a Seattle-based quartet. We understand that the cookies supplied for the event by Park Shore were excellent, though we arrived too late at the McNae Triangle Park to get any. The Madison Park Community Council and Business Association were sponsors of the on-shore refreshments, with Starbucks supplying the coffee.

How we voted: 2011

2011-12-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

Almost 60% of Madison Park’s 3,400 registered voters mailed in their November election ballots this year, and on each of the major ballot issues they agreed with the majority view—but with an even stronger level of support. King County Elections recently released the voting totals by precinct, so we took a look at what the numbers show for the nine precincts that make up Madison Park.

On Initiative 1183, which privatized liquor sales, Madison Park registered an overwhelming 67% in favor to 33% opposed, compared to a voting margin of 59% to 41% statewide:

On Initiative 1125, which if passed would have blocked tolling on state roads except by vote of the legislature, Madison Park was again in line with the electorate Statewide, with 68% opposed and 32% in favor:

Finally, on the City’s Transportation Benefit District Proposition 1, which would have imposed a $60 car license fee if it had passed, Madison Park said a strong No of 64%, versus the 56% No vote for Seattle as a whole:

With regard to electing officeholders, Madison Park did not always vote for the ultimate winner, however. Madison Parkers were in favor of keeping in office each of the four incumbents seeking re-election to the Board of the Seattle Public Schools. Nevertheless, two of the incumbents were defeated for re-election, in spite of their strong showings here. Board member Peter Maier, who was defeated by a vote of 49.2% to 50.4% for newcomer Sharon Peaslee, carried Madison Park with 65% of the vote. School Board President Steve Sundquist also carried Madison park with 65% of the vote, but he lost his seat with just 45.3% of the overall vote to challenger Marty McLaren’s 54.1%.

Appealing those assessments

2011-12-11T16:29:00.000-08:00

We ended our recent report concerning the 2011 assessments by noting that while you can choose to believe that the Assessor's valuation of your house is invalid, you still must your pay your property taxes based on that analysis. Of course, as has been pointed out by several readers, that is not strictly true. If you really think your property assessment is off base, you can choose to appeal. It's a course of action open to all; but it's undertaken each year by only a select, aggrieved few.

We decided to look into the appeals process for our area of town to see how things have been trending. Unfortunately, the Assessor's Office does not maintain records that show the percentage of appeals that are successful for any particular Assessment Area. What is available, however, is an aggregate total for each year of how many appeals have been filed. For the Madison Park/Madrona/Leschi Assessment Area (14), there was a big spike in appeals for the 2010 assessments (the valuations which were used to determine our property taxes this year):

The number of appeals almost quadrupled between 2009 and 2010, dropping back this year to a more manageable level (though still about 50% higher than for 2009). The Assessor was not surprised by the sudden uptick for 2010, apparently. It's what can be expected in those years when physical inspections occur in a particular Assessment Area, as happened for our part of town in 2010. These physical inspections, as we have noted, result in varying increases or decreases in assessed valuation between properties (in other words, no standard increase or decrease is applied to most properties in the area). Physical inspections and the resulting adjustments to value must, by law, occur at least every six years. And when that happens, many more property owners object to the results than is the case in a non-inspection year.

So many 2010 appeals were made from Area 14, in fact, that it's apparently the case that the King County Board of Equalization, which adjudicates these matters, is still working on finishing them up. After that's done, the Board can move on to appeals of the 2011 assessments. The deadline to file appeals of the 2011 assessments has passed; so with just 45 appeals in the docket, the 2011 workload for the Board will be much abbreviated from the previous year's level.

It's worth noting at this point that the 2010 assessments, which were issued in late summer last year, provided property owners with an assessed value as of January 1, 2010. So in 2011, property owners are paying taxes based on a home valuation which is well over a year old. In rapidly declining real estate markets, the Assessor will necessarily be behind the curve in assessing values downward. But that never-quite-up-to-date situation is equally true in rapidly increasing markets.

By the way, if you're interested in knowing how the physical-inspection process works, the Assessor's Office has a video on YouTube showing a property assessor in action:

There were a couple of other issues that came up as a result of the posting we did on the assessment process. One of these is the fact that when it comes to condos, the standard area assessment adjustment (the factor used for most properties in an Assessment Area in non-inspection years) does not apply. Condos are considered part of the Commercial Property assessment report, according to King County Chief Appraiser Dennis Pulsipher, and the adjustments are not broken out by Assessment Area. So anyone trying to reconcile the 2011 Area 14 standard area adjustment (-5.08%) to their condo-value decrease for this year is going to find it does not track.

Finally, those interested in knowing just where all those property-tax revenues are going this year might be interested this little chart, courtesy of the King County Assessor:

In early 2012 we will be reporting both on the tax rate for the year and on whether the Madison Park/Madrona/Leschi Assessment Area is paying a greater or lesser proportion of the County's total tax burden than was true in 2011.

This fence to be removed

2011-12-08T20:39:00.000-08:00

Parks Board makes its recommendation

After serving for more than 60 years as a safety barrier (and, in the opinion of many, an eyesore), the chain-link fence at Swingset Park is about to become a thing of the past. That, at least, is the position of the Board of Park Commissioners, which this evening voted 4-0 (with one abstention) to recommend to the Superintendent of Parks & Recreation that the fence and its attendant blackberry bushes be removed. The Board also recommended that the Superintendent "confer" with the community concerning both the implementation of its recommendation and the creation of a vegetation-management plan for the park. It's the Board's intention that this interaction with the neighborhood occur prior the fence being taken down.

Theoretically, the Acting Superintendent, Christopher Williams, could reject the Board's recommendation. But this seems unlikely given that it was Mr. Williams' own department that initiated the proposal, developing the briefing paper which provided background and justification for the removal the fence. Williams, who attended the Board session, gave no indication that he would be doing anything other than carrying out the wishes of the citizen panel, stating that among the issues he may be discussing with people in the neighborhood are "volunteer stewardship activities" and "maintenance" of the park once the fence is removed. Several Board members acknowledged concerns about safety at the park, asking that the parks department explore such options as a low hedge to replace the fence and a more-limited fence to enclose the immediate area around the swingset.

The outcome, though not unexpected, appeared to be a disappointment to the 10 to 12 Madison Parkers who attended the Board session. It was clear from comments made by Board members that they felt the weight of the community's input and sought to justify both the Board's process and ultimate recommendation. After the Commissioners reached their decision, Board Chair Terry Holme told those assembled that the issue had been "a challenging one for the Board--and we take our challenges seriously." He noted that the Commissioners had read all of the input, had instituted a "rigorous" process of review, and had taken longer to reach a conclusion than was typical for such proposals. He noted that although the neighborhood's concerns were taken into consideration, the Board has a responsibility to serve the entire parks system and to consider each park as part of the whole. In this case, he said, he felt that the park was not meeting its full potential and will be a better park because of the recommended changes.

During the Board's discussion, it was noted that each of the Commissioners who were present had visited the park to see the situation firsthand (one Commissioner was absent from the meeting for medical reasons). Board Vice-Chair Diana Kincaid, who made the motion to remove the fence, stated that "public waterfront is incredibly valuable and precious" and suggested that there are other locations fairly immediate to the park where such activities as kids' soccer practice could take place. Another Commissioner, Jackie Ramels, stated that there are other parks in the system, including the one at Alki, where the drop off to the water is significantly greater than at this park, without the parks department feeling the need to have any barriers in place. In the end, the desire to ensure "waterfront access" won out, with only one Commissioner, John Barber, expressing reservations based on child safety (his was the one abstention).

[Swingset Park is located at E. Lynn Street and 43rd Avenue E.]

Exploring underwater wreckage off the beach

2011-12-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of wreckage under the waters of Lake Washington, almost all which arrived there accidentally. Though at least one vessel was intentionally scuttled in the Lake, much of the underwater debris consists of commercial boats or ferries that sank (usually during storms) and were not recovered. Some of the wreckage, however, is the remains of military aircraft that took flight from the old Sand Point Naval Air Station.

Until KUOW aired a story on the subject last Friday, we were unaware that one of theses airplane wrecks actually sits on the Lake bottom just off the shore of Madison Park. The plane in question is a Korean War vintage propeller-driven fighter plane known as the Corsair. One of these was recovered in fairly good condition from Lake Washington a few years ago and rehabilitated. It now resides in the Museum of Flight:

The Corsair resting in our part of the Lake is not in very good condition, now more than 60 years after it took off from Sand Point---never to return. KUOW producer Ann Dornfeld last month accompanied four wetsuited divers, several of them members of The Maritime Documentation Society, as they entered the Lake at Madison Park Beach in search of the wreckage site. Her story (the audio feed and a transcript of which is available in full here) follows the scuba divers as they rediscover the site of the wreckage:

"The plane is a tangle of pieces; broken wings over here, crumpled fuselage over there. The divers' lights pierce the black water, golden beams panning over rusted gears and ammo boxes. Pale little sculpins and blue and orange crayfish dart amid the wreckage. After about half an hour on the wreck, we head toward shore." Once back on land, one of the divers, Ben Giner of Puget Sound Divers, comments, "Can you imagine the force that was required to twist that plane like that and shatter it going into the water? The water is hard at that speed, but still, even the internal components of the plane that should've protected by the fuselage are just ripped to pieces."

The wreckage resulted from a mid-air collision with another Navy Corsair, the very one that was later pulled from the Lake and restored. The accident occurred on the morning of July 29, 1950 when the two planes, part of a larger formation executing an "x-under" maneuver, collided. According to the Navy investigation, as reported by the Seattle Times, the propeller of one of the planes chopped off the fuselage of the other plane. While one pilot was able to take his plane to a soft water landing near Sand Point, the other pilot elected to ditch his badly damaged plane, ejecting over the Lake. Fortunately, his plane did not land on the beach but hit the water hard, two hundred yards from shore, and sank immediately. Both pilots were rescued from the Lake. The full story, with pictures of the pilots is available here on a site that also provides this great video of the wreckage:

There are a lot of other interesting wrecks in Lake Washington, though most are far removed from Madison Park. A great site for further exploring this subject is operated by the Submerged Cultural Resources Exploration Team (SCRET), which provides the history and underwater shots of ten Lake Washington wreckage sites here.

[Thanks to DCS Films for the embedded video. Pictures of the underwater wreck were culled from this site. There is another video of a different dive to the Corsair wreckage on the Puget Sound Divers site here.]

December happenings

2011-12-03T14:30:00.000-08:00

'Christmas Ship' and flotilla arrive December 17

As regular readers of this blog know, there is officially one and only one Christmas Ship--all of the rest of the boats following in its wake each year are simply holiday hangers-on. Just so we don't get an irritated email from Argosy Cruises (which owns the "Christmas Ship" trademark and hates to see it misused), we're reporting unofficially that "The Christmas Ships" will be arriving at the Madison Park Beach two weeks from today: Saturday, December 17, at about 4:55 pm.

This year the on-boat live musical entertainment will be The Dickens Carolers, while the on-shore refreshments will be provided courtesy of the Madison Park Business Association and Community Council, Park Shore Retirement Community, and Starbucks.

As always, you better get there on time or you'll miss the show. The ships will start heading north at about 5:15 on their round-about voyage back to Kirkland.

'Tear down that fence!' revisited

The simmering debate over the proposed removal of the chain-link fence at Swingset Park moves into a new phase next week, with the Board of Park Commissioners meeting on Thursday, December 8, to formulate a recommendation to the Parks Superintendent. The meeting will begin at 7:00 pm in the Parks Administration Building, 100 Dexter Avenue N. The Commissioners will not be taking any further input from the public at the upcoming session, but that probably won't stop a lot of interested parties from Madison Park from showing up to hear the deliberations. No word on whether lakeside condo owners will again be chartering bus to get residents to the meeting.

Those interested in hearing about the fence-removal issue from the Superintendent himself will get a more convenient opportunity to do so when Christopher Williams, the acting Superintendent, attends the upcoming Madison Park Community Council meeting on Monday, 7 pm, at the Bath House. The last time a representative of the Parks Department appeared at a Community Council meeting, the results were judged less than satisfactory. This event, like the last one, is likely to be jam packed.

Another 520-design feedback session

The public is invited to weigh in on some "preliminary ideas" for the new SR 520 corridor between I-5 and the edge of Lake Washington. The feedback session will be held on Wednesday, December 7, at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), 4-7 pm. It doesn't appear that the Washington State Department of Transportation has posted these design concepts on the 520 website as yet, but there is a lot of other background information there, including the presentation made at a public session held in early November (to access, click here.) Perhaps even more interesting, in view of the fact that the actual floating bridge design has yet to be finalized and graphically portrayed in a side view, is the fact that WSDOT at some point posted the "SR 520 Bridge Architectural Design Principles" online, which we just discovered. Interesting reading (and lots of illustrations) for those who care to take a look.

SR 520 tolling: is it really going to happen?

Originally, tolling on the 520 floating bridge was to have begun last spring. We all know what happened thereafter (though with no one losing their job, as far as we're aware, over what has become one gigantic black eye for everyone involved). Ironically, the electronic tolling system is called Good to Go, though at least on SR 520 it has proven to be Not-Good-Enough to Go to this point. Supposedly before the end of the month the glitches will have been fixed and the money will start rolling into the State coffers. It figures that you can't sign up for Good to Go at the present time, due to another "system upgrade" currently underway. That upgrade should be in place and the site back in operation by 7 am on Monday morning.

McGilvra scores high (as always)

2011-12-01T19:40:00.000-08:00

The Seattle School District last month made public the annual School Reports for each of the schools in the system, and once again John J. McGilvra Elementary School had an excellent outcome. This was the third year that the District used this form of academic reporting, and it was also the third year in which McGilvra was rated a Level 5 school, the top designation. Slightly fewer than a quarter of the Seattle Public Schools qualified as Level 5 for the 2010-11 school year (which is the period covered by the recently released report). For the District, however, this is a substantial improvement over the 15% of schools qualifying as Level 5 in the previous two years.

McGilvra's greatest improvement, year over year, was the results of the School's 4th graders on the State writing test:

The School had made the improvement in writing skills a high priority, and it's clear that those efforts paid off. For the District overall, only 68% of 4th graders were judged proficient in writing.

Reading was also one of McGilvra's strongest suits, with 93% of 3rd, 4th and 5th graders passing the State test (versus 74% for the Seattle overall). 92% of the School's 5th graders, meanwhile, demonstrated proficiency on the State science test (versus 64% for all schools in the District).

The School Report also provides an overview of the year-to-year academic growth of students at McGilvra, compared to the "typical" growth of students statewide. 64% of McGilvra's 4th and 5th graders met or exceeded what was considered typical reading growth for students from one year to the next. In math, 60% of McGilvra's 4th and 5th graders were met or exceeded what was typical.

Another set of variables covered in the School Report showed the results of parent, student and staff surveys conducted during the academic year. In several major categories, McGivlra showed improvements year over year. For example, the "Family Climate" survey (measuring parental attitudes) showed 90% 'family engagement" in the School, up from 83% the previous year. The "Staff Climate" survey, meanwhile, reported that 65% of respondents were positive about the "professional culture" or the School, while 79% were positive about "school leadership." This was a big increase from the 50% who were positive about the professional culture the previous year and the 69% who were positive about the level of leadership. The improvements undoubtedly reflect the change in principals that occurred late in the 2009-10 school year.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the positive feelings about the new principal were also reflected in the Family Survey: in the earlier year, only 66% of the parents answered that they were "satisfied with the leadership provided by the school principal." Last year that number rose to 83%.

McGilvra's average class size rose to 22 last year, versus 21 the year before. This was the result of an increase in overall School enrollment from 257 in the 2009-10 school year to 269 in the following year. A more dramatic increase in enrollment almost certainly took place this school year, and we will be reporting on that issue and its implications some time during the spring.

Those interested in reading the McGilvra School Report in detail can do so by following this link. The staff, parent, and student survey information is available here.

Stormwater project: operational at last

2011-11-29T14:40:00.000-08:00

It must have been with a gigantic sigh of relief that Madison Valley merchants learned yesterday that Phase II construction of the seemingly never-ending Madison Valley Stormwater Project is now officially complete. An email from the Seattle Department of Public Utilities (SPU) on Monday reported that the project is now operational and the related improvements to the stormwater drainage system along E. Madison Street are also in place. Construction ended last week.

The project, which began in the winter of 2009, has been a long, drawn-out affair--one that has been much more disruptive to the area than local merchants say they were led to believe before construction got underway. Indeed, Phase II of the project is actually still not completed, since there will be additional work in the spring of 2012 to create landscaping at Washington Park in the area of the new 2.2 million gallon stormwater tank. That work had been scheduled for completion this year, but delays in construction of the pipeline meant it was too late in the season for landscaping work to be practical. The decision was made by SPU not to work during the holiday season in order to leave Madison Street free from all construction-related activity.

That decision is just fine with the merchants along Madison Street, for which the two-plus years of construction have been something of an endurance test. The lack of parking and the disruption to traffic along Madison have definitely resulted in economic hardship for several of the businesses in Madison Valley. According to SPU spokesperson Elaine Yeung, Madison Street should not see much impact during the landscaping phase of the project next spring. She estimates that the work cannot get underway until at least April, and even then bad weather could cause further delays. It will take several weeks to carry out the landscaping scheme, including at least two weeks of dry weather, she told us.

Workers are currently securing the site for winter, according to Yeung, but there should be no further activity in the area for the next four months. Restoration work at Washington Park will include repairs to at least some of the sidewalk along the north side of E. Madison Street, she noted. At this point it is not known if any of the sidewalk, other than that at the entrance to the construction site, will be replaced; but the Parks Department has apparently requested that this happen.

The rock facing on the watertank has been installed, though a close-up view will not be possible until next year. This is what it should look like when the landscaping and railing have been installed:

Short takes No. 11

2011-11-27T17:31:00.000-08:00

Bank of America almost back to normal

Following the presumed arson fire at the BofA ATM earlier this month, the Bank needed to scramble to ensure customer service in Madison Park. The branch itself was out of commission for about seven business days following the fire, finally reopening last Monday. With the replacement ATM successfully installed and operating by Friday, the temporary mobile ATM--which had served a useful purpose during the interim--was driven away by Bank personnel on Saturday.

Bof A Manager Caitlin Bouroncle told us last week that while the branch is back to full service, there may still be a bit of contractor work going on for awhile. When we went by earlier today, it appeared that the place was almost pristine.

An air of entitlement in Madison Park?

It's time for us to give a belated nod to an interesting piece posted on the Crosscut website earlier this month by Madison Park's resident journalistic gadfly, Knute Berger: "If fences make good neighbors, what happens when you take one down?" Berger (aka "Mossback") dissects the current controversy over "access" to Lake Washington at Swingset Park, while ruminating on the nature of Madison Park and its denizens.

Calling the neighborhood "almost too good to be true" in some ways, Berger recites some of the blessings of living here, concluding that Madison Park "feels like a wealthy village that can afford to have the old neighborhood amenities that all neighborhoods used to have." But he sees a darker side as well. "There's also a lot of entitlement in the air," he states, noting that "some people also believe they have a right to a sense of exclusivity here." That attitude, he believes, permeates the debate over the fence, though he admits that not everyone living here shares that exclusivist position. As for himself, he comes down strongly in the anti-exclusivist camp: "Madison Park, tear down that wall."

Those interested in reading the piece might also want to peruse the reader comments for some other perspectives on the neighborhood.

MPC makes the cut

The Madison Park Conservatory, which has consistently received good press since it opened exactly a year ago today, got another culinary send up last week when Seattle Times food critic, Providence Cicero, placed MPC on her list of the favorite Seattle restaurants she's reviewed in 2011. The Conservatory is one of ten eateries making the list, which is available, along with her commentary, here.

A milestone

2011-11-27T15:30:00.000-08:00

By way of self-congratulation, we note that over the Thanksgiving holiday the Madison Park Blogger signed up its 400th subscriber. This is in addition to the 200 users who, on average, now visit MPB each day. This all adds up to a readership of between 400 and 600 people for most of our postings, according to statistics from Google Analytics.

We've come a long way in the less-than-three-year history of the Blog, mostly as the result of word of mouth.

We appreciate the support of our readers and, as always, invite comments, criticisms, story ideas--and subscriptions. Those interested in subscribing may easily to do by following the directions under "Subscribe to Feed" or "Subscribe via Email" in the right-hand column of this site.

Police Blotter 11/15/11

2011-11-24T20:16:00.000-08:00

House break in leads to arrests

We're certainly not complaining about our neighborhood's lack of notoriety, but since the Seattle Police Department began its own blog last year, we've noticed only two postings concerning crimes occurring in Madison Park. The first such story was the one last week reporting the early-morning arson fire at the Bank of America ATM. This week, coincidentally, there was another Madison Park crime story on the blog, this one with a much happier outcome:

Occupied Burglary in Madison Park, Suspect Apprehended
Posted by Detective Jeff Kappel

On November 23rd at approximately 3:00 a.m. officers responded to a report of an occupied burglary in progress in the 3400 block of East Valley Street. Upon the officers’ arrival one suspect was still on scene and was taken into custody. The victims told officers they saw another suspect in the back of the house. Officers were unable to locate the second suspect and subsequently called a canine unit to the scene. The victim’s residence was searched using the dog and no other suspects were located. Officers then conducted an area search utilizing the dog. However, the second suspect remains at large.

Preliminary investigation indicates that the suspects entered the house through an unlocked, but closed, front door. The female homeowner found the first suspect seated on a chair in the living room. She yelled at him and tried to get him to leave, but he was not immediately responsive. The other family members were upstairs and came down to see what was going on. Fortunately, there was no violence inside the home, and it does not appear that the suspect had time to take anything.

The suspect appeared to be very intoxicated, under the influence of narcotics, or both. It is unknown why he chose to enter this particular home.

The 31-year-old male suspect was arrested and booked into the King County Jail for Investigation of Burglary.

[We understand from neighborhood sources that the second suspect was later apprehended. A word to the wise: It appears that the perpetrators entered the house using a hide-a-key.]

Stealing with a smile

The map above shows crimes that occurred in the neighborhood during the month since our last Police Blotter on October 15. Unusually, there were few car prowls during the period (one on the 200 block of E. Galer on 11/10 and one on the 3800 block of E. Garfield on 11/13) and only one vehicle theft (a truck stolen from the 1500 block of 38th Avenue E. on 11/5). There were, however, a lot of thefts reported during the month, running the gamut from stolen dirt to high-end watches.

Detective Kappel (the writer of the SPD blog posting) playfully suggested the headline we've used above, which aptly sums up one of the heists that was reported this month. It seems that on October 17, a resident of the 1800 block of McGilvra Boulevard E. looked out her window and saw a man in the act of lifting several of her bags of potting soil into his truck. Seeing the homeowner watching him, he smiled at her before jumping into the vehicle and driving off "at high rate of speed."

Five days later there was another theft in the neighborhood, one which had a greater economic downside. On October 27, a homeowner on the 2300 block of 43rd Avenue E. reported that her $15,000 gold, silver, and aluminum watch had been removed from the premises by person or persons unknown. That same day, a resident on E. McGilvra Boulevard at 42nd Avenue E. reported that his bag, which contained a laptop and charger, had been ripped off. And on October 30, a yard contractor working on the 600 block of 34th Avenue E. reported that a leaf blower had been stolen from his truck while he worked at the site.

The only other home break in reported during the period happened on the night of October 17 on the 2000 block of E. McGilvra Boulevard. In that incident, the suspects climbed over a secured back fence, broke into the house by forcing a door, stole a large-screen TV and a significant number of other items (the list of which, for some reason, was redacted in the police report), and then fled the scene. Fingerprints were recovered.

[The map above shows crimes in Madison Park during the period October 16 through November 15. The dollar sign icons on the map represent cases of fraud (identity theft and stolen bankcards), the dollar-bill icons represent cases of theft, the spray-paint can represents a case of property damage, and the star-burst icon represents a case of a home break in.]

Those good news/bad news assessments

2011-11-22T13:08:00.000-08:00

Values down 5.9% on average

That old adage about the certainty of death and taxes has a corollary for property owners: the inevitability of tax assessments, which for those of us in King County is an annual ritual. Last year, as you may recall, our area of town (known to the King County Assessor as Area 14) was subjected to a physical inspection by the Assessor’s staff, a process that resulted in changes to the valuation of area properties that were definitely not uniform. Overall, however, the decline in assessed values for properties in Area 14 (Madison Park, Madrona and Leschi) was 1.3%. Last year was the second year in a row that the assessments had been adjusted downward. This is the third year.

Everyone should have long ago received their 2011 property assessments for taxes to be billed in 2012 (they were mailed out in August); and assuming that no improvements were made to your property over the past year, the “official property value notice” should show your property declining in value by about 5% (5.08% to be exact). This “standard area adjustment” applies to 97% of the homes in our area. The exception this year is for waterfront properties, which were uniformly decreased in value by 12.19%. Such a large adjustment in the assessment of these 100 very expensive waterfront homes had an outsized impact on the average decline for the 3393 total properties in Madison Park, Madrona and Leschi combined. As a result, the neighborhoods registered a 5.9% average decline in property value year over year:

2010 Average Value: $1,136,300
2011 Average Value: $1,069,400

The average land value, according to the Assessor, is now $631,200 and the average value of the improvements is $438,200. The valuations were based on sales occurring in Area 14 during the period from January 1, 2008 through January 1, 2011, giving progressively higher weighted value to most-recent sales.

Area 14, showing the various subunits

A decline in the tax-assessed value might be considered a good thing if it automatically meant a decrease in taxes. Unfortunately, as we’ve noted many times, assessing the tax value of properties and setting the annual tax rate are two separate and distinct processes. The government’s need for revenues in 2012, as determined by the votes of our elected officials and the passage of tax levies by the voters, will not be known for certain until early next year. Once that aggregate tax-revenue number is established, the tax rate will be determined based on the total assessed value of all the properties to be taxed.

Even though our neighborhoods’ assessed values declined by 1.3% last year, the annual tax rate rose by almost 7%. So for 2011, the impact of an average decline in property values was more than offset by an increase in the overall tax obligation, meaning higher taxes. That will probably happen to us again in the coming year due to the fact that Seattle voters just passed a $232 million school levy that almost doubles the existing school levy amount.

There’s something of a silver lining, however. By our count, of 27 Assessment Areas located in Seattle, only nine of them suffered a larger decline than Madison Park/Madrona/Leschi. The Georgetown/South Park area showed the biggest decrease (down 7.37%), while three areas actually showed increased values: Green Lake (up .78%), Phinney Ridge/Fremont (up 1.47%) and Wallingford (up 2.52%). While property owners in those last three neighborhoods have the satisfaction of enjoying escalating property values (at least in the opinion of the government), the positive glow from that accomplishment may be offset by the greater likelihood of their having to pay higher taxes next year. Those of us living in Madison Park (or, certainly, Georgetown) will be paying a diminishing portion of the total tax obligation relative to most of the other Seattle neighborhoods. That’s the good news portion of what is otherwise a bad news “2011 Residential Revalue” report by the Assessor.

Here’s how the tax revaluations have played out for Area 14 over the past seven years (based on the standard area adjustment, except for 2010, where the average adjustment for all properties is used):

So, as you can see, the Assessor believes that over the last three years the market has just about wiped out all of the increased property value that accrued to our part of town during the previous three. Of course, if you don’t believe that the Assessor can accurately use property sales data to track changes in values for properties that didn’t change hands (like most of ours), you may ignore all of these statistics as meaningless bureaucratic static. Just so long as you pay your tax bill, that is. You’ll know exactly what that is come February.

Come down and see the firehouse

2011-11-17T17:38:00.000-08:00

Anyone reading this blog over the last couple years knows what fans we are of our neighborhood fire team. The Seattle Fire Department's Fire Station 34 is holding an open house this Saturday, so everyone will have the opportunity to meet the firefighters and sit in Engine 34, shown above.

In one form or another this firehouse (located at 633 32nd Avenue E.) has been protecting the neighborhood for a long time. We culled this picture from the Seattle Fire Department's website:

It shows the Fire Station as it looked in about 1921. Although the current firehouse is considered to be in "generally fair condition," it does not meet current seismic standards. As a result, it is scheduled for a structural upgrade, a project which will take three years and include an expansion of the work space. The design of the new station will be on display during the open house, which will be held from 1 to 3 pm on Saturday, November 19.

Found at 41st & E. Galer

2011-11-17T07:30:00.000-08:00

This skinny but "super sweet" dog was discovered last evening by Louisa and Georgia, the daughters of Wendy Skerritt, who brought the dog home with them to be safe. (Rescuing lost dogs seems to be a specialty for these girls, who performed an earlier intervention this year).

The dog carries a tag identifying it as being from Moab, Utah. If you know anything about this lost female canine, which appears to be a wire-haired pointer/retriever, please let us know.

Afternoon Update: We're happy to report that as a result of our morning posting, Ugnes has been returned to her owner, Chad Beyer, who earlier this month moved from Utah to Madison Park with his German Wirehaired Pointer. Ugnes, whose name we understand is Lithuanian for "fire", is apparently able to perform escapes using each of these tricks: jumping an invisible fence, unlocking and opening a sliding door, and removing an insert from a dog door. This was not Ugnes' first escape since arriving in the neighborhood.

For Ugnes' safe return, Chad can thank Wendy Skerritt and her daughters who took the dog in and alerted the neighborhood. After seeing the story on the blog, Shirley Wilson (who has her own wire hair dog) recognized Ugnes from the photo and made the connection.

Madison Park: wealthy as charged

2011-11-14T20:38:00.000-08:00

The proposal to take down the fence at so-called (by the City and no one else) Madison Park North Beach has drawn an unusual amount of media attention to our fair neighborhood in recent weeks. KING-TV, KOMO-TV and KIRO-TV have each run news stories on the subject, as have other news purveyors. Some of the coverage in the major media and blogosphere has focused on the apparent class conflict between those "upscale" Madison Parkers who wish to preserve the waterfront park as it is and certain out-of-the-neighborhood members of the public who say they want direct access to the water at 43rd Avenue E. and E. Lynn Street.

In its coverage of the issue, SeattlePI.com referred to Madison Park as "tidy and affluent," while the Seattle Times settled on "wealthy" as its descriptor for the neighborhood. We were intrigued by the fact that The Times was able to quantify the wealth aspect, noting that "Madison Park is one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods, with an average income of $161,000, according to census data."

We decided to check into this. For one thing, is the number for real? And if accurate, is it meaningful? After all, average income is probably not the best way to look at a neighborhood's affluence. Here's a simplistic example that helps explain why: suppose ten minimum-wage workers live on a residential block, along with one multi-millionaire. This combination would presumably result in a pretty high average income for that block, since you would divide the sum of the annual incomes of everyone on the block by eleven to get the average--which would be high, even though most of the block's population actually lived in poverty.

This is not a third-world neighborhood, so income disparities for Madison Park would hardly be in line with our example. But it is well known that we have quite a few millionaires (and perhaps a billionaire) living in our midst, and these high-income individuals could certainly throw off the average income calculation for the community as a whole. Having looked into the matter, we can report that while the neighborhood is definitely wealthy, the situation is more nuanced than was evident in the Seattle Times story.

First, to give the paper its due, its average income calculation for Madison Park is essentially correct (there appears to be a typo, however). The U.S. Census reports that Census Tract 63 (Madison Park, including its Broadmoor and Washington Park enclaves) has average income of $151,000, based on surveys undertaken for the period 2005-2009.

The U.S. Census also reports, however, that the median income for the 2,871 households in Madison Park is only $76,042. We'd argue that this is a more representative way of looking at the affluence of the community. The median income number is the halfway point between the bottom 50% of households and the top 50%. The City's demographer, Diana Canzoneri, agrees that median income is the typical approach used when looking at income levels across population units.

Here's a look at how income is distributed in Madison Park, according to the Census estimates:

Almost one third of Madison Park households earns less than $50,000 per year while another third earns $125,000 or more. This is a much broader variation in income levels than might be suspected if one simply looks at the $151,000 average income number for the Park, which is obviously skewed by some very high income earners. Even so, it presents a much different picture from than that of Seattle as a whole:

A Madison Park household is almost twice as likely to have annual income of $125,000 or more than a Seattle household is. And when you get to the $200,000 income level and above (which is the highest category surveyed), the difference is even more striking:

That's right, more than one fifth of Madison Park households, according to the U.S. Census, have annual income at or above $200,000.

So yes, whatever way you look at it, Madison Park is definitely wealthy. But by no means is everyone who lives here in that category.

Fall color at the Japanese Garden

2011-11-11T10:44:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about living in Madison Park is our proximity to the Washington Park Arboretum, with its 230 acres of lush and varied habitat. A little gem within the Arboretum, of course, is the now half-century-old Japanese Garden. While many of us may not think to visit the Garden at this time of year, these recently-shot pictures by photographer Dennis Valente illustrate the spectacular show that awaits those who do.

The Japanese Garden is open through this weekend (10:00 am until 4:00 pm each day), so this is your last opportunity to see the fabulous fall color the Garden displays.

Admission is $6 for adults, with discounts for seniors, youths, college students, and the disabled. Kids five and under get in free.

The Japanese Garden, which covers three and a half acres of the Arboretum, was designed and constructed under the supervision of world-renowned Japanese garden designer Juki Iida in 1960.

We did a little story on the Garden's 50th Anniversary last year. Information on the Japanese Garden is available here.

Extreme cash withdrawal or anti-bank protest?

2011-11-09T14:33:00.000-08:00

This was the scene at the Bank of America branch in Madison Park this morning as police and fire crews investigated what appears to have been a deliberately set fire using accelerants. Whether this was some form of anti-Big Bank protest or simply a misguided attempt to extract money from BofA's ATM machine is not obvious. According to the Seattle Police Blotter, the fire was reported at 2:00 am this morning by Seattle Police officers responding to a bank alarm. The ATM was heavily in flames by that point, and the fire had spread into the building, including the attic. It took about 40 minutes for the fire to be put out, according to the Seattle Fire Department blog. The SPD also reported that Henry, the accelerant-sniffing dog, is responsible for determining that this was probably an arson fire.

This, courtesy of KING-TV, is what the building looked like after the fire had been doused:

We joked earlier this week that Madison Park is not the kind of neighborhood where residents are likely to toss bricks through the windows of a bank branch. But how about burning down a bank branch? Naw. Must be an out-of-area hit. Perhaps some kind of political Occupy Madison Park movement? If so, no one has apparently claimed credit.

KING-TV reported that cash in the ATM was definitely burned in the fire. The BofA branch, given the extent of the damage, is closed at least for the day. Multiple fire-clean-up crews and glass repair workers are active on site, but no word on when the branch will reopen for business. We understand that there was little fire damage to the public space in the branch but that significant water and smoke damage occurred in the room housing the Bank's servers. The fire department broke the glass doors on both sides of the branch in order gain entrance. Repair work was also underway today at Ewing & Clark, which shares the building with both BofA and a "pop-up" antique store.

[The Bank of America Branch is located at 4100 E. Madison Street. KING-TV's report is here.]

Parsing the fence debate

2011-11-07T16:19:00.000-08:00

Madison Park as cul-de-sac

Commentary by Bryan Tagas

You'd probably have to live in Madison Park for a few years to truly appreciate the quiet, steady rhythm of life down here at the end of the road. We sit conveniently removed from much of the wear and tear of typical urban living, having little serious criminal activity in the neighborhood and not much in the way of social discontent. Our socio-economic circumstance and relative isolation make us, perhaps, a bit more insular than other Seattle neighborhoods. We're hardly likely, for example, to follow the lead of those Capital Hill anti-Big Bank protesters who last week threw bricks through the windows of their local Chase Bank branch. And, as longtime resident Ed Clark puts it, it would be surprising to see Madison Park generate a big turnout for a meeting to discuss something really serious, like homelessness. But we are able to get 100 people to a hearing across town to discuss the removal of a neighborhood fence.

The Commissioners meet

It was standing room only last Thursday evening when the Park Commissioners convened in Denny Park to consider the staff proposal to take down the fence at the "Madison Park North Beach." Let's cut to the news first: the Commissioners will not be making a recommendation to the Parks Superintendent at least until they discuss the matter at their December meeting. And while it's true that the staff recommendation to remove the fence was pretty definitive, Acting Parks Superintendent, Christopher Williams, told those assembled, "We don't have a decision made. We are looking to hear creative solutions."

The Commissioners then got an earful from what was mostly an audience composed of Madison Parkers opposed to fence removal, though not everyone from the neighborhood spoke against the proposition. In addition to Mr. Clark, who said he felt the "safety" issue was being overblown, there were two or three other residents who spoke in favor of fence removal. Everyone else was either opposed to the idea, opposed to the process used by the Parks Department, or both.

David Graves, Senior Project Planner, presents his recommendation

For most in attendance, the principal issue was the safety of children and others using the park. It was noted that the fence was installed for what was originally considered to be a good purpose: protecting kids playing near the water. Not only is the rip-rap dangerous, many argued, but the water is treacherous at that point as well. Some were a bit heavy handed in their commentary, one claiming the the Commissioners themselves would be personally liable for any injuries or deaths resulting from their decision. Others focused on the change in usage of the park that would result from the fence removal. Without the protection of the fence, for example, little kids will probably no longer be able to use the field for soccer practice.

Sam Smith makes his point

One of the most cogent non-safety arguments made by those testifying concerned the fact that there's already significant public access to the water in Madison Park. This park at E. Lynn St. provides a different kind of recreational opportunity and different potential uses from what is available at the other public spaces in the neighborhood. It is more of a "passive" park, as opposed to "active" Madison Park and its beach just down the road. Removing the fence at the Swingset Park just to get direct access to Lake Washington accomplishes no worthwhile purpose, they maintained. No one will want to swim there (especially if aware of the 48" sewer overflow pipe at that location), and launching kayaks from the rip rap (and later getting them out of the water) would be problematic at best.

It had been rumored that the guy behind the whole fence-removal idea, Patrick Doherty, is an avid kayaker intent on using the park for that purpose. But when he spoke at the hearing about "access" at the park, he said his concern was primarily about the "visual access" to the Lake that the fence and its overgrown blackberry bushes were impeding. He said he'd like to see the Lake become "perceptually accessible" at that site. Many agreed with him about the blight caused by the overgrown fence, asking that the Parks Department simply remove the vegetation or do both that and replace the existing fence with a less-imposing one.

Parking and traffic congestion were also introduced as concerns, with one resident noting the potential negative impact on area property values if the "North Beach" is opened to additional public uses. A political note was made by another resident who reminded the Commissioners that Madison Parkers vote and that when the next bond levy occurs, "the Parks Department is going to need all the friends it can get."

When the session ended after about two hours it could not be said that the views of Madison Park, or at least of those neighborhood residents who cared enough to give them, had not been heard. The impact of all this may be evident in December when the Board of Parks Commissioners meets again to debate the issue. In the meantime, those who still wish to give their input may do so through December 2 (details here).

All in all, in my opinion, Madison Parkers presented themselves before the Commissioners as an articulate and concerned citizenry, legitimately upset about a process that began with a staff recommendation rather than through a dialog with the neighborhood. The legitimate concerns about safety, parking, congestion, and appropriate park usage were perhaps more persuasive when raised by people who did not have personal property interests as their principal motivation.

More than one resident stated that the neighborhood understands that this park belongs to the City and not to the neighborhood. But there was also a clear pattern of NIMBYism under the surface of much of the testimony, a perhaps inevitable reaction to the fear that more of the madding crowd will be coming down here to enjoy the public spaces in our midst.

But if "access" really just means the removal of visual blight, it seems that a reasonable compromise could easily be worked out, assuming that the Department of Parks and Recreation has any funds with which to implement it. Here's the recipe: Remove the vegetation and build a lower fence, keep the park for its current uses, save the children.

[Hearing photos from SeattleChannel.org. The complete videos of the hearing are available here.]

Another weekend closure for 520

2011-11-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

Fortunately, given that the Huskies are playing Oregon in an evening football game on Saturday, the eastbound lanes of SR-520 will not be closing temporarily until 1:00 am on Sunday morning, though the westbound lanes will be closing three hours earlier, at 10:00 pm on Saturday. This is another in a series of planned bridge closings to accomodate Eastside construction on 520. This weekend, 22 concrete girders will be installed to support a new lidded overpass at Evergreen Point Road in Medina. This is a graphic of what the lid should look like when completed:

The highway will reopen at 5 am on Monday morning in both directions. Additional closures are in the cards for the foreseeable future, as there are other overpasses and lids that will be installed on the Eastside as 520 is widened to accomodate additional lanes. More information is available here.

[Photo and graphic courtesy of the Washington State Department of Transportation.]

Is this fence coming down?

2011-11-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

Decision could come quickly

Tonight's the night when the staff of the Parks Department makes its recommendation to the Board of Park Commissioners that the fence at "Madison Park North Beach" be removed and public access to Lake Washington restored. Background on the site, known to most of us as either the Dog Park or Swingset Park, is contained in a briefing memo posted online last Friday. The memo also provides the rationale for the recommended change: "Removing the fence at North Beach would expand the opportunities available to the surrounding neighborhood to access the Lake Washington shoreline consistent with State and local policies."

Those residents of the "surrounding neighborhood" who live closest to Swingset Park, however, are the adjacent condo owners; and they don't seem to be particularly happy about the new "opportunities" that the fence removal might create for them. Apart from the safety-of-children issue, their apparent principal concerns are parking disruption and the noise and crowding that may result from increased park usage. It is rumored (and was reported today as a fact by The Seattle Times) that residents have chartered a bus to bring Madison Parkers to tonight's hearing. Local opposition to the fence's removal has been successful in the past, according to the briefing memo, which states that in 2003 a proposal to take the fence down was "shelved due to the volume of negative comments received."

Since the Parks Department staff acknowledges that the reason for the fence when erected was the safety of children, we asked what has changed since that time. According to spokesperson Dewey Potter, what's different now is a change in public attitudes. "Public awareness and interest in public spaces being open to the public is not the same as it was in 1945," she told us. The policy of providing maximum access to the the Lake Washington shoreline is what's driving the process this time.

Critics and proponents will have an opportunity to weigh in at tonight's meeting, which is being held in Park Board Room of the Parks Administration Building at Dexter Park (100 Dexter Avenue N.). The meeting begins at 7 pm. Information is available here.

Although the briefing memo states that the Parks Board will again deliberate the issue at a meeting in December, Potter told us that the Board could vote in favor at tonight's meeting. In that case, the Acting Superintendent, Christopher Williams, could agree to the recommendation and order that the fence be removed immediately, she says.

Third Quarter 2011 Real Estate Report

2011-10-31T13:29:00.000-07:00

A ‘qualified-buyers' market’

Last month my neighbors put their house on the market and sold it in just three days. They had multiple offers, and they obtained their listing price. Their quick-sale experience, however, was not that unusual for sellers during the month of September. Four of the nine houses sold in Madison Park that month went from listing to sale in fewer than 30 days, and the average number of days on market for all of the houses sold was just 91.

There was a clear-cut relationship between the quick selling properties and those that were least discounted from their initial offering prices. The quick sellers averaged a 2.4% difference between the listing price and the sale price, while the five slower-selling houses (one of which sold after 375 days on the market) were discounted 14.6% on average.

What’s the lesson, if any, from all of this? Dave Hale, manager of Windermere Real Estate’s Madison Park office provides this insight: “For the well-priced, market-ready listings there are buyers.” In his opinion, we are now experiencing a two-tier market, with one tier composed of properties that are “realistically” priced and the other tier priced out of line with market conditions. A major factor that’s impacting the market, he notes, is a lack of inventory. Indeed, there are only 76 properties currently on the market, compared to 94 at this time last year and 91 the year before.

Last month one seller accepted a 30.4% discount from the initial offer price after his house had been on the market only 77 days. This quick acceptance of market realities was not typical of sellers, however. During the last quarter, seven houses were sold after more than 200 days on the market. Six of those sellers took major hits relative to their initial expectations, accepting an average discount of 20.9%. One seller, whose house was on the market for over 500 days, was ultimately rewarded with a relatively small 10% discount from the initial offering price. Proving, apparently, that patience can be rewarded in selected circumstances.

Here is how the sales played out in the market during the third quarter:

Houses

Sales: 28
Median Sale Price: $1,420,000
Average Sq. Ft.: 3,746
Average Price per Sq. Ft.: $412
Average Days on Market: 136
Average Discount from List Price: 10.7%

Condos

Sales: 6
Median Sale Price: $535,000
Average Sq. Ft.: 1,035
Average Price per Sq. Ft.: $417
Average Days on Market: 175
Average Discount from List Price: 7.3%

The most expensive house sold during the quarter was a 3,200 sq. ft. 1940’s Cape Cod waterfront home in Washington Park, which after 251 days on the market sold for $4,400,000. That was an 11% discount from the initial offering price of $4,950,000. Only seven of the 28 houses sold in Madison Park during the period had sale prices of less than $1,000,000. Eight houses, meanwhile, sold for $2,000,000 or more.

So what’s the “take away” from all of this statistical information? Are we on a roll—or is it something less? Windermere’s Hale thinks the local market is now stable, telling us, “It’s my personal feeling that the worst is over.” Indeed, the 34 homes sold in Madison Park during the third quarter represent a 35% improvement over the 22 sales during the same period last summer. So in that respect, at least, things seem to be on a more even keel, with between 10 and 13 homes sold every month this year beginning in May.

But with interest rates and inventory now at historically low levels, will we soon see some upward pressure on market prices? That’s the question that potential buyers, potential sellers and real estate professionals are grappling with. Hale doesn’t pretend to know the answer. What he does believe, however, is that for the “qualified buyer” now is probably the best market in the last ten years.

Here’s a look at the current inventory in Madison Park (Broadmoor and Washington Park included):

Houses

Listings: 55
Median List Price: $1,875,000
Median Sq. Ft.: 3,720
Median Price per Sq. Ft.: $504
Average Days on Market: 125
Percentage with Price Reductions: 38%
New Listings: 15
Pending Sales: 10

Condos

Listings: 21
Median List Price: $550,000
Median Sq. Ft.: 1,106
Median Price per Sq. Ft.: $497
Average Days on Market: 116
Percentage with Price Reductions: 52%
New Listings: 4
Pending Sales: 2

Of the 55 house listings, there are only four on the market that are really priced under $1,000,000 (unless you want to be literal and include the four houses listed at between $950,000 and $995,000). So Madison Park’s reputation as “pricey” is certainly not endangered. The most expensive house on the market is a $7,950,000 “1930’s French-style estate” in Broadmoor. It has more than 10,000 sq. ft of living space on a half acre. Four of the other five most expensive houses in the market, however, are located in Washington Park, ranging in price between $6,335,000 and $7,895,000. The least expensive listed house is a “charming rental house” built in 1928 and located north of E. Madison St.

Condo prices, meanwhile, range from $1,75000 for a 2,100 sq. ft. unit in Washington Park Tower to $224,950 for a 595 sq. ft. unit in the condo building just south of Madison Park Beach.

The peak selling period for real estate has just ended, but there could still be a surprise before the year ends. Last year an incredible 16 sales occurred during December, making up for a fairly lackluster couple months earlier in the quarter. With only 12 pendings at the end of third quarter this year and only 76 listings, it will be tough to end 2011 in such a spectacular fashion. At this time last year there were almost 100 homes on the market.

[Photo is of 1821 41st Avenue E., a 2,300 sq. ft. house priced at $759,000, listed by Cathy Millan, Windermere Real Estate. This house went pending after only two weeks on the market. Photo by Matt Edington. Thanks to Wendy Skerritt of Windermere Real Estate for sales information used in this report and to Redfin for listing data.]

News on the culinary scene

2011-10-29T13:06:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of Seattle Magazine's choosing Maggie Savarino of Madison
Park Conservatory as one of Seattle's Next Wave of Tastemakers, City Arts has just placed MPC's head chef and owner on the cover of its November issue, with an inside article entitled, "Live to Eat: Cormac Mahoney Cooks What He Wants." Well, no duh. The critical reviews of the end result of that cooking, by the way, have been pretty uniformly laudatory (see here, here, and here). City Arts' piece, incidentally, includes some direct quotes from Mahoney that are clearly intended for mature audiences. When they come our way, Madison Park Blogger always screens these profane Mahoneyisms from the eyes of our sensitive readers. City Arts follows a more candid policy. Caveat lector.

Also noteworthy this week is a report from the recently opened Cafe Parco: the restaurant has just been granted a "temporary pre-approval permit" to serve "adult-type beverages." During Cafe Parco's first two weeks, it's been a case of bring your own vino. But that's no longer the only option. By the way, the restaurant's on-line reservation system is now up and running.

[Madison Park Conservatory is located at 1927 43rd Avenue E., and Cafe Parco is located at 1807 42nd Avenue E.]

Madison Park Number One for trick-or-treating

2011-10-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

Local news reports last week played up the fact that Zillow's annual list of best cities for tricking or treating showed Seattle in the Number Four spot (after San Francisco, Boston, and Honolulu). Within Seattle, however, it's Madison Park that gets the nod from Zillow as the best neighborhood for trick-or-treaters, followed by Queen Anne, Ballard and Laurelhurst. Zillow didn't provide any details on its methodology, but in past years it's been speculated that Madison Park ranks high because of the larger average size of the treats handed out on Halloween (full-size candy bars in some cases!). Whatever the reason, the neighborhood certainly enjoys a good Halloween reputation, with a lot of out-of-area trick-or-treaters making the rounds here each year.

This is just a reminder that Halloween gets off to an early start on Monday afternoon, with many area businesses (some of them members of the Madison Park Business Association, and some not) handing out treats to deserving kids from 3 until 5 pm. The event is sponsored by the MPBA and the Madison Park Cooperative Preschool.

[Graphic courtesy of Photobucket.]

Is that you, Watson?

2011-10-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

We are happy to report that the long-time-missing black cat, Watson, the subject of many "Lost Cat" notices posted around the neighborhood, has at last been found! We were glad to learn yesterday that after over two months roaming the 'hood, Watson is now safely back at home--just in time for Halloween. He was discovered this week in the vicinity of the house where he was being cat-sat at the time of his disappearance.

The Saga of the Bees (Part II)

2011-10-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

We left our readers with a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of our first installment of “The Great Summer Bee Caper.” It’s been so long since we ran the story that readers may be forgiven for having forgotten the details of our not-quite-Hitchcockian tale. It all began with the sudden arrival of a honeybee swarm in the neighborhood, and it ended (or at least our narrative did) with the bees swarming up 42nd Avenue. Our intrepid ‘bee wrangler’ from Fremont, Patti Loesche, was charging after them in her car. Here, we pick up the story:

What Val Ellis may have been thinking as she watched the bees make their escape from her front yard has not been recorded (that’s her in the photo above, observing the mass exodus from the other side of the street). But it’s a safe bet that she was relieved to discover that the lovely ceanothus bush located just ten feet from her front door was being rejected as the ultimate destination of the madding swarm.

We know exactly what beekeeper Patti Loesche was thinking, however, as she jumped into the car to begin her hot pursuit: “I was sure I would run into those bees again at some point. I knew they were looking for a new home.”

As she followed the swarm up the street, the main body was lost to sight; but as she rounded the corner of E. Lynn and headed toward Lake Washington, she encountered “something like a scene from an Armageddon movie,” she says. “I had no detective work to do.” What she saw was one woman running down the street in mad flight while two other women were frozen in place with horrified looks on their faces, pointing to a tall cedar tree at the North end of the waterfront park. Looking up to where the women were pointing, Patti saw that the bees were safely ensconced high in the tree.

Though not perfectly equipped for the assignment, Patti set to work. The goal: entice the bees into the artificial hive. It’s not a simple process, nor a quick operation. Getting honeybees to settle down in a new hive takes some gentle coaxing and a lot of patience. Not to mention more than a little stamina.

Patti set her ladder up against the base of the tree, climbed up, and got to work. Work, in the case, meaning holding a box of wooden frames next to a giant swarm of bees and hoping that they’ll decide (in the words of Patti Loesche) “Oh, here’s a good place!”

Soon, some of the bees started inspecting the box. “Once they do that, everyone goes in,” Patti says. “The bees were very calm, and many were on top of the box fanning their scent to bring the other bees in. Because of this, I believe that the queen must have gone in, though I did not see her,” she notes.

Though it became a tedious, backbreaking, box-holding endurance test for Patti, many of the bees finally coalesced into their new location after about an hour. She then vigorously shook the tree branch and a few thousand more bees landed in the box. During all this time she had been perched about 15 feet up the cedar tree. “But by now I had bonded with the swarm, so I was willing to wait on them for awhile.” It’s not a procedure she says she would recommend to anyone, however.

After about two thirds of the bees were in the box, she took it farther down the tree and set it on a lower ladder. It was getting late in the day, and under normal conditions she would have left the box overnight. Given its location in a public park, however, she decided this was not such a hot idea. So after waiting a bit longer for more of the bees to enter the box, she closed the entrance, considering the bee-capture operation a job well done. She estimates she collected around 80% of the bee swarm.

From that point it was just a matter of clearing up the equipment, getting the hive into the car, and setting off with the swarm for its new home in Fremont.

And the bees? They’re doing just fine, according to Patti. “It was a huge and robust hive,” she says, though the swarm’s queen apparently diappeared sometime after entering the box. Fortunately, Patti was able to successfully combine the new hive with an older one in her backyard apiary (she currently has a total of five hives, including two located in a neighbor’s yard).

“Just what were those bees doing swarming in Madison Park?” we asked. “It’s an absolutely natural event,” Patti reports. “Bees swarm one or more times a season, either to reproduce or because they’re overcrowded. This swarm occurred right when it’s supposed to.” She believes it came from someone’s hive, probably one that had become overcrowded, forcing the bees to move on.

And as for Val Ellis’s ceanothus bush (shown above), was it really a likely place for the bees to find a new home? “Not at all,” says Patti. “They were just resting there while deciding where to relocate the colony.” She notes that the swarm could have moved on into the Arboretum or possibly into a crevice at someone in the neighborhood’s house. “Scouts had been sent out,” she notes, “and I could see that the bees were beginning to dance on top of the swarm faster and faster. I knew they were going to make a move.” It just occurred a bit sooner than she had planned.

In the end, however, the Day of the Bees in Madison Park ended well for just about all involved. The folks on 42nd Avenue got a dose of excitement without any fallout; the beekeeper got another honeybee swarm to add to her collection; and the bees, for the most part, found themselves in a fine new home.

But not quite all of them. On the day following the mass honeybee emigration, a few lost and forlorn bees were still to be seen flying around in aimless circles near the cedar tree. If they could’ve, they would’ve cried, “Wha happa?”

***********

Thanks to Patti Loesche for sharing her photos and telling us the Rest of the Story. Patti has been a beekeeper for about four years. She says she got into beekeeping because a friend was doing it and it was fascinating to see how orderly and coordinated those thousands of bees could be: “I just love watching their behavior.”

[Photo of Val Ellis watching the bees vamoose by Sara Perkins.]

MLK School sale not illegal

2011-10-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

For the benefit of our readers who missed the story in the major media, we note that the Washington State Auditor has determined that "the Seattle Public Schools followed state law and district policy when the School Board voted last year to sell the former Martin Luther King Elementary School to the lowest bidder." That, according to the Seattle Times in a copyrighted story today.

The Auditor, however, did not opine on the wisdom of the policy that allowed for an outcome that lost the School District millions of dollars it would have received if selling the abandoned building to the highest bidder, The Bush School. The Auditor's job was simply to look for violations of law and due process.

It's ironic that we find ourselves linking to the story in the Seattle Times, given our stated position that the paper's failure to properly cover this story in the first place might have been partially responsible for the questionable outcome. That feeling led us for the first time in the two-plus year history of the Madison Park Blogger to leave our journalistic perch and descend into out and out editorialism. Or was that a step up?

MPC's Maggie Savarino: Poised to be notable

2011-10-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

She's one of those rare folks who both live and work in Madison Park. Maggie Savarino, former food-and-booze columnist for Seattle Weekly, is known to many of us as the front-of-house manager, concoctor of drinks, and sometime bartender at Madison Park Conservatory. She's also, in the opinion of Seattle Magazine, one of nine people "poised to become the Seattle dining scene's next notable names." In other words, she has the honor of being in the City's "Next Wave of Tastemakers."

The November issue of the magazine, just out, cites Savarino for "her upstairs bar menu of tinkered, tinctured cocktails and other creative libations," noting that these are "a welcome discovery at an already impressive restaurant." Seattle Magazine also discloses that Savarino recently authored a new book, The Seasonal Cocktail Companion, which will be published next month by Sasquatch Books. Subtitled, 100 Recipes and Projects for 4 Seasons of Drinking, the book, in the words of foodblog seattle.eater.com, "contains DIY projects, including root beer bitters, booze-soaked cherries, and make-your-own 'cellos beyond the standard lemon variety. As the title suggests, the book is organized by season, with at least one drink recipe for each project." DIY, for the uninitiated, is Do It Yourself.

We caught up with Maggie last week in MPC's upstairs bar, where she not only is responsible for creating the drink menu but also tends the bar on Wednesday evenings. She was modest about her newfound status as a tastemaker and somewhat bashful about getting her picture taken. But she was not shy about talking up her new book or touting the Conservatory. With regard to the book, she reports that her goal in writing it was to demystify the subject. She accomplishes this by providing cocktail recipes, tips, tricks, and ideas (including how to winterize tequila).

With regard to the restaurant, she notes that there is a new bar menu upstairs, just introduced, which includes some interesting and tasty items not part of MPC's regular fare (such as "a burger of our very own," a grilled cheese/smokey tomato soup combination, and a grilled beef tongue with housemade pickles). Happy Hour, by the way, is from 4 to 6 pm.

Another thing, she says, is worth noting: Tako Truk is back, at least in abbreviated form. Chef/owner Cormac Mahoney reintroduced the specialty-taco concept at MPC earlier this summer as the Sunday night cuisine (4-8 pm). It's an informal, family atmosphere downstairs, Maggie says, with no reservations taken and a menu consisting of interesting, unexpected and tasty tacos (including the popular Coco Piggy). If you wanted to, she says, you could probably be in and out in twenty minutes (though you probably wouldn't want to). In addition, there's fun upstairs for the 21-and-over crowd (featured on November 20, for example, is guest DJ Kurt “The Godfather” Bloch of Too Many Bands to Mention). Details of the Tako Truk experience are available here.

Police Blotter 10/15/11

2011-10-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

Madison Park: Crime backwater

The neighborhood is experiencing its typical end-of-summer slowdown in criminal activity, as evidenced by the above map, which shows reported crimes in Madison Park during the 30-day period, September 16 through October 15. When we contacted the Seattle Police this month to get background for this report, we had virtually nothing to ask about. While we're hardly crime free here in the Park, it's certainly the case that in relative terms our community remains something of an oasis within the urban jungle.

Of course, if you're the unlucky soul who had his house broken into or car stolen, you may not take such a sanguine view of the matter. While we almost made it through the period without a single burglary, there was one such incident reported: on the 3800 block of E. Crockett St. on September 16 (the star-burst icon on the map). An "unknown suspect" forcibly entered the residence while no one was at home and stole a computer, two iPods, one iPad, and some cash. One car, meanwhile, was stolen, that incident occurring on October 13 on the 2400 block of 41st Avenue E.

The only other crimes of note were the theft of a purse from a local restaurant (the victim having left her purse behind and the staff not being able to locate it later), and thefts from properties located on the 1900 block of 39th Avenue E. (on October 11) and 1700 block of E. Galer St. (on October 5). There were no car prowls in Madison Park proper, although ten such incidents were reported in the Arboretum or nearby during the period.

There was one disturbance investigated by the police, which happened on the 4100 block of E. Madison St. on September 27 (the black mask icon on the map), but the incident was pretty tame. The "victim" reported to police that a person known to him approached him and yelled at him, acting aggressively before leaving the scene. The complainant simply wanted the altercation documented, which the police obligingly did.

As we said, not much to report. Let's hope it stays that way.

Halloween is the day to trick or treat

2011-10-18T06:37:00.001-07:00

For some reason unknown to us, the Madison Park Business Association occasionally schedules its annual Halloween Trick or Treat event on a day other than Halloween. But this year, the big to-do is actually going to happen on Halloween Day. That means that neighborhood kids can dress up and present themselves for tricking or treating purposes at area businesses on Monday, October 31, from 3 until 5 pm.

Again this year, the Madison Park Cooperative Preschool will be taking pictures of the little tricksters at McNae Triangle Park (in front of Bing's) throughout the event.

[Upper graphic by artist Linda Apple. Photo by Melynda Warner.]

A glimpse into the past

2011-10-18T06:37:00.000-07:00

Our posting last week on the death of Governor Albert D. Rosellini elicited an email from Madison Park photographer Bob Peterson, with this photo attached. Peterson describes the shot, taken in downtown Seattle during the 1960 U.S. Presidential campaign, as his very favorite picture of Governor Rosellini. The photo shows an open convertible carrying Senator John F. Kennedy in a cavalcade along Fourth Avenue, near University Street (that's the Olympic Hotel in the background).

The Governor, seated next to the future President, is looking mighty pleased (perhaps anticipating his own re-election that fall). While Rosellini carried the state, Kennedy didn't do so, as Washington went Republican in the presidential contest that year. Seated in the backseat on the other side of Kennedy is probably the First Lady of the State, Ethel Rosellini. In the front passenger seat is Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson.

Though the car of choice for this ride down Fourth Avenue was a Buick, Governor Rosellini was a Cadillac man himself, in later years tooling around the neighborhood in a big white car of that make, license plate reading "GOV ADR".

[Photo by Bob Peterson. Click to enlarge.]

More critical mass for the retail core

2011-10-16T12:15:00.000-07:00

Another retail establishment arrived in "The Village" late last week, adding depth to Madison Park's shopping district and helping to reinforce 43rd Avenue's role as part of the district's retail scene. Park Bench Gifts, a couple months in the planning, officially opened for business on Friday in the Villa Marina building.

Manager Jan Yoder reports that Day One interest from passers-by was strong, and she says she's optimistic that the new store will quickly find its niche. She describes the shop's merchandise as being primarily home decor, accessories, and seasonal items (such as the Halloween and Thanksgiving things currently on display).

It's a pretty small location from which to operate, and the 400 or so sq. ft. of retail space is unusually configured to boot. But the store seems to work well in the cozy space, with plenty of room for displays and a nook-like feel for each of the two sections of the shop.

The new store is owner John Sheard's third retail operation in Madison Park (the others being Cookin' and Red Wagon Toys). With the arrival of Madison Park Gifts in the building, Villa Marina's available retail space is now full.

Madison Park Gifts is located at 1928 43rd Avenue E. Store hours are 10 am to 6 pm, Monday-Saturday, and 11 am to 5 pm on Sunday.

Free cupcakes at New York Cupcakes Saturday

2011-10-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Though the store actually opened in early September, the official Grand Opening of New York Cupcakes' Madison Valley location will occur tomorrow, with the store giving away 500 mini-cupcakes as part of the celebration. In addition, there will be a charity raffle for the grand-prize giveaway, The Ultimate Cupcake Birthday Party, where New York Cupcakes will throw a party for one lucky individual and 24 of his or her closest friends. The party will include cupcakes made by NYC, cupcake wrappers by Bella Cupcake Couture, invitations by local artist Jessie Olsen of Cakespy, flowers by Toppers florist, a photo booth by Art of Subtlety, and a $100.00 gift certificate to Common Folk Co. for the birthday person. Raffle tickets will cost $1, with all proceeds benefiting St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.

There will also be hourly prizes awarded during the celebration, which begins at 10 am and ends at 5 pm. The raffle winner will be announced promptly at the end of the Grand Opening, according to owner Lisa Waxman Johnson.

New York Cupcakes is located at 2711 E. Madison St.

SR 520 closes again this weekend

2011-10-14T05:37:00.000-07:00

Well, they couldn't close the floating bridge often enough or long enough, it seems, to get all of the necessary and immediate Eastside demolition and reconstruction done during the summer months (there have been four separate weekend closures so far), so these closures have now extended into the fall. At least tomorrow's closure will not occur until after the Husky game's return-home traffic has disbursed.

At it stands now, 520 will be shut at 8 pm on Saturday, from Montlake Boulevard to I-405 in Bellevue. Lanes will reopen by 5 am on Monday. 520 will remain open between I-5 and the Montlake Boulevard off ramp. According to the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), work this weekend includes installing 24 huge concrete girders for a new overpass at Evergreen Point Road in Medina and creating a median work zone for future improvements east of 84th Avenue Northeast.

This is hardly the last of the planned weekend closures. WSDOT noted in its press release yesterday that the "closures are limited to to no more than 20 weekends during the next three years." Information on all of this is available here.

[Photo by Tom Case, Great Beyond, on Flickr.]

Italian makes a comeback in Madison Park

2011-10-13T15:24:00.000-07:00

By Bryan Tagas

I first met the Celinda Norton, chef/proprietor of the soon-to-arrive Café Parco, when I accosted her on a Madison Park street corner earlier this summer. Recognizing her from afar (I’d seen her photo online), I made a mad dash down the street, deftly sprinted across an intersection—not quite knocking down a couple of probable Park Shore residents in the process—and “introduced” myself. I gave her and her entourage my very best imitation of the demanding/pleading/cajoling style that Barbara Walters does so well: I simply insisted on a pre-restaurant-opening interview.

Fortunately for me, Celinda proved to be a much more gracious person than I. She immediately agreed to the interview, never so much as hinting that she didn’t have a clue who I was or where Madison Park Blogger might fit into the scheme of things here in the neighborhood. I simply told her the truth: there are few things (perhaps no things) that my readers would rather hear about than the opening of a new food establishment in Madison Park.

Since she was game, we met up a couple weeks later—and over a glass of wine she provided me with the details for this backgrounder. Cafe Parco makes its debut tomorrow.

Cuisine: ‘Not Spaghetti Italian’

Although Café Parco is Celinda’s eighth restaurant, she says she’s finding the move to Madison Park to be a bit more of a transition for her than her other ventures have been. For one thing, she’s already discovered that this is a neighborhood where everyone seems to both have an opinion and be willing to walk right in and share it. These unsolicited (but, she says, welcomed) ideas about how the new restaurant should operate don’t necessary mesh with one another, it turns out. “There seem to be many 'food factions' at work in Madison Park!” she reports.

What she wants to make clear from the start, however, is that Café Parco will be an Italian restaurant. In other words, don’t expect to see the new menu trying to duplicate any of the dishes that were staples of the longtime predecessor on the site, Madison Park Café. French cooking is definitely not what the new place is all about. Neither are we talking “spaghetti house,” she declares. When asked to sum up the new cuisine, she responds with the term, “New World Italian.”

That naturally raises the next question: What typifies this style of Italian cooking? “Well, it isn’t just pasta, for one thing. It’s about the integrity of ingredients and not overdoing it. You allow the ingredients to speak for themselves.” She notes that “the breadth of Italian cuisine is amazing” and adds that she has been following the trends in Italian cooking for several years (also, this is also not her first Italian restaurant). “The cuisine of Italy is based on tradition and quality of ingredients.” she told me. “In recent years Italian chefs have embraced change. Not so long ago it was considered nearly a cardinal sin to change a historic recipe or presentation. Once the new trend toward creativity began to shift, it was adopted with gusto. The spirit of Italy lives on; fresh, quality ingredients, the best the season has to offer, are at the heart of every dish. Combinations may change but the integrity lives on. My menus will exemplify this. I will be working with the best items sourced locally. You will find familiar herbs and spices woven through my Italian-styled creations.”

Celinda says that while she has thousands of cookbooks, she doesn’t necessarily follow all of the instructions. She likes to experiment and create. One of the things she reports she’s working on right now is smoke--to be used, for example, to create smoked tomato sauce or lightly smoked cabbage. A recent addition to her cookbook collection, Smoke and Spice, is co‐written by a woman of Italian heritage, and Celinda says she was intrigued by the author’s use of smoke in dishes from her family recipes.

Celinda reports that her menus will always be changing. Her intention is to keep it fresh, she says. But what, exactly, will be on the opening menu at Café Parco? Here are some possibilities: Crespelle, braised rabbit filled Italian crepes, maybe NW-foraged chanterelles in roasted tomato cream over crostini, a roast duck breast entrée featuring house made Cappellini tossed in duck fat with orange, Castelvetrano olives, caramelized shallot, fresh thyme and sea salt. Her favorites on the lunch menu are the Rosemary ham on foccacia with pickled mustard seeds and confit of apricot and fennel or the simple indulgence of house-made Papparadelle tossed with smoked tomato sauce and Parmigiano. She predicts the Pasta al Forno will be a tremendous hit, describing it as a baked Italian-style “mac and cheese.

The price point for the Café she describes as “reasonable,” placing the lunch entrees in the $12-$15 range and the dinner entrees in the $15-$25 range.

‘You will almost always find me in the kitchen’

Café Parco will very much be about Celinda Norton and her culinary vision. “Ignore the ego,” she told me, “but I am good at what I do.” Although she says she will be wearing a variety of hats in the new establishment, the chef’s hat for her is by far the most important, “since for me, the food aspect is the most fun.” This is one restaurant that will be “run from the kitchen,” she assures us. Not that there is anything wrong with doing things another way, she adds, “But I will be the chef, and I really can’t imagine being dependent on someone to create the dishes and do the cooking.”

She says she’s expecting to work 16-hour days if necessary and believes her first day off will probably not arrive until sometime in January. Even with the hard work, however, she says she enjoys the challenge: “I love it. It comes natural to me.” After all, she’s been through this many times before. She started her first restaurant in Longview in 1979. Five successor restaurants in Longview followed that initial foray, before she moved to Seattle in 2003 to start 94 Stewart. Her restaurants’ cuisines have included Northwest, Italian, Mediterranean, Asian fusian, and even a dabble in “South of the Border.”

Helping her at Café Parco, in what is clearly a Norton family endeavor, are her two children, Lindsey and Nic. Lindsey, who her mom describes as a good cook who will provide some help in the kitchen, will primarily be up front serving (“Lindsey is a phenomenal server. She has superb knowledge of food and wine. She also is quite the entertainer. A guest once told us he asked for her section, just to watch her work. He called it Lindsey Vision”). Nic, meanwhile, will be the restaurant’s General Manager. She describes him having great “front of house” skills, in addition to which he is both a solid techy and “remarkable” cheese steward. He can wield a hammer, too, having more than a little to do with the building’s remodeling, currently underway. Anyone stopping by over the last few weeks has seen Nic, Lindsey and Chef Celinda all working madly to get Café Parco of the ground.

Reconfiguring the spaces

Madison Park Café was known for its cozy indoor atmosphere on cold days and its great outdoor seating on those rare warm days. Café Parco will have more room in both its interior and exterior seating locations. The intent, Celinda tells us, is to create new outdoor seating both directly in front of the restaurant (by extending the existing patio to the area along the sidewalk) and—ultimately—on the deck where the front door was located. The new entrance to the Café Parco will be where the side door had been. Remodeling of the interior will add another couple tables to that space as well.

The kitchen, meanwhile, has been expanded by moving the dishwashing operation downstairs (not very efficient, admittedly, but the only way to free up needed space, says Celinda). The kitchen will be more enclosed than it was (mahogany glass doors and bookshelves are being installed to block unwelcome light and sound from the reconfigured new dining room). While the hope had been to enlarge the cooking area and have a much larger hood, that has proven to be prohibitively expensive, so “We’ll just have to make do.”

Celinda says she’s looking forward to seeing what’s going to happen and is willing to make changes as she gets experience with the neighborhood and learns its tastes. Some things may work well; and others, not so much. “I can’t possibly make everyone happy,” she says, “but I can try.”

[Cafe Parco will be open for lunch each weekday beginning tomorrow, Friday, October 14. Dinner will begin next week, and weekend brunches will follow thereafter. For details, including hours of operation, check the Cafe Parco website (click here for details about the lunch menu). Cafe Parco is located at 1807 42nd Avenue E. (Phone: 328-4757). Note that Cafe Parco does not have its liquor license in place yet (though that should happen "soon"). In the meantime, Chef Celinda recommends that those who wish to have wine with dinner purchase a bottle at Madison Cellars (4227 E. Madison St.) and bring it along.]

Our memorable visit to the ‘other’ Madison Park

2011-10-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

My wife, Margo, and I just spent several sun-filled days in the city of New York, which explains the lack of postings on this blog during the interim. We were in the Big Apple to attend the opening-night reception at a Chelsea art gallery, where Margo is participating in a new show of abstract art. The event itself was rewarding and fun; but as it turned out, it was not the only “peak life experience” that we got to enjoy while in Manhattan. As a collateral benefit of our being “In Town,” we were also able to engineer something of a culinary coup--one that involved another Madison Park.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Seattle’s Madison Park is not the only Madison Park on the planet. This blog subscribes to a daily feed that provides updates showing any new Internet posting that uses the term “Madison Park.” So that’s how we came to know that Madison Park is also a musical group, a public high school, a park in Roxbury (MA) in Madison (WI) and in Santa Ana (CA), as well as a neighborhood in Charlotte (NC), among other things. New York does not have a Madison Park; but what it does have is a Madison Square Park, located right in the middle of Manhattan (in the Flatiron district). And that neighborhood, it seems, is referred to by New Yorkers as simply “Madison Park.”

While there’s a spectacularly unsuccessful high-rise condo project in the area, known as One Madison Park, there’s also a spectacularly successful restaurant there that takes its name from the same park. That trendy establishment is Eleven Madison Park, which is by far the most likely “Madison Park” to be mentioned in the press on any given day, completely overshadowing any references to Madison Park-Seattle.

Just the week before our arrival in NYC, Michelin awarded three stars to Eleven Madison Park, making it one of only seven restaurants in the City to be so highly rated. That same week, Zagat confirmed Eleven Madison Park as one of “New York’s Top Ten Restaurants” for this year. Though getting into Eleven Madison Park without a long-in-advance reservation is well neigh impossible, we decided to walk down to the place, take a look, and see if we could talk our way in for lunch.

Though we undoubtedly appeared as though we’d just blown in from somewhere remote (we had), we were nonetheless greeted at Eleven Madison Park by a poised and courteous front-of-house staff that gave every appearance of having been waiting breathlessly just for our arrival. When politely asked “How are you today?” Margo spontaneously began describing the trauma of coming to New York for her big art show but discovering on landing that her luggage had not arrived with her. (Here, an aside: Alaska Airlines touts its guarantee that your bags will appear on the carousel within 20 minutes of your plane's arrival or you are entitled to a $20 gift certificate or 2,000 frequent-flier miles. However, when your bags don’t make the plane at all—showing up at the hotel 40 hours later, in our case—you apparently get nothing. Not even an apology!).

Anyway, following her tale of baggage woe, Margo then launched into a story (quite true) about how one of her chef friends once did a stage (look it up) at Eleven Madison Park.

While she worked the left side of the house, I was working the right side, mentioning to a couple of young, eager-faced restaurant staffers that Margo and I live way, way Out West in the “other” Madison Park, that I write the neighborhood blog, and that while Eleven Madison Park ranks Number One on the “Madison Park” Google search, my own blog, Madison Park Blogger, ranks way down there at Number Eleven! Margo and I each ended our separate, overlapping pitches with how much we, for all these many reasons, wanted desperately to experience Eleven Madison Park. Having smiled and nodded appreciatively throughout our performance, the hostess then, without missing a beat, cheerily informed us that the restaurant was “full.”

Nevertheless, she let us in.

And not only that, the staff then gave us the kind of attention that, if we hadn’t known better, would have easily led us to conclude that they had mistaken one of us for somebody important. For good reason, Zagat describes EMP’s service as “world class” (“even the busboys have Cornell degrees” is the quote). The wait staff was super-attentive, yet not intrusive.

And the setting for all of this high-end professional courtesy is an art deco masterpiece, a huge 1930’s hall described, again by Zagat, as “majestic.” It’s a beautiful space done in tones of orange and brown--with flowers, fixtures and lighting that all just works to create a magnificent venue in which to enjoy the service—and, of course, the food.

The cuisine at Eleven Madison Park is classified by some as New American, and by others as French, but whatever you call it, it’s fantastic. We ordered lunch from an eclectic four-course prix fixe menu, and we spent a full three hours consuming it, along with all of the assorted hors d’oeuvre, amuses, and other delights that came our way. Partway through the meal we were invited to go into the kitchen to view the action, hear the EMP story, and watch while one of the chefs prepared a special passion-fruit daiquiri just for us (this involved, as part of the show, her literally whipping part of the concoction in an a bath of liquid nitrogen).

Since I am far from qualifying as a food writer, I would do an injustice to the fabulousness of the cuisine to try to describe it in detail. But “unexpected” and "adventurous" are terms that Eleven Madison Park takes to heart, and “artful” is the word used by many food writers to define chef Daniel Humm’s wizardry. Here are some examples of the cuisine: crab roulade wrapped in avocado, lobster knuckles sweetened with figs, and smoked sturgeon sabayon served in an eggshell. One reviewer describes the food at Eleven Madison Park as ranging from “very good to breathtakingly delicious.” And that was certainly our experience.

Chicken Breast Basquaise (from Serious Eats Review)

At the end of the meal, as Margo and I were basking in the afterglow of our amazing culinary adventure, one of our bright-and-enthusiastic servers quizzed us on how the East Coast Madison Park stacked up against the West Coast version. Which one, she asked, did we now most appreciate?

Hard to choose!

[To read a great review of Eleven Madison Park, see Frank Bruni’s four-star take on the place in the New York Times. Chef Daniel Humm, who Margo and I got to meet while we were enjoying his food, will be in Seattle next month to promote his new Eleven Madison Park cookbook, to be published on 11/11/11. (Third photo from the top is courtesy of Urban Spoon. Video is from vimeo.com).]

Meanwhile, on display at Montserrat Gallery, Chelsea:

"Collapse of the Colony" by Margo Spellman, mixed-media triptych. Montserrat Gallery is located at 547 W. 27th Street, New York City. On display through October 22.

Governor Rosellini dead at 101

2011-10-10T18:27:00.000-07:00

Albert D. Rosellini, 15th Governor of the State of Washington and longtime Madison Park resident, died today, according to the Associated Press. The Seattle Times reported the cause as complications of pneumonia.

Son of Italian immigrants, Rosellini, a Democrat, was elected Governor in 1956, re-elected in 1960, and defeated in 1964 by Republican Daniel Evans. He made further tries for elective office, as King County Executive in 1969 and for Governor again in 1972, before retiring from politics. He then worked as a lawyer, consultant, and beer distributor. The Governor lived, until just a few years ago, in a house on 43rd Avenue E., north of E. Madison Street. His wife, Ethel, died in 2002.

An excellent review of his life can be found at historylink.org. With Rosellini's death, there are six current and former Governors of the State living, the oldest of which is Daniel Evans, born in 1925.

[Photo courtesy of the University of Washington.]

Seen or heard in the 'hood

2011-10-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

John Gallen moves on

According to The Attic's Mark Long, "Johnny" Gallen began his several-decade career at Bert's in 1966, with a job sweeping floors. When the store's linoleum was replaced with carpet the following year, Gallen moved on to other duties, ultimately assuming responsibility as Bert's "flower guy." In his twenty-year role of flower buyer and plant expert at the store, he was well known to a couple generations of flower lovers and gardeners throughout the neighborhood.

After "retiring" from Bert's in 2006, Gallen continued to be seen in Madison Park, where he had been a longtime resident. Gallen recently moved to Aurora, Colorado to live near his family, reports Long, who believes that Johnny's departure represents "another passing of the torch" in the neighborhood. Long, who arrived at The Attic in 1989, remembers only Tina's on Madison, Madison Park Jewelers, Madison Park Hardware, Scoop du Jour, Anne Marie Lingerie, Choppers, the Red Onion, and Salon in the Park as other Madison Park businesses that were in operation then and which are still here today. Oh, and of course, Bert's Red Apple itself.

Ready for an Italian Renaissance?

Anyone wandering past the new Cafe Parco over the last fews weeks couldn't help but notice that things are happening there, both on the outside and the inside of the former Madison Park Cafe space. Chef/proprietor Celinda Norton and her crew (consisting primarily of family members) are working away madly in the hope of getting the doors open at the new neighborhood eatery within the next week or so (perhaps October 10).

Those interested in seeing what's going on inside can check out Cafe Parco's blog to view some interior construction photos. In a recent email to Chef Celinda fans, son Nic reports that the restaurant's menus have been posted online (see them here) and mentions that there has been something of a snafu in getting the liquor license approved (hopefully a problem that's resolvable before opening, but maybe not, he warns).

By the way, we have an "exclusive" interview with Chef Celinda that we will be posting at about the time of Cafe Parco's opening. Stay tuned.

New benches become official

Though Madison Park Blogger crassly overlooked a little side-ceremony that took place during Madison Park Art Walk last month, we're rectifying the oversight. The new stone benches next to the Bank of America parking lot were officially inaugurated with speeches and a ribbon cutting on Art Walk's opening night. Doing the honors (twice, since the cameraman was asleep at the switch) were these two photogenic girls, who performed their roles with energy and grace. We failed in our reportorial role in getting their names, unfortunately. But didn't we perhaps see those two in the Kid's parade last July?

The long-in-the-making bench-installation project was a joint effort of neighborhood volunteers, the Madison Park Business Association, and Bank of America.

Hey, you can't please everyone!

The benches in McNae Triangle Park, in front of Bing's, were considerably spruced up this summer when volunteers pressure washed and repainted them in a burst of civic do-goodness (do-gooderism?). Anyway, we understand that a lot of work went into the refurbishment; and we're told a lot of thought went into the choice of colors. Theses efforts, we're sure, have been appreciated by users and passers-by alike.

It just figures, however, that the new color combination for the benches (orange and green) would not get a thumbs-up from everyone in the Park. Do we ever agree about anything? Someone (we know who, but won't say) scrawled a you've-got-to-be-kidding-me message on a waste receptacle near the benches, apparently appalled over the shade of orange used (or maybe it was simply a complaint about the color orange in the first place). In any event the message was quickly erased by someone who evidently thought that the real travesty was the graffiti.

This and that

We've noticed what we think is an interesting convergence of two groups which are each planning to descend upon the general area this Sunday, October 9. One of the get-togethers is the monthly "meet and greet" at Tully's of the Seattle & Puget Sound Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) Group; and the other is the Meditative Tree Walk for International Peace in the Arboretum of the Seattle Druid Meetup Group.

Seen on a bumpersticker on a truck parked in Madison Park:

Stop Organized Crime: Don't Re-elect Anyone!

[Thanks to David Hutchins for the photo of the refurbished park benches in front of Bing's.]

Lesser Madison Park

2011-10-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

Commentary By Bryan Tagas

Columnist, author, and Madison Park resident Knute Berger (aka Mossback) wrote a cute piece several years ago (“Coffee talk in Madison Park”) in which he declared, somewhat tongue in cheek, that people living in the neighborhood could be divided into two principal camps: those who choose to get their java at Starbucks and those who are aficionados of Tully’s.

Starbucks customers, he wrote, “seem a little more groomed, more LA, more SUV.” He described the upscale coffeehouse as bustling “like a cross between a busy ski lodge and a place where people in office-casual dress take meetings” or perhaps “run their empires from their laptops.”

The much smaller and cozier Tully’s, in contrast, he viewed as the kind of “neighborly” place where groups of old friends might meet in an atmosphere embodying “some kind of older, village version of Madison Park.” He saw the place as being “old tennis shoes” versus “tennis club.”

In summing up the dividing line within Madison Park, Berger determined that the neighborhood “still carries some shades of class difference, between the upper middle class and the rich; between old-timers and newcomers, between people who seem to prefer an older, unpretentious Seattle and a slicker, more professional one.” And in their choice of coffeehouse, Madison Parkers may be making a statement that is more than just about the quality of the coffee. “It strikes me,” Berger concluded, “that the self-sorting in Madison Park suggests there is something sociologically important going on in these places. It's where people can quietly announce their class identification and aspirations.”

While Berger’s class-based assessment of the neighborhood is not without merit, it misses (or, at best, skirts) the principal issue that really defines Madison Parkers. The chief fault line within Madison Park, in my opinion, is the one that runs between the “Lesser Madison Park” crowd and the “Improvements Should Be Made” agitators. This ongoing “status quo versus change” conflict forms the backdrop that defines most of the struggles over proposed “improvements” to the neighborhood. And while Tully’s patrons might be more likely to be found in the “keep Madison Park as it is” group, there are plenty of Starbucks-coffee drinkers who are also solidly on the front lines with the stand-paters. Simplistically, the defining issue of this Great Divide can be summed up as Madison Park for Madison Parkers! versus Madison Park for Everybody!

The view from East Lynn Street

The current brouhaha over the possible removal of the chain-link fence at ‘Swingset Park’ (aka Madison Park Beach North) provides an appropriate jumping off point for a discussion of how the fault line works. Someone (in this case someone from outside the neighborhood) proposes that an “improvement” be made to a Madison Park venue: restore waterfront access by eliminating a fence that for many decades has created a barrier between Lake Washington and the public.

Residents then react, making a couple dozen comments on the proposal on this blog or in emails. The lines are drawn: Open things up or keep things closed?

There are, admittedly, legitimate safety concerns about the fence removal. Unless the original beach is restored, the riprap will still limit access to the water and will certainly be a potential hazard for children (one that insurers might define as an “attractive nuisance”). The water is several feet below the level of the grassy surface of the park; and at the bottom of the riprap, the water is filled with jagged rocks. But safety concerns are not predominant in the thinking of certain Madison Parkers, who are more focused on the potential disruption to the neighborhood that could be caused by opening that stretch of waterfront to the public.

Though the fence, with its blackberry-bush overgrowth, is an eyesore and an imposition on an otherwise pristine landscape, some neighbors are taking a clear position: “We like it like that!” They say they are worried about the parking situation in the area if the fence comes down and people from outside the neighborhood discover another lakeside access point. And then there are those concerns about possible nighttime crime and the loss of the quite, secluded, neighborhood feel of the park. But are these legitimate issues or just manifestations of what might be termed the “Lesser Madison Park” mentality?

“Keep the bastards out!”

Curmudgeon and longtime P-I columnist Emmett Watson (now long dead), was well known in the last century for half-seriously championing the concept of a “Lesser Seattle.” Watson’s proto-movement was an anti-outsider, anti-Chamber of Commerce reaction to growth, so-called improvements, and the establishment’s civic-booster mentality. Watson, who had his own connection to Madison Park, claimed to believe that it would be best if the City didn’t try to attract any new residents (hence his creation of the official Lesser Seattle slogan, shown above).

Even through Lesser Seattle may be dead, Watson’s legacy seems to live on in Madison Park, where a preservationist and anti-outsider mentality is often coupled with a feisty leave-us-alone stance. The neighborhood’s grand dame, Lola McKee, once summed up the attitude (which she didn’t necessarily admit to subscribing to) this way: “Let me pay my taxes, then leave me alone.” In order to discourage visitors, T-shirts were once supposedly printed up with “It’s Always Raining in Madison Park” emblazoned on them. There’s an anti-City of Seattle component to all of this as well. Madison Park is one of the very few neighborhoods in Seattle that takes pride in the fact that it has never adopted a comprehensive neighborhood plan, while bureaucrats from City Hall are often viewed here with intense suspicion.

Many in Madison Park are wary of any change that would potentially draw more people to the neighborhood. At a public meeting a couple years ago one resident used the term “those people” when describing the kind of visitors to the Park who might ride the bus in, or bring their home barbeque to the beach in the back of their pickup. Sometimes on hot summer days, visitors park on the public streets in front of our houses. Perhaps this kind of behavior should not be encouraged.

This Lesser Madison Park thinking sometimes immobilizes the neighborhood’s “establishment,” such as it is. For example, the rehabilitation and improvements made two years ago to Madison Park (the City park, that is) were the result of the organizing and fundraising efforts of a group of residents, Friends of the Park, who joined together in common cause. It could have been—but was not—a project of the Madison Park Community Council. From the Lesser Madison Park perspective, the proposed improvements might have resulted in more people coming into the neighborhood, potentially creating problems of parking and crime. At least some on the Council apparently bought into that view. Let’s keep the old park the way it is!

Another example of “establishment” immobilization is the time several years ago when some residents of Madrona wanted to re-open to the public Madison Park’s E. Mercer St. waterfront road end. They proposed that the City revoke the private-use permits of the neighboring private property owners. Madison Park’s own Council, however, was reportedly the only one in the area that did not come out in favor of the plan. Effectively, the neighborhood’s representatives could not agree to the position that opening publicly owned space in Madison Park to the public was an inherently good thing.

Lesser Madison Park, it should be noted, does not equate to “make no changes to the Park.” After all, there have been many recent improvements to the neighborhood (such as the McNae Triangle Park in front of Bing’s, the BofA parking lot benches, and the “beaver lodge” road end) that are the result of people banding together to enhance the community. These projects are generally not controversial since they are unlikely on their own to attract additional visitors to the Park. They fit more into the category of improvements that residents, primarily, can enjoy. Lesser Madison Park advocates and boosters alike are able to work together on these kinds of projects without shifting the fault line.

But when it comes to bigger changes, something that would get the attention of a much wider audience, the division within Madison Park becomes much more pronounced. This controversy over a new public waterfront-access point is therefore not surprising, since we do not have consensus on what kind of a neighborhood Madison Park really is.

Inclusive or exclusive?

There are 5,000 of us living in Madison Park; and short of our doing a formal survey, there is just no way to know for sure what we think our neighborhood should stand for--if anything. Whether Madison Parkers predominantly see the various neighborhood “improvements” as an inherently good or bad thing is a mystery; and frankly, our representatives on the Community Council are simply not in a good position to know. Does Madison Park embrace “outsiders” or are we just threatened by them?

While we may really be the elitist, keep-it-all-to-ourselves kind of neighborhood that our detractors claim we are, I’d like to think we’re better than that. The choice before us, I believe, is this: Do we as a community wish we were more like our exclusive enclave, Broadmoor, with its perimeter walls and gate guards? Or are we a neighborhood that believes in sharing with other Seattleites the very amenities that help make this Village by the Lake a joy for those of us lucky enough to live here?

How we answer that question will certainly do far more to define each of us as Madison Parkers than our preference for where we purchase our morning coffee.

[Thanks to Richard Carl "Dick" Lehman for the use of his cartoon, above.]

Fence or no fence?

2011-10-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

The regular Madison Park Community Council meeting on Monday evening will include a discussion of the proposal to remove the fence at the "Swingset Park" (aka "the Dog Park," aka "Madison Park Beach-North"). The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has invited itself to the meeting for the purpose of discussing the idea and getting community input.

The Council's president, Gail Irving, is already on record as opposed to the idea, at least without other changes being made to the park as well. Some condo owners in neighboring buildings have also expressed opposition in emails to this blog.

Tomorrow's meeting provides the opportunity for Madison Parkers to weight in on this contentious issue. The Community Council meets at the Madison Park Beach Bathhouse (1900 43rd Avenue E.), beginning at 7 pm.

Bringing us up to date on 520

2011-09-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

You might well think that there just is no stopping the State from doing what it wants to do to State Route 520. To be sure, the project has quite a bit of forward momentum. For example, the revisions to the Eastside portion of the highway, including the creation of two additional lanes, are well underway (that's the Bellevue Way overpass above 520 being demolished earlier this month in the photo above). Meanwhile, the State recently published its final environmental impact statement (FEIS) for the I-5 to Medina portion of SR-520; an apparently winning bid was received from a general contractor for the floating-bridge-replacement work; and the federal government weighed in with its approval of the project. This thing is marching forward.

But while there doesn't seem to have been much press coverage of the fact, the opponents of the State's plans have by no means rolled over. In fact, just this month the Coalition for a Sustainable 520 filed a federal lawsuit over the FEIS in which it asks the court to "declare that the defendants' actions as set forth in this Complaint are arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, not in accordance with law, not supported by substantial evidence, and without observance of procedures required by law, and therefore must be set aside." The defendants are both the federal and State governments, so this is pretty strong stuff.

The State still thinks the whole replace-the-bridge program is a fine idea, it still doesn't have anywhere close to the money needed to complete the project, and the opponents are still up in arms. Oh, and the tolling that was supposed to begin on the floating bridge during the spring? Maybe next year. That pretty much covers the 520 story since our last posting on the subject. Consider yourselves up to date.

Tomorrow, you will have your chance to weigh in on "the urban design of the new corridor." That's the currently unfunded portion of the new 520, everything between Foster Island and I-5, including the new Montlake "interchange" and freeway lid. From 9 AM until noon there will be a presentation of the "Seattle Community Design Process" and an opportunity to "meet" (and presumably talk to) the SR 520 design team. The session will be held in Mary Gates Hall at the University of Washington (south of Suzzallo Library, north of Drumheller Fountain, for those familiar with the campus layout).

[Photo courtesy of the Washington State Department of Transportation, whose website for the SR 520 Bridge Replacement and HOV Program can be found here.]

Tile artists return to the Park on Saturday

2011-09-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

Madison Park's Pioneer Hall is the venue again this year for the Handmade Tile Festival, presented by Artisan Tile NW. Over twenty tile artists will be participating in this, the 6th Annual Festival. Many of these artists will also be submitting their works for a juried show at the conclusion of the Festival.

The theme for the show this year is “Signage." This is a reference to the old tradition of fronting shops, professional offices and residences with tile signs. In the period before widespread literacy, such signs often used images and symbols rather than words. Many of the Northwest tile artists in this show will be doing a contemporary take on this old tile-signage art form.

This is the fourth year in a row that the Festival has chosen Madison Park for the event. There will be a public-invited reception and preview of the exhibition on Friday evening (5-8 PM) at Pioneer Hall, with the show itself taking place on Saturday, October 1, from 10 AM until 5 PM. Pioneer Hall is located at 1642 43rd Avenue E.

The artists will be on hand at the Friday reception and throughout the day on Saturday. Most of the tiles on display during the show will be available for sale.

Artisan Tile NW is a non-profit handmade tile-makers group dedicated to the creation, promotion and preservation of the art and craft of handmade tile. You can see more examples of tile art at the group's Flickr photostream.

[Photos courtesy of the artists: Maria Root (top), Karen Morrice (middle), and Deborah Bacianga (bottom). The "Seattle, Buy Local" tile shown at bottom is the commemorative tile for this year's Festival, available for sale at the show in a limited edition for $35.]

Musings on the real estate scene

2011-09-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Madison Park: not hot, not cold

Though we’re still a month away from our third-quarter report on Madison Park real estate activity, it’s already clear that the summer is ending on a pretty solid note. There have been many more sales per month than in earlier quarters, and there’s a large number of properties pending sale. This bodes well for a potentially strong close to the year, at least in terms of sales. It may also be the case that the average price-per-square-foot achieved by sellers is now trending up rather than down. So while it’s too early to be breaking out the champagne, these markers, combined with a decline in market inventory, do give sellers reason for hope.

Nevertheless, Seattle, like most U.S. metropolitan areas, remains a “buyer’s market” in the opinion of national real estate research consultants such as Altos Research. SeattleBubble.com. meanwhile, recently looked at Northwest Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data, comparing the 2011 numbers to the historic “high” and “low” points for the last decade in King County. That analysis showed that sales in the County this year are at about 60% of the decade’s best year, while pending sales are at about 70% of the best year. In terms of closed sales, pending sales and inventory levels, the King County market is still below the averages for the Century’s first decade. The conclusion of SeattleBubble.com: “Sure, we’ve moved out of the gutter, but we’ve got a long way to go before we get back to anything resembling a ‘normal’ market.”

Madison Park is probably no exception. Real estate website Redfin did some interesting statistical research on Seattle neighborhoods earlier this summer and found that Magnolia, Ballard, Northeast Seattle, Queen Anne, and Northwest Seattle were the hottest neighborhoods, at least in July. The relative “hotness” of each neighborhood was rated, among other things, on the year-over-year price change for sold properties (up 8.4% for Magnolia and 2.7% for Queen Anne), and the number of months of inventory (2.0 months for Ballard, 2.3 for Northwest Seattle). How did Madison Park compare? The neighborhood showed a year-over-year change in the average sales price per-square-foot of 2.5%. At that point we had an 8.2 month supply of inventory (total listings divided by total sales for the month). While we may not be hot, neither are we cold. Redfin gave that designation to the Lake Union, Rainier Valley, and Lake City neighborhoods.

A final bit of encouraging news was provided by Zillow, which at the end of July reported that its Home Value Index for our neighborhood (excluding Broadmoor) was up 5.5% year over year.

‘A buyer for every house’

I sometimes attend “brokers’ opens”, which are held in this area on Thursdays. These open houses are designed to showcase new listings to real estate professionals so they’ll know what’s available in the market. The listing agent (or a surrogate) usually sits in the house for a couple of hours around lunchtime and answers questions put by the other agents and the occasional passerby who might show up. Part of the listing agent’s job is to shill for the seller: talking up all the pluses of the property while downplaying (or completely overlooking) any minuses. A good agent will be able to make a potential negative into a positive (for example, talking about super-tight spaces as “warm and cozy” or positioning a house’s lack of yard as a great situation for those tired of landscape maintenance).

I was visiting with an agent during an open house recently, while she did her thing. As various agents wandered through the place, she would occasionally call out to them: “Did you notice the lovely inlaid wood floors in the master bedroom? It’s all original!” Having walked through the house earlier, I asked her about the weird floor plan. She admitted it was pretty bad. And that was hardly the only problem with the house (lack of street appeal and a musty interior smell were among the other downsides). So, I wondered, how are you going to unload this thing? She had a ready answer: “There’s a buyer for every house, Bryan!”

That piece of insight certainly seems to hold true, even if the seller may have to wait a long time for that buyer to finally come along. Right now, according the MLS, there are 17 homes in Madison Park that have been on the market for 200 days or more. And seven of these have been on the market for more than a year (one for over 500 days). These properties range in price from $265,000 (for a Canterbury Shores condo) to $5,400,000 (for a Broadmoor mansion at an “undisclosed” address), so it’s not all about the “price point.” While a lot of the problem may be that theses homes are priced above their actual market value, it may instead be that the “right buyer” has simply not come along to claim them. That’s what the sellers certainly hope.

Every once in a while a house will sell after a long spell on the market, even without a steep lowering of the initial offering price. When that happens, it’s a wonderful vindication for the seller (and perhaps for the agent as well, unless the agent had been arguing unsuccessfully for price reductions as the home sat unsold). There was a “right buyer” in those unusual cases, just as there was a “right buyer” in the more typical long-term situations where the buyers struck deals only after the sellers made significant price concessions. But in the end, most homes one way or another do end up with the “right buyer.”

There are many examples in Madison Park of houses that ultimately found a buyer when it seemed that a sale was unlikely, or at least a sale at the initial offering price. One such house in my neck of the woods is a 7,000 sq. ft. speculative house built in 2005. At the time it was put on the market it was the subject of a laudatory article in the Madison Park Times in which the builders stated that they were trying to recreate a little bit of their native Russia right here in the heart of Madison Park. Much to the consternation of the neighbors, however, they had torn down a classic house in order to build a gigantic home that featured a pastiche of different window, column, and railing styles. When the builders said that the house was reminiscent of St. Petersburg, one neighborhood wag suggested its style was more like “St. Petersburg as interpreted by Las Vagas.” At a neighborhood party about the time the house came onto the market, the host invited guests to compete for who could come up with the best word to describe this new neighborhood structure (I’ve forgotten what the winning word was, but my vote in absentia—since I was not invited—was “egregious”). There was just no way this house was going to sell to anyone. So we thought.

Just a few months later, however, the house sold at close to the asking price of $4,400,000. The buyer was an insurance executive from California. At that time and in that place, at least, the “buyer for every house” adage certainly proved true. But maybe not today. That same house was just withdrawn from the market after having been first listed for re-sale in May 2009, at $4,700,000. The asking price was reduced to $4,250,000 in early 2010 and to $3,600,000 in 2011. Still no buyer. But someday...

The ‘art’ of selling houses

One of the chief jobs of the listing agent is to entice prospective buyers and their agents to take a look at their listed property. One method of drumming up interest is through the artful wording used in the description of the home. That’s the paragraph used that’s in ads, on the agent’s and other real estate websites, and given to the MLS. I often get a chuckle out of these little essays. My favorite real-estate-agent adjective is the word charmer, a very much over-hyped term that’s sometimes appropriate but is often used to mean, at best, “fixer-upper.”

Of all the real estate property descriptions I’ve read over the years, however, this recent entry for a probable teardown in Madison Park certainly is the most incomprehensibly overwrought:

“A Lake Washington treasure ~ tucked away on a lakefront peninsula of history in the heart of Seattle. The diary of this quiet, no-through avenue in Madison Park/Washington Park community is a journal of significant citizens and signature properties, drawn together by attitudes: superb positions, civic pride, world interests. 60’ of gentle shores; 15,500 sf street to beach. The lore of an Elizabeth Ayer legacy before retiring. Eclectic fire of sunsets against towers of glass; jagged Mtn. peaks.”

Must have worked. The property is rumored to be going pending.

A fine mess: City to detour E. Madison Street through Madison Valley beginning Monday

2011-09-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

One-week closure has merchants up in arms

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. When the Madison Valley Stormwater Project was conceived, nothing other than the intermittent blockage of E. Madison St. was anticipated. That was then, this is now.

Next week, due to "unavoidable" circumstances, Madison Street will be closed to traffic through the Martin Luther King, Jr. Way E./28th Avenue E. intersection (the red area shown on the map below). The 18,000 vehicles that transit the area daily will be channelled through side streets for five straight days, beginning Monday morning and continuing at least until sometime Friday afternoon.

The purpose of this temporary closure is to repave the intersection, which happens to be the location where four large boulders were discovered by the tunneling machine near the end of last year. The machine was boring an underground tunnel for the pipeline that will be used to divert stormwater into the new high-capacity tank being constructed near the ball field in Washington Park. The boulders, however, proved to be immovable objects, other than through above-ground excavation. As a result, the intersection had to be torn up--and this caused, in the parlance of Seattle Public Utilities (SPU), "a differing site condition." Meaning, therefore, the implementation of a "street restoration plan." In other words, big-time repaving.

According to Grace Manzano, SPU's project manager, Madison Street's repaving will involve a significant amount of concrete pouring and the integration of steel rebar into the works. This is in order to properly distribute traffic loads on E Madison. It's "unfortunate," she tells us, that the area will be further disrupted by this additional work, but it's all in a good cause. "SPU wants to complete the work as quickly as possible so the merchants can return to earning their livelihoods," she says. "This is the end phase."

When the City announced the detour plan earlier this week, Madison Parkers may have detected a wailing sound coming from the Valley. Those were the Madison Valley merchants, whose general response to this unexpected challenge seems to be "You're killing us!!!" Anger and frustration boiled over in an email sent by Marie Harris of Veritables earlier this week. Accusing SPU of being "tone deaf" she railed, "We were assured you would be out of our business district by the end of summer...We have cooperated to the point of rolling over and playing dead." She requested that the project be put on hold at least until January, after the holiday selling season is ended.

Madison Valley Merchants Association (MVMA) president Larry Levine, meanwhile, sent the Mayor a letter on behalf of the Association. In it he stated that "many merchants have given up publicly expressing their concerns or contacting SPU with their concerns. They feel that their concerns fall on deaf ears." A later meeting at Cafe Flora between SPU and some of the merchants did not result in a delay of the repaving, however. It is moving forward as planned.

In here (28th E. )

Here's the rundown of how the detour will work. Westbound traffic will be detoured onto 28th Avenue E. (at the corner where the restaurant Luc is located), it will be channeled onto E. Mercer Street after one block, and then be routed onto 27th Avenue E. for one block back to E. Madison Street.

Out here (27th E.)

Traffic moving in the opposite direction will be detoured off E. Madison at 27th E. and head eastbound on E. Arthur Place for a block before being re-routed back onto E. Madison. There will be limited parking, if any, on these detour streets, although parking will still be allowed on E. Madison St., other than in the area of the intersection repaving. There is a separate truck detour route which is a far longer, more cumbersome way into and out of Madison Park:

The Madison Valley Community Council has come out with an announcement encouraging all area residents to patronize the Valley's merchants during the construction period. Signs will be posted reminding everyone that the district is still open for business. It is hoped that all paving will be completed before the dinner crowd arrives in the Valley on Friday evening.

For what it's worth, SPU's Manzano tells us that everyone on the project understands the merchants' frustration. We're giving the last word, however, to Madison Valley resident Richard Winsler II, who in an email to the MVMA summed up the frustrations of people living in the construction zone. He said he opposed any efforts by neighborhood businesses to have the repaving delayed until next year. "While we may sympathize with the local businesses," he wrote, "we will do everything we possibly can to have the construction over with ASAP. We will NOT allow for it to be put on hold."

"Please don't forget," he added, "that the residents agreed to have the night work happen to help out the merchants back in March. While all the business owners were home sleeping soundly, nearly every single resident was kept up every night for two weeks during the night time construction. The residents have had enough and want this construction to be done with promptly and with no interruptions."

Police Blotter 9/22/11

2011-09-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

A month without a break-in?

For a period of 29 days (August 18 through September 15), Madison Park did not experience a single residential break-in (or at least not one that was reported to the police). It was looking like we might actually experience a full month without a home burglary in the neighborhood. But it was not to be. On September 16, a late-afternoon break-in at a residence on the 3800 block of E. Crockett Street, in Canterbury, ended the run. Nevertheless, it may be that we're beginning to see the usual end-of-summer decline in this kind of activity. To date, at least, there has not been another such incident reported.

Car break-ins, however, continued unabated. There were nine car prowls in Madison Park proper during the period since our last Police Blotter on August 18, plus another nine incidents reported at various locations in the Arboretum. Here's the run down of car break-ins in the neighborhood: one on 8/26 on the 3400 block of E. Valley St., one on 9/1 on the 4000 block of E. Madison St., two on 9/7 on the 4000 block of 43rd Avenue E., one on 9/6 on the 1200 block of McGilvra Blvd. E. and on the same day another one on the 700 block of the same street, one on 9/8 on the 4000 block of E. Madison St., and one on 9/12 on the 1900 block of 42nd Avenue E. There was also one car stolen in the neighborhood, that incident occurring at 5:30 am on September 6 on the 2300 block of 42nd Avenue E.

Other crimes included a case of harassment involving a landlord and tenant on the 3900 block of E. Madison St. (the giant exclamation point on the map above), with the tenant allegedly making threats (and apparently being hauled off by police for his efforts), a "bar fight" on the 4200 block of E. Madison on August 20 (that one involving an altercation between a patron and the female barkeep), and an arrest of a suspect under a warrant on the 1400 block of E. Galer St. on September 13. And there was the usual slew of lesser criminal incidents (theft of mail, dog off leash, credit-car fraud, and petty theft) to round off this month's Police Blotter.

"I need a locksmith" scam artist at it again

Apparently he's at it again. We've alerted our readers on more than one occasion to the well-known (at least to his victims and readers of Madison Park Blogger) scammer who preys upon certain sympathetic souls who fall for his well-honed line about being locked out of someplace and needing money for a locksmith. We received this report from Nat Stratton-Clarke at Madison Valley's Cafe Flora last week:

"There is a man conning people out of money going around the neighborhood saying that he is a janitor from Cafe Flora early in the mornings. He is slim, in his early twenties and African American. He went to Ines Patisserie yesterday morning around 6:30 AM asking her for money and told her that it was his first day at the restaurant and that he needed $52 for a locksmith because he locked himself out. He also approached our executive chef two weeks ago with the same story while she was by herself at her car a few blocks down the road from Flora. She didn't feel comfortable confronting him ( and I am glad that she didn't!). I just want make sure people know that he does not work at Cafe Flora. None of our janitors work that early in the morning and none of them can lock themselves out because they are always here with a manager. Hope this hasn't happened to anyone else!!!"

While it could be a copycat scam artist, it's probably the same infamous guy. It's not apparent in these incidents that anyone actually forked over any money, however, so perhaps the word is out. In the earlier incidents people gave the cash and wondered at their gullibility after the fact. Of course using the line about being a janitor at Cafe Flora when trying to scam an actual employee of that restaurant would not be a winning strategy in any circumstance. Nevertheless, the "I Need a Locksmith" scammer is known in the past to have hit the very same house twice with similar "locked out" stories. Its clear that when it comes to conning people, his attitude can be summed up in that old adage: bold is gold.

Criminal, or just weird?

We also received this report earlier in the week from a reader on 42nd Avenue E., south of E. Madison St.:

“I have just filled a police report regarding a man in the neighborhood who has shown up at my house three times in the past 24 hours. He first appeared at my garden gate late yesterday (Sunday) morning, while I was working in the garden. He looked like someone from the neighborhood who had been out running. However, once he began talking, it was clear that he was either using something or perhaps had a mental condition.

He then left plants at my front door early this morning while my husband and I were out walking. We learned that the plants were purchased early this morning from a nursery in the Boeing Field area. We thought it concerning but not totally alarming until he showed up at the gate about 7:00 PM this evening with flowers. We called the police.

He is white, about 5'9" tall with short brown hair, clean shaven and in his early to mid 40's. This evening he was wearing jeans, a dark shirt, black baseball cap and dark glasses. He seemed confused when he saw my husband and did not recognize me; but did he remember that he had met a [houseguest] at the house. We told him [the houseguest] was gone to California. He said his name was David, and was heading for Arizona in a couple of months. He left quickly.

The police asked that if anyone sees him to please let them know. Sadly, there is now a lock on the front gate. We hope that it will not have to be there for long, but this just seems a bit too odd to ignore and we wanted to let others know, just in case he shows up at their home or yard."  

More waterfront access for Madison Park?

2011-09-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

City rethinking longstanding approach

Longtime Madison Parkers can remember a time when the "Swingset Park" at E. Lynn St. and 43rd Avenue E. was a lovely, sand-filled beach providing year-round access to Lake Washington. Somewhere along the way, however, the City decided to replace the sand with riprap and ultimately concluded that topping the whole thing off with a chain-link fence was a wonderful idea. What was once a favorite neighborhood beach became, instead, a waterfront park without water access. In fact, according to the Seattle Department of Parks & Recreation, it is the only piece of park shoreline in the entire City that is not accessible to the water.

Why this was allowed to happen is not obvious, and the Parks Department has been unable to provide us with an explanation. What we did learn today, however, is that the City is seriously looking at reversing course and seeking a way to provide public access to Lake Washington at the E. Lynn site. According to Parks spokesperson Dewey Potter, a "briefing paper" has been prepared on the subject, which will soon be presented to a meeting of the Parks Board.

The catalyst for all of this, apparently, is a "citizen request" made by an open-spaces activist, Patrick Doherty, who wrote an interesting opinion piece concerning our little park on the Daily Journal of Commerce's "SeattleScape" blog in August ("Why is the City Fencing Off the Shoreline in Madison Park?"). Doherty states in his posting that he was told that the residents of Madison Park do not want the beach restored (though who told him that is unclear). "Well, excuse me," he exclaims, "but Lake Washington shoreline is a precious, very finite commodity and public ownership and use of any part of that commodity is not the sole province of the nearby neighbors."

A reader of this blog sent us the link to Doherty's opinion piece when it appeared last month and suggested that we look into the matter. The Parks Department did not at that time respond to our request for comment. Today we learned, however, that SeattlePI.com is working on a story about the City's possible new stance regarding the E. Lynn Park. As noted, the Parks Department has now acknowledged as much.

Some MPB readers may recall that several years ago the neighborhood activist group, Historic Madison Park, raised the same issue that Doherty has now claimed as his own: Give Us Our Waterfront Access! But the group's numerous suggestions for potential "improvements" to Madison Park were met with reactions ranging from outrage to indifference. The stiff opposition of many in the Madison Park "establishment" to HMP's ambitions ultimately was the death knell for the group, which ultimately gave up its efforts and disbanded out of frustration, anger, and recrimination. Or at least that's the way we remember it.

At any rate, that inside-Madison Park group was ineffective in getting what Doherty has apparently accomplished from the outside: a City review of a decision that was made decades ago and may not be the appropriate one for today's Madison Park.

We have been promised that when the 'briefing paper" is slated for a Parks Board agenda, it will be made available to us. Hopefully, it will not only make recommendations concerning the E. Lynn park but will also include the history of the site and the rationale for closing it off to public access.

UPDATE:

This just in: The Parks Department staff will be asking the Madison Park Community Council for some time at its October 3 meeting to discuss the "Madison Park North Beach" fence removal, according to Parks spokesperson Dewey Potter. The Board of Park Commissioners will be briefed by staff on the issue at its November 3 meeting, and a public hearing will also be held. The Board is expected to discuss the issue at its December 8 meeting and then make a recommendation to the Superintendent. Apparently the issue at hand is simply removing the fence, not restoring the beach, however.

More to follow.

[Upper photo courtesy of Windermere Real Estate, used without permission. Satellite photo from GoogleEarth.]

The great summer bee caper

2011-09-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Honeybee swarm causes a ruckus

It was a quiet, tranquil and, rare-for-July, sunny summer day on 42nd Avenue E. when the bees came. As the morning wore on, however, it began to dawn on folks living on the block between E. Newton and E. Lynn Streets, that something was not quite right. The neighborhood was no longer quiet and tranquil. What was that loud humming, anyway?

Where they came from, no one knows. But the bees had arrived in a giant swarm, and for some reason they decided that a big bush in front of the home of Val Ellis would be a pleasant destination. Though Val and her husband were oblivious to the sudden bee invasion, some of their neighbors had become aware of the situation. Naturally, they were alarmed. Val’s immediate neighbor, Anton, called her to break the news: “Say, Val, are you aware that there are thousands of bees in your front yard?”

What Val discovered when she looked out the window was quite a sight. “I freaked out,” she told us. “I knew nothing about bees, but there they were just ten feet from my front door!” And the bees weren't all resting peacefully in their newfound bush, either. Many were doing what bees do: swarming all over the place, occasionally massing themselves on neighbors’ windows, and buzzing out into the street.

It was clear that the neighbors expected some kind of solution out of her, Val said. “They were up in arms!” Apart from their concerns, Val herself was plenty motivated to get the bees gone--the sooner the better.

So she took action. She called an exterminator: “Get down to Madison Park pronto. We’ve got an emergency!” she cried. [At this point we should note that Val doesn’t remember exactly what she said because she was still freaking out, so she gave us permission to misquote her, if necessary, to heighten the drama of the story.] The exterminators said they’d soon be on their way: “Don’t worry, lady, those bees are gonna be history.”

Meanwhile, however, cooler heads prevailed. A neighbor, having investigated the commotion, asked his arborist (who just happened to be on site) to take a look at the situation. The arborist immediately identified the bush (or perhaps tree, Val was a bit unsure which it was). More importantly, the arborist identified the bees as honeybees. As everyone knows, honeybees are in crisis mode. You certainly can’t exterminate honeybees! We need every one we’ve got!

So on to Plan B: Call the Bee Lady. In this case, Patti Loesche, a beekeeper from Fremont who is a member of the Puget Sound Beekeepers Association. It seems that honeybee swarms are not uncommon around here, and the PSBA maintains a list of beekeepers ready and willing to pick them up and find the bees a new home (in the beekeeper’s apiary, of course). Loesche arrived on the scene within an hour or so (the exterminators earlier having been called off). She immediately got to work.

The neighbors, of course, remained riveted to the scene (though at a safe distance). Honeybees swarms are not aggressive, Loesche pointed out. She then explained to the crowd how she was going to entice those very bees into an artificial hive she’d brought expressly for that purpose. “As you can see I have here…”

As it turned out, however, educating an uninformed public and catching honeybees are two different objectives that can’t necessarily be undertaken simultaneously. While the educational process seemed to be going pretty well, the bees were apparently coming to the conclusion that they didn’t much like what they were hearing. Suddenly the Queen decided to take off--and the swarm, following her, made a bee-line down the street. “They’re getting away!” the crowd yelled in unison.

"Come back!"

Unperturbed, Loescher leaped into action. She hoisted the artificial hive back into her vehicle, jumped in, revved the engine, and sped down the street in hot pursuit. Racing around a corner, she was lost to sight.

The bees gone, the crowd disbursed.

[Thanks to Sara Perkins and Dick Lehman for the photos. Thanks to Sara Perkins and Val Ellis for telling us the story. It seemed like such a good place to end the tale, but there's actually more to tell. Return to the blog later this week to learn "The Rest of the Story."]

A fun night in Madison Park

2011-09-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

The opening of the Second Annual Madison Park Art Walk on Friday night was one of those occasions when everything just worked. The weather was perfect, the art good-to-great, and the music infectious. Anyone experiencing the show, even the most curmudgeonly among us, would certainly have seconded the proposition that Madison Park is one fabulous village by the lake.

The kickoff for Art Walk was a packed reception at Starbucks. The event brought out an array of neighborhood types, a good selection of out-of-the-area art lovers, and the occasional passerby who was swept in, wondering what all the excitement was about. The venue seemed much more hopping than it did during the first Art Walk last year. The attraction of the event may have been heightened by the fact that each of the participating artists was allowed to have one piece on display at Starbucks this year (those artworks, incidentally, will remain there through the end of the month). The wine and beer flowed freely--as did the art lovers, who proceeded from Starbucks to visit the 28 locations hosting artist installations. The tide began rolling at Ann Marie Lingerie, flowed down E. Madison Street, and washed ashore at Roppa Bella, around the corner on 43rd.

The art of Brooke Westlund at Park Deli

There were multiple musicians performing during the evening, with Sambatuque making things festive at the triangle park in front of Bing's, where spontaneous dancing broke out and continued into the night.

But music was not the only lively thing during Art Walk. The art itself was often interesting, diverse, and fun to see in unlikely settings.

The art of Lene Sangster & Julia Waldeck at Cactus!

There are clearly a lot of talented and creative people living in the general vicinity. Approximately 30 artists from the Park and surrounding neighborhoods made the cut for this year's show. In addition to the more established artists, grade-school artists (from McGilvra, St. Joseph, and Epiphany Schools), teen artists (including some from Coyote Central), and "resident" artists from Park Shore, also had their works on display at various venues.

The art of McGilvra's students at Red Wagon Toys

One of the best things about the evening was the ability to interact with the artists and learn about their art. Another positive aspect was seeing so many neighbors and friends enjoying the connection to community that Art Walk exemplifies.

Artists Margo Spellman and Barbara Ireland

We are unabashed fans of this sort of thing, so perhaps we're just prejudiced. Nevertheless, we doubt that very many (if any) participants left Friday's Art Walk opening wishing they had done something else with their evening.

Art Walk, sponsored by the Madison Park Business Association, could not happen but for the dedicated work of volunteers and the generous contributions of the artists, individuals, and neighborhood businesses such as Key Bank. This year the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods also provided funding.

Art Walk continues through the end of the month, so you still have time to visit or revisit some impressive displays. More details are available here. All of the art, by the way, is for sale, with 100% of the proceeds going to the artists.

[Top photo: the art of Maria Root at Martha Harris Flowers & Gifts. Photo of Margo Spellman and Barbara Ireland courtesy of Dick Lehman.]

Art Walk begins tonight

2011-09-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

Opening-night reception at Starbucks

Though Madison Park may suffer a dearth of art galleries (dearth, in this case, meaning zero), that doesn't mean we're a neighborhood where art and artists are under appreciated. The lack of "proper" venues for art is simply not an impediment to a community that has shops, restaurants, salons, and offices in abundance. It's now a tradition (assuming three years running can be so designated) that each summer Art comes to the Park, with a weeks-long art walk showcasing the works of local artists, sometimes on display in unlikely locations. That's part of what makes it fun.

The tradition began with MadArt two years ago and was continued by the Madison Park Business Association with a successful Art Walk last year. The summer-art idea has proven so popular, in fact, that there were more artists interested in participating in this year's event than there is space to show their works. The diverse art of more than two dozen artists will be on display during the Second Annual Madison Park Art Walk (September 9-30), the theme of which is "Life @ Elevation 46." All of the artists are either from Madison Park or surrounding communities.

Those who've been reading this blog since inception are well aware that we're very big on art (MPB is an Art not Ads website). But in the interests of full disclosure we should note (for those not already clued in) that the Madison Park Blogger is married to Madison Park artist Margo Spellman, who helped organize and is a participant in Art Walk again this year (that's her art above). Shameless Plug Number Two: she has an art show upcoming in Manhattan next month, details available on her website (www.margospellman.com).

So where were we? Oh yes, Party!!! The opening night reception at Starbucks is always a lot of fun (or at least it was last year). The wine begins flowing at 6 pm and continues until 9 pm (unless they run out). One piece by each Art Walk artist will be on display at Starbucks, and many if not most of the participating artists will be present. After the reception, it's off to see the art scattered around "The Village." Music will be provided by Sambatuque at the triangle park in front of Bing's, and there will also be music at other venues. Free ice cream will be provided by Bank of America at the bank's new park-bench installation by the BofA parking lot.

Here's some more art to whet your appetite:

Artist: Barbara Ireland

Artist: Brooke Westlund

Artist: Art Messer

We will, of course, cover this event in full. But reading about it is hardly the same experience as coming on down, seeing the art in person, and meeting the artists. If you must miss tonight's opening, you still have the rest of the month to experience the high-quality and diversity of our local art community. It's an impressive bunch!

[Top photo: art by Malei Young. The art shown here is representative of the artists' work but will not necessarily be on display as part of the 2011 Art Walk. Details of the artists and locations where their art will displayed is available here. Starbucks is located at 4000 E. Madison St.]

New York Cupcakes arrives

2011-09-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

Stories about new food outlets in the neighborhood are often the most popular postings on this blog. So we expect that lots of readers will be happy to learn that New York Cupcakes has officially opened, though with this caveat: "It's a soft opening only--this is still not everything we will ultimately have." Nevertheless, things looked pretty much in place when we stopped by the new shop in Madison Valley yesterday afternoon. By our count, first-day customers were able to choose from at least 15 cupcake varieties (there are 40 flavors or more in the NYC repertoire, rotating daily).

All of the cupcakes looked scrumptious, but we chose the red velvet variety ("many people think these are our very best') and received this parting advice: "New York Cupcakes don't like to be left in hot cars or put into the refrigerator." No problem there.

New York Cupcakes' hours are Monday-Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm, and Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm. The shop is located in the space vacated earlier this summer by Bella Dolce at 2711 E. Madison St. (328-5161).

Summer, glorious summer

2011-09-06T20:08:00.000-07:00

We'd just about given up hope that it was going to happen this year: a three-day weekend that was sunny and warm from beginning to end. But mother nature pulled it off, and the Labor Day weekend was pretty spectacular in Madison Park. Not that many Madison Parkers stayed around to enjoy it. It seemed to those of us left behind that a lot of the natives must have left town for the holiday (you could get an outside table at Cactus!, for example, without having to wait--a pretty much unheard of event during good weather).

Though the beach was definitely not as crowded as it often is on hot weekends during a "normal" summer, the place was still plenty busy. And it looked like everyone was in a pretty good mood...

...for there are few things nicer than the California-seaside atmosphere of Madison Park when the weather cooperates.

Happy Summer!

Residential construction alive and well here

2011-09-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

At the height of the local real estate market three years ago it was an unusual month in which three or four spec houses were not under construction in the neighborhood. As we’ve reported, those heady days are long past, with the number of new speculative projects coming onto the local market each quarter falling to a single outlier, if even that. This definitely doesn’t mean, however, that construction of new housing has come to a halt in Madison Park. Far from it.

Numerous residential builders and a host of workers in various construction trades remain gainfully employed here creating new houses. By our count there are currently 15 residences in some phase of construction in Madison Park. While a few of these are major remodels where the existing structure has at minimum been gutted, most of the current projects involve complete teardown and replacement. Interestingly, most of the new-construction activity is centered south of Madison or in Broadmoor. Washington Park is home to most of the new construction (a total of nine sites), while Broadmoor has four construction projects underway. Unless we missed one, the rest of Madison Park is limited to only two at this time.

It’s possible that one or more of these projects will turn out to be a speculative venture. Unless the property owners have already disclosed their intentions, the first evidence of a spec house may be the posting of a “For Sale” sign on a newly completed structure. At least one house north of Madison appears to be in this spec category, with completion likely in the fall. That’s when we’ll probably see the sign and know for sure.

39th Avenue E. and E. Highland Drive

But most, if not all, of the rest of the construction projects in the neighborhood are being undertaken by property owners who are building their own dream homes. And for the most part, they are throwing up large structures on imposing pieces of property. One of the grandest projects in this category is the 7,200 sq. ft. residence being built on a nicely placed 10,000 sq. ft. view property at 3825 E. Highland Drive The existing 3,600 sq. ft. structure, built in 1937, was demolished to make way for the new two-and-a-half story residence, with a detached garage.

Down the hill from this site, just south of the Seattle Tennis Club along McGilvra Boulevard E., there have been no fewer than three separate view-property construction projects in progress over the last six months, one of which is a recently completed 7,000 sq. ft. mansion on a 26,000 sq. ft. piece of property. Next door to it is an almost-complete 6,500 sq. ft. contemporary home built on a 15,000 sq. ft. parcel.

It is a Stuart Silk-designed steel-and-glass structure which is expected to attain the highest level of "Built Green" certification:

And a few lots further down the street, a 9,580 sq. ft. five-level (four stories plus a lower garage) mega mansion appears virtually completed, a full four years after the original 1930s house on the site was demolished and construction of the new structure first began.

That on-again-off-again project is quite a story that we don’t have time for here.

Meanwhile, in Broadmoor, three of the active building projects involve teardowns of older structures sitting on choice sites. In one case, a homeowner on the fairway purchased her neighbor’s abode in order to demolish it and expand her already-large residence. One of the four Broadmoor building projects is new construction on a previously vacant parcel. More new-construction opportunities still exist in the gated community, with five separate vacant lots currently for sale there. A couple of these are being market as the “only vacant lot” available in Broadmoor.

What we really like to see is the kind of project where the new owner takes a classic existing home and remodels it in a way that preserves and enhances the structure. There are plenty of examples in Madison Park where the original house that was torn down was architecturally superior to the modern house that replaced it. In many cases these replacement houses are gigantic boxes rising where a cottage had previously stood.

We are happy to note, therefore, that there are at least a couple of major rehabs underway in Washington Park that defy this go-big-or-go-home convention. One of these, a classic 1925 Craftsman located at 809 39th Avenue E., is currently being renovated in a way that retains the basic elements of the original house while adding a partial second story.

Based on zoning, a much-larger house than the one planned could be built on the 7,000 sq. ft. piece of property. A neighboring homeowner was the purchaser of the Craftsman, so this rehabilitation may be more of a view-protecting proposition for him than a special concern over preserving the classic outlines of the somewhat-dilapidated structure that he bought. Most of us can applaud the idea that not every single original house in Madison Park needs to be demolished and replaced. It's nice, therefore, to see a few old worthies get a reprieve from the junk heap, whatever the property owners' motivations.

[Photo at the top: A modernistic residence by E. Cobb Architects under construction at E. Highland and 42nd Avenue E. Thanks to Laura Halliday of Windermere Real Estate for her assistance in compiling some of the information used in this posting.]

September happenings

2011-09-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

Art Walk returns next week

More than two dozen artists from Madison Park and its environs will be participating in this year's Madison Park Art Walk, which will open on Friday, September 9 and extend through the end of the month. This is the second year for the popular event, which last year drew hundreds of art lovers to the neighborhood to view the wide range of art on display in neighborhood shops, restaurants, and other businesses. This year almost thirty merchants are participating in Art Walk, which has been branded Life@Elevation46.

The event kicks off with a free-to-the-public opening-night reception at Starbucks (400 E. Madison St.) from 6 until 9 pm on the 9th, with most of the artists in attendance. Many of the artists who were popular last year are back for this year's event, displaying different works. They will be joined by some new artists as well, including William Ingham, whose art is shown above. We will be covering this story in greater detail as we get closer to the actual event.

Madison Park Art Walk 2011 is presented by the Madison Park Business Association.

Other events in September

Yes, we know it's not a Madison Park event exactly (actually, not at all), but it is a lot of fun, involves some great food, and is really not that far away: The St. Demetrios Greek Festival, which begins at noon on Friday, September 16 and extends through that Sunday. The Greek Orthodox church is located at 2100 Boyer Avenue E. (Montlake), which is practically within walking distance. Information is available here.

Also this month, Glow Natural Health Center in Madison Valley will be celebrating its 10th Anniversary with a big blowout on September 21 (details here), Pharmaca is presenting a "Women's Vitality Event" on Saturday, September 17 (details here), and The Arboretum and UW Botanic Gardens are sponsoring various events, including free guided walks on September 4 and 18, Park in the Dark on September 9, and Bioblitz on September 23 (details here).

Our neighborhood Starbucks gets a nod from the New York Times (no less)

2011-08-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

Starbucks achieved some great free "product placement" yesterday when the New York Times published a profile of the company's Madison Park store in a article headlined, "There's One on Every Corner, But None Like This." The editorial motivation for the piece is the fact that our locally-based, global Mega Coffee Purveyor is experimenting in Madison Park with something new: wine and beer.

What we already knew, the world now knows.

Describing our neighborhood as "lovely," writer William Yardley notes that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz lives in Madison Park and often "pops in" to the store on his way to "brand building." Yardley speculates on whether this fact was having any impact on the employees' behavior while the reporter was on the premises:

"Were the baristas looking for their boss, who lives in a ton of house nearby? Were they anxious? Were they freaking out? Is it true that they undergo special scrutiny before they can work there? Do they sometimes wish they worked in one of those apathy-oozing independent coffee shops in an edgier part of town? Surely they have a tattoo or two beneath those buttoned black sleeves, right?"

It may be shocking to some to discover that Madison Park is apparently not considered "edgy." This Yardley is not some fly-in from New York who might not know better, either. He is, we believe, the paper's local stringer, or at minimum a regular reporter for the NYT who is based here. So when it comes to Seattle, he probably knows "edgy" from "not edgy." We'll just have to live with our perceived lack of edginess.

By the way, if you're thinking that the New York Times' piece was prompted by Starbucks' desire to have national media attention for its local experiment, you're almost certainly wrong. Yardley has a tough time getting answers to questions like the ones he poses in the excerpt above. Some answers were eventually forthcoming from Starbucks' media relations team (aka Corporate), and you can read all about it by clicking on the link above.