WE'RE the Ones Polluting the Sound

New study out on pollution in Puget Sound. The good news: industrial waste levels in the Sound have decreased over the years. Yay! The bad news: car emission pollution keeps going up. Basically, your car exhaust either settles in the Sound directly or if it lands on a parking lot or street it washes into the water. The newspapers picked this story up, but no one has an easy solution. Drive less. Buy more efficient vehicles.

Tags: uptown, seattle, green, environment, pollution, pugetsound

Let's See More Green Roofs

It would be great if we had more green roofs around - which is a enviro-trendy way to say "plants growing on the roof." Green roofs help clean the air from that nasty car exhaust, they regulate a building's temperature, and they look pretty good too. Granted, you may not be able to see them from the ground, but wouldn't it be cool to look down from the Space Needle and see a bunch of green roofs? The real ground is pretty much taken up with asphalt, so to grow plants...look up!

Green Roof Blocks is a great company, their blocks are easy to install and don't need to be watered. No word on if they can get TOO much water here in Seattle.

Tags: uptown, seattle, green, environment, urbandesign

People can now wander Seattle naked

Want to walk around uptown without throwing on your track pants? Check out the new a9 Maps. While Google Maps let you fly around the world on a satellite and Microsoft's Virtual Earth copies GOOG, a9 gives you groovy snapshots of most streetfront action in town -- and in lots of cities across the country. It's so very groovy! Geek alert: I have fantasy of being out there the next time the a9 van rolls by my house so I'm in my a9 map picture!


Hometown dot.com legend Amazon is a busy body. Apparently, they're bored building the big department store in the sky. Lucky planet earth!

Tags: uptown, seattle, maps, a9, photographs, pictures

When Jean Godden was a Black Panther

From Sity Council Pos. 1's canned response to my e-mail asking her to get the monorail plan moving again:

The freeway fights of the 1960s and 1970s weren't for the faint of heart. I still recall the evening when we packed the Seattle City Council chambers in protest. Along with the Black Panthers, we demonstrated against a bloated I-90.

"Pave Central Seattle neighborhoods and we'll burn your city," yelled the Black Panthers. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder and cried: "Burn, baby, burn!"

You're either part of the solution or part of the problem, indeed.

Tags: seattle, monorail, jeangodden, blackpanthers

Queen Anne land rush

In neighbor news, let the bidding begin. Queen Anne's school-house apartments are being converted to condos.

Condo conversion will be lucrative, but not for district

The Times avoids the covetous-condo-hunter angle and focuses on the scool district's lack of foresight. Sadly, it seems this obvious move was not so obvious when the school district signed onto the deal 20 years ago, says the Times. No word on what the SeaTimes had to say about things back in the 80s, of course ;)

Tags: seattle, queenanne, condos, realestate