The Rainier Valley will be bustling this weekend with two fantastic and family-friendly events. The annual Rainier Valley Heritage Parade, on Saturday from 12:00-4:30pm, will offer food, live music, street sports, a beer garden, a pie eating contest, a police picnic, B!kecitement in front of Bike Works, an afterhours movie in Columbia Park, and more. Take Link to Columbia City and walk a 1/4 mile east to Rainier to join the festivities. In addition to an incredible diversity of food and artistic talent, the festivities offer a great opportunity to see a Rainier Avenue S that prioritizes people, even if just for a day, as Rainier will be closed to cars for the 3/4 of a mile between S Alaska St and S Brandon St.
On Sunday, go one stop further on Link for the Othello Park International Music and Arts Festival, from noon to 6pm (free). The festival will have live 11 music and dancing acts, a petting zoo featuring a camel, 6 food vendors, and much more.
Bring your flak jacket
Shooting with Puyallup police ends in chase, multiple collisions
http://www.nwcn.com/story/news/local/2015/08/11/puyallup-shooting/31491993/
A family member was recently mugged and assaulted in Renton during the afternoon. She wasn’t seriously hurt but she did have bruises, a bloody nose and blood on her clothing. When she tried to get on a bus to go home, the driver refused to allow her on the bus, citing Metro policy. The driver did call 911 and the bus stayed at the stop until aid arrived. Apparently Metro’s policy is to not allow bloodied passengers on the bus, but the bus must remain with the injured person until help arrives.
Police Investigating Early Morning Robbery, Gunfire In Ballard
http://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2015/08/08/police-investigating-early-morning-robbery-gunfire-in-ballard/
Great parody account of Big Don. Very funny! Please post some more nonsensical things that Big Don believes in.
Columbia Park has become quite a popular spot to hang out this summer. For decades, CP has been a dead sliver of soggy, scary greenspace that absolutely everybody avoided. Now, it’s full of people all day long. I think having The Angeline + the PCC open has suddenly made CP a functioning part of the neighborhood. It also creates a quicker pedestrian pathway from Rainier & Alaska into the Columbia City neighborhood (west of Rainier Avenue ).
It’s nice to finally have construction nearly done on The Angeline project. The sidewalks are clear, parking is mostly restored and there is some street level retail open (the PCC). Unfortunately, The Angeline is a butt-ugly building that really detracts from the neighborhood. I know that the Urbanist Manifesto doesn’t give many brownie points to aesthetics, but The Angeline is really a mess. There are plenty of examples of new neighborhood construction projects that do contribute to their neighborhood’s aesthetics, but The Angeline has somehow managed to mess up what could have been a cornerstone project for the neighborhood and turned it into a shining example of “how to not build a mixed use project”. What has been built at Yesler Terrace looks pretty good (so far) and The Greenhouse building–2 blocks away from The Angeline–is a great example of new construction. I hope that the next new construction projects in Rainier Valley will be designed by greater talents than the team that designed The Angeline.
But please come down to Rainier Valley this weekend, have some fun and decide for yourself if The Angeline is a joke. Our southend neighborhoods are really quite friendly and our events are usually very entertaining. Don’t let BigDon spoil your fun.
So my son, Isaac, goes to daycare at Seed of Life, across the street from the Columbia City Library (a Carnegie Library fyi). I used to live behind it, back at the Genesee Park Apartments on 38th and Alaska. Anyway, my route to work was and is, drop the carpet rat off at daycare, jaywalk across Rainier, go through the library parking lot and then use Columbia Park to walk to Edmonds and to the station (Alaska sucks to walk on). I do the reverse on my way home a couple times a week.
Boy has Columbia Park changed. And just in the few years I’ve been walking through it. It’s seriously been over six months since there’s been a bum sleeping on the sidewalk and/or bench if I remember correctly. Even 40s or cans of Steel Reserve are increasingly rare.
Back in the day you could expect Columbia Park to be activated during a Farmers Market but now it seems every day (during summer at least) something is happening. It will be interesting to see how winter treats it. Will the new residents/eyes on park keep it activated?
On the aesthetics of the building. I honestly don’t see what you’re talking about. On the other hand having a grocery store 3 blocks from my house could be clouding my judgement. Tell me again why it matters?
I was there yesterday to see the new PCC. The park has always been pretty empty in my experience; not bums but hardly any people at all. I blame that on the wide-open design: a plain lawn with paths across it, no vertical things to divide it into more intimate sections. In short, windswept, like Lake Union Park and Northgate Park, even if it’s an the 1800s formal-garden design rather than a modernist design. But yesterday there were groups of people sitting in the park, mostly behind PCC. The north part of the park in front of the library was more empty like usual. The PCC building is right next to the park, with only a one-row parking strip in between. The previous building was smaller and in the middle of a large parking lot. So it looks like the PCC building and the community center building (former church) on the other side make it a smaller space and thus more inviting, the opposite of windswept.
Unfortunately I don’t know which building is the Angeline, and I didn’t see this comment until afterward so I didn’t look for it. I did see Angeline Street, and a building under construction a block from the station (with a triangular vacant lot in between). But the building was too unfinished to tell what its exterior would be like.
But, I saw a good-looking new building a few days ago! I think it was the one at Olive & Summit where the B&O Espresso used to be. It was brick, with a vertical orientation (tall and narrow units), and little townhouse yards in front. The exterior wall lights were black vertical canisters, I think rectangular although they may have been round, but narrower than usual. I didn’t like the modernist clean lines and minimal decorations. but given that the lights and building were much better than most new buildings. It reminded me of the back side of the Joule, which I also like. It looks like developer just need to put a brick facade on buildings to make them better-looking; get rid of this aluminum and concrete siding most of them have.
The Angeline brings much needed housing and a grocery store to Columbia City and it’s a tremendous improvement over the doggie day care/asphalt field that preceded it. But somehow, in the planning process, aesthetics were overlooked. The Angeline looks like it went through a lot of “process” and “compromise” that created a very confused looking building for a cornerstone location. Does it matter? Maybe not, but I’d rather see designs like The Greenhouse replicated over The Angeline.
Maybe “process” is to blame for the blandness of The Angeline. It looks like the architects tried to break the building up into separate visual blocks to make it appear less monolithic. The 20 foot high concrete wall faces that surround the Bank of America parking lot are particularly anti-community. Like I said before, there are plenty of good looking buildings bringing density and urbanization to Seattle neighborhoods. The Angeline just isn’t one of them. Does it matter? Maybe not.
So The Angeline is the PCC building? To me it looks like typical modernist ugly, but perhaps better than average. It was odd that the PCC has no entrance on the Rainier side. I went past the outdoor tables thinking that was the back door, but when I got to the other side it was all loading zones.
The parking strip was surprising; I would have expected underground parking. I’m not sure if there’s underground parking too; the strip looks like not enough spaces. The strip didn’t bother me because it’s so narrow and on the side of the building rather than at the sidewalk. One-aisle and two-aisle parking lots don’t bother me anymore because they’re not that far to walk across, and they’re better than a vast sea of parking in front of a building.
The outdoor-eating area is also long and narrow, and has a long wheelchair ramp that switches sides. That breaks up the space into squares, and the planters and other things complement it, so the overall aesthetic is nice. But it does make for a bit of a long walk to the front door. That may have been necessary since it goes downhill to the door and the shop floor. But it’s less than ideal. The biggest thing that bothered me about the outdoor-seating area was the yellow plastic stools: they look uncomfortable. But there are also chairs and benches.
There is an underground parking area. It’s on the north side just as you enter from Rainier.
The BofA building may have created a number of challenges for the design team. What will eventually become of the BofA site and how to design around that unanswered question would be difficult. I did notice that there are bigger decks on the north side of the building (the side that faces the library) and some of those decks are angled so that neighbors can easily sit on their decks and have a conversation with their next door neighbors. Nice touch. But on the sides that surround the BofA, there are about 6 different architectural styles in varying shades of blah or ultrablah. Compromise? Accommodation? Process Fail? Who knows.
It looks like the concrete walls will eventually be covered with vines. Not exactly elegant, but it is an attempt to fix the problem.
Honestly, my only complaint is not enough brick. I think having different colors and styles of brick would help break it up while blending in better.
However I wasn’t the one that designed it or paid for it to be built. I’m just glad it was built.
I assume the concrete wall faces are for interface with a future building that obliterates the BofA and parking lot. One would hope that that’s coming.
I’ve been told that near term there will green decorations added (a metal grate with vines and stuff).