The Stranger loves Boat Street, too

We already shared our love song for the Boat Street Cafe and Kitchen -- this week's Stranger weighs in and confirms our enthusiam.

Boat Street, the sequel, feels charming and complete in a way that totally new restaurants cannot.

Read the rest.

Also, here's our review from early last month.

--j

20 Seattle streets to avoid if it snows

snow1
Originally uploaded by candid.

Seattle Department of Transportation has this handy list of the 20 Steepest Streets in Seattle.

The Queen Anne area claims a lot of these climbs, no surprise.

Mix and match this list with the 5 highest points in Seattle if you want to test our your Outback's 4wd for the first time.

Here are the top 3 on the steep list.

PERCENT SLOPE	STREET NAME	FROM	TO
21	E ROY ST	25TH AV E	26TH AV E
20	W BLAINE ST	9TH AV W	10TH AV W
20	E TERRACE ST	RANDOLPH AV	ERIE AV

--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, snow

5 best places to sled without leaving Seattle

Yellow curb and sculpture - Seattle Center
Originally uploaded by Belltown.

If you measure sledding opportunity by proximity to God's intelligently designed snow making machines, we're here to help. Here's how to toboggan without leaving Seattle.

SDOT's Highest Elevations in Seattle

1. High Point above sea level, 6 parcels south of watertower at 35th Ave SW and SW Myrtle Street - 520 feet - NAVD88
2. Near Bitter Lake, on N 145th St just east of Greenwood Ave - 493 feet - NAVD88
3. NE 92nd ST and Roosevelt Way NE - 466 feet - NAVD88
4. Queen Anne Hill, at First Ave N and Lee Street - 456 feet - NAVD88
5. Highest point in Volunteer Park - 453 feet - NAVD88

Of course, if you measure the opportunity by likelihood of achieving light speed on your shitty plastic disc sled, you might do better to check out this list of the 20 steepest streets in Seattle.

Also, be careful -- urban sledding is dangerous!

--snip--
There’s no more dangerous place for kids to sled than the very place where his injury occurred: the street. When Children’s Hospital of Seattle tracked sledding injuries after one major snowstorm, for instance, it found that although 44 percent of kids sledded in the street, 76 percent of injuries came from street sledding.

"They hit parked cars, moving cars, telephone poles, trees, fixed objects, sometimes they overshoot their target," says Dr. Tongue, a clinical associate professor at Oregon Health Sciences in Portland.
--unsnip--

--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, snow, sledding

Starbucks rip-off: 5 ways to score free coffee

Not very X-masy of us given that the corporate coffee giant is planning a holiday "Cheer Party" (edited 7:50p 11/30/05) from 4p-6p Thursday night where they'll be giving away free drinks and goodies but we liked this list too much not to share. Bah humbug, we guess.

Barista Laments: How to get free coffee drinks
Rule number 1: Go the busiest store near you to capitalize on worker confusion.
The key is to find a *$ that is busy, where confusion makes it easy to get away with things. If you go to an empty store where the person who rings you up is the same person who makes your drink, you aren’t getting away with anything.
more...

We get all preachy: EMP art belongs at SAM

blue on blue on...
Originally uploaded by ChrisB in SEA.

We're usually agnostics when it comes to corporate giants with billions to burn. But Paul Allen is pushing his luck. The blurred lines between public and private are getting to be too much -- it's hard NOT to be jealous for Seattle's museums and public spaces.

Seattle Times: Paul Allen's Experience Art Project
Paul Allen is about to break the secrecy that's long shrouded his art collection. Over the years, ARTnews magazine has cited Allen as one of the world's top spenders on art, yet few people seem to know exactly what he's been buying.

Maybe we're being naive. Maybe public art museums are structured business entities just like Allen's EMP. Maybe we should be glad Allen is sharing his collection with the proletariat. But we'd rather see this kind of spirit enriching a true public institution vs. the qausi-public institution in Seattle Center.

EMP is a non-profit today but that's not the long-term goal. Be careful putting too much of your city's culture in hands that are seeking profit.

--j

The Usual Suspects: Seattle's 3 urban nesting grounds

So, where do wanna-be yuppies who can't afford to breed in downtown Seattle start looking for nests? We're on the hunt for a new home after (sadly) discovering that it is impossible for a family to live in Seattle's downtown.

General loacation requirements:

• Within 2.5-mile radius around Space Needle
• Within walking distance of at least one coffee shop, one restaurant and one grocery store. Bar is bonus

This pretty much narrows our search to these usual suspects:

Queen Anne
It's very difficult to accept the fact that this might be our perfect nest. Just feels too Volvo-y. But we need to face facts - QA is perfectly located and has a lot of gorgeous little (expensive!) homes. And we could still walk to a Macrina. And we don't have to live on top of the hill. Somehow, staying low makes us feel we can live in QA and retain our street credibility. (Of course, admitting that we've looked at homes in Magnolia kinda blows that credibility away, no?)

Capitol Hill
We'll use Capitol Hill to encompass everything from Volunteer Park to 1st Hill and Madison. Lots of diversity in those areas but the areas with homes for sale are mostly similiar and share Cap Hill's attributes: the highest prices around, proximity to downtown, unique homes and its own neighborhoods and business cores. Even with all this, Cap Hill's yuppie hoods aren't the slam-dunk choice they used to be. Overpricing and decay around areas like Broadway make the area less attractive. But as long as lots of people read that and say 'Good. Glad you don't like it. Let us have it!' the family home areas of Capitol Hill will be in high demand. We want to be there mainly because that is where our friends are and we kinda dig false bohemia. Groovy. But maybe our friends will move to QA to be where we are.

Magnolia
We're not sure why more people don't talk about Magnolia as an option for young, family-raising types. Strip away the urban grit and false bohemia of Capitol Hill and you'll get Magnolia -- near downtown, filled with a mix of very expensive and some relatively affordable houses and replete with its own little retail core. Magnolians refer to this area as 'The Village' and there aren't any smack dealers -- so the Capitol Hill comparison is a bit of a stretch, but you get the idea.

There are a few options outside this immediate ring of potential nesting grounds -- but no sense insulting those places until we actually are thinking about living there :)

More construction in Uptown

Poor, poor Seattle. We look kind of pittiful right now with our sillty little monorail collided and stacked up in a sad hunch. Uptown also looks a little worse for wear with torn up pits of gravel and mud on nearly every corner. You can add the intersection of Denny and Queen Anne Ave to the list of construction projects in the area -- we returned from the turkey day holiday to find the Shell gas station lot being fenced off and dug up. Directly across the street, the mud pit that will become the Trio condo project deepens while just around the corner they're piling gravel high in the Olympic Sculpture Park construction zone. If you have a 3-year-old who digs Tonka trucks, Uptown is the hood for you right now.