Uptown's last post

New places, new posts. Turns out, the best, easiest solution for what to do with our neighborhood blog is to leave it behind and wish it the best of luck. We won't be updating Uptown after this post -- we've moved up to Capitol Hill. You can follow along here if you're interested.

Meanwhile, the brilliant posts from this blog will just drift along and gum up Google for a few hundred years. To the future, we apologize.

Thanks for reading.

What to do with a neighborhood blog when you move

We started this blog about our neighborhood for a few reasons:

1. To share the good stuff we found on our home turf
2. To inspire more good stuff
   
3. To call out the bad stuff in the area
   
4. To inspire changing or eliminating the bad stuff
5. To weigh in on life and issues from the neighborhood's perspective

For the most part, we've been happy with the results. While we don't presume to have been the final word on anything we've written about over the past year, we do like to think we've turned a lot of people onto the best things about Uptown while protecting a few of you from the worst.

A few hundred people drop through the blog each week so there must be some little bit of value -- though the competition from reading work e-mail isn't very significant, of course. But now we're moving to Capitol Hill. What do we with our neighborhood blog?

Pack it up and take it with us?
Moving the blog to our new neighborhood is one option. On the plus side, all the 'timeless' posts on interesting stuff (yeah, 'all' of them!) would come with us and have an attachment to our new neighboorhod. On the technical side, I don't know how easy it would be to completely move a new Blogger URL but it would likely be easy enough to simply re-name the blog. Still, moving the thing with us seems disruptive -- a future full of oddly labeled Google links and cross-links from other blogs that need to be updated with new info.

Shut it down
Another option is to stop posting and just leave the blog out there drifting in space for the occasional visitor from a Google search. This seems to be the way of the old Web, especially -- full of ghost pages that just suddenly stopped being updated.

Pass it on
Finally, we could hand off the pages and posts to a new editor so the neighborhood voice continues. If there were a more sizeable inheritance, we would be pushing more for this option but, in reality, there's not much there there. Still, if somebody's interested, you know where to find us. Until the end of this week, at least.

-- j

Best sledding, tubing and tobogganing spots near Seattle

Turns out, if we want lots of traffic, we should be writing about playing in the snow. We've been away on holiday for a week and not posting -- but a lot of you still visited the blog after searching for "sledding seattle" on Google.

We have a nifty little post about sledding without leaving Seattle. But we're guessing that when some of you search for "sledding seattle," you're actually looking for "sledding NEAR seattle."

Unfortunately, the Google results for the "near" search don't yield much useful info. So, here are some good links for those of you planning a drive into the mountains:

Seattle PI: Playgrounds for snow sports
Comprehensive listing with good info about what you'll find and how to find it but dated info so caveat emptor. Includes the map graphic you see on this post.

WA State Non-motorized Sno-Parks database
Sno-Parks usually are good prospects for easy access to snowy hills

Tacoma News Tribune: Pumped up on tubing
Focuses more on south part of state

Hammerhead Sleds Sled-Hill Database
High-performance sledding company maintains state-by-state listings of good hills to take a ride on its product


--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, snow, sledding, tubing

Condo 4 Sale again

Boo! The condo is up for sale again. Our non-buyer found us via a Craigslist ad we placed while we waited to officially list the property. We were a little wary having had some CL issues in past when we tried to give away a washing machine -- but the transaction was proceeding. Then Mr. CL started getting cold feet and asking ridiculous questions about the building. That was the first sign that we were about to get burned. Tonight, he's decided to back out. It's within his rights as a buyer. But he's leaving us hanging. So, file this post under plaintive whining -- we have to keep the place cleaned up for walk-throughs again!

--j

Charting Seattle's blog interest

One of the best blogs about blogging turns us onto this neat new trick from Technorati -- the weblog search engine.

Here are two 'live' charts of references to 'seattle' and 'portland' in blogs tracked by Technorati. Portland, we got you beat, sucka! Really, we're not going to gloat about the head-to-head thing -- in both charts you can see the growing swell of blogging in general. It's especially cool to be able to track this swell in relation to what we've been writing about.



Posts that contain Seattle per day for the last 30 days.



Posts that contain Portland per day for the last 30 days.

--j

One question about the Seattle Center suicides

Sure, there are bigger questions for the families or friends or witnesses. But from our perspective, we've got to ask just one -- why the Seattle Center? Is it becuase the venue is the last warm, free, public place in the city? It would be sad to see the place changed because of this. While the lame carnival rides are an embarrassment, the eclectic mix of entertainment and mall food inside the Center has created an oddly charming gathering place.

2 public suicides at Seattle Center called unusual
By Sara Jean Green
Seattle Times staff reporter
Seattle Center officials say two recent suicides in the Center House are unfortunate, but they concede there's little they can do to prevent such a thing from happening again.

Counselors have been made available to Seattle Center employees who may have witnessed the most recent suicide, which occurred Friday when an 84-year-old homeless man shot himself at the end of an evening jazz performance. The King County Medical Examiner's Office on Monday identified the man as Forest David Howe.

--j

2 restaurants for cheap eats

As we wind down our days living uptown, the combination of wanting to try things we never got to and a total lack of time has us eating out quite a bit. And our looming huge mortgage has us looking to save a penny or two even when we're too lazy to cook. Recently, Belltown's Toi and Lower Queen Anne's Marinepolis Sushi Land fit the bill.

Toi lured us in with their 'Blue-Eyed Devil' all-Monday night happy hour. Why we always fall for the happy hour thing, I don't know. Happy hours are never really that great of a deal and you end up ordering off a limited menu and missing some of the best things the restaurant has to offer. Toi's happy hour was typical -- they even have the classic happy hour menu item that is a 1/2 serving of a regular entree at the low, low price of 1/2 the regular entree! We'll let you figure it out. We did better when we happily abandoned happy hour and ordered a bowl of the spicy tom ka soup and blew away all of our happy hour value with a 10 buck Grey Goose martini. So much for being cheap.

Meanwhile, cheap is the best thing going for Sushi Land -- it is definitely a low-priced option for kaiten sushi action. With the cheapest plates at $1 a pop, the neverending flow of kaiten boats is a fun way to get stuffed. But you definitely get what you pay for. We usually joust each other with our chop sticks for the last bites of unagi -- but it turns out we've been eating at fancy-pants sushi joints with good unagi. The stuff at Sushi Land was mealy and flavorless. Better were the simple preparations like the spicy tuna or California rolls. You can get the full scoop on Marinepolis SL over at SushiFinder.com -- you'll also see a note or two over there mentioning some problems with the health department. The concerns are legit -- you can see for yourself over on the King County Health web site. There were some major issues last year and some problems as recently as this October. But this kind of thing comes up with lots of restaurants -- people just tend to think about it a lot more when it comes to eating boats of raw fish. Um, yum?

BTW, to be fair, here are Toi's inspection notes -- no such issues there. Still, the next time we're feeling cheap, we'll take our chances with Sushi Land.

--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, restaurants, toi, sushiland

The other side of the smoking ban: body odor

From the always sweet-smelling Stranger, comes this excellent point re: the impact of WA state's indoor smoking ban:

While the positive reviews stream in, there was one dissenter: "Something negative I did notice [at the Laptop Battle] was far more B.O. and a lot of farts and food smells," gripes Andrew Luck. "It was really gross. Bring back the smoke, 'cause people smell even worse when you get that many in a room."

-- j

Moving from Uptown: Top 5 things we'll miss

IMG_0486
Originally uploaded by chuntr.

The new house is bought. The downtown condo is sold. Our days in Uptown are numbered. So it's time to start numbering our thoughts about the neighborhood. List journalism is the sincerest form of nostalgia.

Top 5 Things We'll Miss
5) Seeing the PI Globe neon flicker on
4) Greater Seattle Soccer League team home field: Memorial Stadium in the shadow of the Space Needle
3) Fishing on the pier in Myrtle Edwards park
2) Walking to Macrina Bakery way, way too often
1) Elliott Bay sunsets

More lists to come including things we won't miss and ideas for what should happen to this blog.

--j

Sounds like Moxie is open

We've been looking forward to Moxie join the mix in the area in Lower Queen Anne. We haven't walked by yet, but sounds like it's open for business.

--j

Embarcadero-izing Seattle

Embarcadero
Originally uploaded by Cocoabiscuit.

The Stranger's slog has high quality post about the Seattle City Council's recent visit to San Francisco to see the development of the Embarcadero first hand. We've been flip-flopping on the tunnel concept -- looking forward to leadership talking about possiblities beyond bridges and tunnels. The Embarcadero might not be the model for us. But pretending it doesn't exist is folly. If we wait much longer, like SF, we might have a decision handed to us by good ol Planet Earth.

--j

Seattlest beats us to it - Velocity is good shopping

Check out Seattlest's We Shop in Belltown - Velocity Art & Design for a love post to one of the coolest stores in the city. It's pretty rare for J to walk into a store only to 'browse' -- he's usually more goal-oriented -- but Velocity is worth a visit even if you're 'just looking.'

-- j/k

Downtown Seattle is no place to raise a kid and that's... ok

family shopping trip
Originally uploaded by poopoorama.

Having just surrendered on starting a family while living in Seattle's downtown, we feel well-qualified to call bullpoop on Peter Steinbrueck's plan to attract families to live in the city's core. We hate being negative on this. We are pro-growth, pro-hippie dippie utopia types. You have to really work to turn us off a seemingly progressive agenda. But we've seen what Seattle's downtown real estate market is like up close and personal. And nothing in this 'plan' will change it. And maybe, nothing should -- but more on that lower in the post.

First, from "THE STEINBRUECK PLAN"
-snip-
The plan seeks to reach three key objectives:
• Create a downtown where a wide variety of residents would want to live,
including families and those of moderate income. A key goal is to have people
living closer to where they work.
• Expand affordable housing opportunities for downtown workers and families
• Create a more neighborly downtown by creating more reasons for residents to
spend time in the neighborhood, such as developing quality park and community
space
-unsnip-

But a summary of the specifics illustrates just how few teeth the council can put into the plan. Here's what Peter's plan calls for:
* Doubling the money contributed by developers into an affordable housing fund;
* Preserving the historic character of downtown Seattle. An Historic Resources Survey will assure our downtown core keeps it's historic distinction;
* Creating a livable residential environment in the Denny Triangle by decreasing proposed building height limits for office towers in the Denny Triangle yet, allowing increased heights in the central business district where commercial office towers currently exist;
* Committing to creating a family-friendly park and community center for Belltown, near downtown where 8,000 residents currently reside;
* Creating a more family-friendly environment by working with Seattle Public Schools to site an elementary school downtown.

Note there is nothing in this that will stop developers from building one Cristalla after another. Why not build them? The Cristalla is sold out and the demographic that can afford it is lining up to buy more. Maybe Cristala is what Steinbrueck means when he says 'affordable family housing.' It's a ridiculous notion. Cristalla units reportedly sold for around $540 per square foot -- that's $650 grand for a 1,200-foot unit.

But I'm not here to say stop the Cristallas. I've given up on that. In hindsight, it's a silly idea. There is a big market for Cristallas -- I don't know who these people are who can afford to pay more than $600K for 1-bedroom condos but they are out there. Maybe the same people like to own 6 or 7 units to match their moods.

And I'm not here to say don't build a park in Belltown. Build it, please. We love grass and trees.

I'm saying that THE STEINBRUECK PLAN won't help families live downtown. Things like community development and elementary school projects should work with reality and make that reality better. That means putting energy into the areas where families really can afford to live. Don't give up on making downtown attractive to families (and everybody, for that matter) -- go forward with improvement plans like parks and solving transportation issues. Families will come, Peter. They most definitely will come. Just don't expect them to live there.

Full disclosure: We just bought a home on Capitol Hill (we're lucky to be able to afford to live so close to the city's center). For those of you that might take a jab because we're giving up on developing downtown for family living so more resources are available for our new neighborhood, it's hard to argue with you. And, while not everybody is going to be able to buy or rent on Cap Hill, I'm guessing that we're part of a trend.

--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, housing, realestate

Best of 2005: Yet another people's picks list

We're suckers for end-of-year countdowns. Heck, we're suckers for any countdowns but really love the approaching new year because it gives all sorts of sources an excuse to count stuff off. NWSource.com (which is run by the 'Seattle Times Company representing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer' -- whatever that means) joins the parade with the tried-and-true 'best of your city' formula -- NWS 2005 People's Picks

Unlike a lot of the 'Best of' lists in Seattle which leave us wondering how many people from Bellevue vote, NWS's 2005 list actually has some intelligent, thoughtful picks. Usually, we can only depend on the non-vote-driven Stranger list for legit 'best' choices but NWS seemed to get a smart response pool this year. We'll take their word for it that these were truly the choices of the 'people.' Maybe the 'people' are getting smarter! yay! Also, good to see nearby venues take the top slot in movie house, dive bar, and art gallery.

--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, bestof2005

Adios 'Pompous' Room! Now stop parking in public spots

We've already danced on the grave of carcinogen-soaked nightlife in Seattle but we can't resist one more jab at an old enemy. Normally, we try to focus on the things we like here in Uptown. But we don't have anything nice to say about El Gaucho.

So, what's our beef with the psuedo-swank steak mill? We guess it's the way they treat the 'little' people. There is a stinky old-fashioned air of superiority about the operation that has manifested itself in plenty of ugly ways over the years. I got my best look at it when I lived on the other side of the alley behind the place for two years. There have been a handful of ugly incidents between staff 'bouncers' and civilians -- nothing more than somebody being forcibly shoved to the sidewalk but still not the kind of interaction I've ever seen at another restaurant in this city.

Before you blame this kind of thing on the kind of upper-crusty-wannabe clientele the place attracts, I can also say I've had my own run-ins with the staff and management over the years. And I wasn't even a customer (so they didn't push me down). I complained because it seems El Gaucho's eager valet boys have been told it's OK to use the city streets to park Richie Rich's Humvees and Escalades. Now, call me a rule follower, but that ain't right. The street parking is for the people -- not to further the business of the Pompous Room. So, between their disregard for their neighbors and their version of customer interaction, I'm not sorry for El Gaucho in the least. We take extra special pleasure in knowing the overpriced, under-classed joint has a big empty living room where once was a pretentious cigar lounge. Adios, Pampas Room. Maybe you can reinvent yourself as a vomitorium to fully round out the decadence. (OK, tht's just mean but it's good to get it out of our system!)

--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, elgaucho, restaurants

Uptown Condo 4-Sale

We weren't kidding around when we said we were leaving. Here's proof. As they say in those 'everything must go' commercials, our loss is your gain. We're moving out of Uptown and leaving our cute lil condo behind to go build a nest up on Capitol Hill.

If you're interested in owning one of the last chunks of downtown housing selling for less than $400-per-square-foot, here's the craigslist listing.

Note we sold out and listed the 'Downtown' condo as being in 'Belltown' -- we had to admit that too many people just wouldn't know exactly where Uptown is. It is downtown and it is in Belltown. But it's uptown too. Oh well.

Also note that we didn't mention this added bonus -- the place comes with a blog you've probably heard of.

--j

Tags: uptown, seattle, condo, realestate

Where to celebrate the smoking ban

DSCF0027
Originally uploaded by asabass.

It's hard not to feel vengeful. We admit it. We want to dance on the grave of an edangered species. Seattle smokers, after midnight tonight, will no longer be a direct part of our nightlife. What else to say but... yipee!

So the real question is where to celebrate? Our first instinct is to mark this event in the (formerly) smokiest of Seattle's bars. A place like the 5 Point or the Noc Noc seem perfect if we were really seeking to rub it in. But I'm not sure we're ready for the human element. Are we prepared to see the pittiful huddles of used-to-be bar smokers shuffling around aimlessly? It might be too depressing. And, worse, we could find ourselves in the middle of a smoking protest -- don't want to be anywhere near the 5 Point when jack-booted riot police show up.

So we'll probably take a different tack -- why not celebrate at one of the places that was there for you all along and now face a new environment for their businesses. We're thinking about ringing in the new nightlife in an always-smoke-free bar like the Virginia Inn. Think of it as a reward for all the fine work they did through the years giving us a nicotine-free option. Of course, if we're feeling really vindictive (and we have a large enough posse of pals) we probably won't be able to resist laughing it up at an ex-smoking joint. We're talking years of pent-up anger here, folks. And dry cleaning bills. And lung tumors, etc.

-- j

Bloggers gets busy with real world, Seattle moves forward

This blog ain't our day job (lucky for us) so we've been away tending to life bidness. We're happy to poke our nose back into the world and find a few good things have happened -- even without our valuable input!

As we noted recently, the Stranger's Slog has been both a) one of the coolest local blogs going and b) frustratingly lamely executed from a geek-tech perspective. While we were away, the Slog rolled out a key piece of goodness -- integrated comments with each post. We'll waste 2 more hours there every day now... 3 if they change design so you can view each post and associated comments on a single screen and click back through the post stream. Go, Stranger geeks, go!

And, for things that truly matter, it's great to see the City Council looking for a way to put some teeth in the management of liquor problems downtown. While we have general reservations about infringing on the liberties of man, we also don't think it's a slippery slope. Banning problem alcohol types from problem areas (and identifying those 'problems' using cold hard datasets) is an important part of the equation. There are going to be plenty of other substances to abuse and we'll need to figure out responses beyond curbing the sale of malt liquor but we're cool with progress. And we didn't even have to write about it to make it happen. Magic! :)

-- j

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