A ribbon-cutting and open-house event was held at Seattle’s Lincoln High School on September 3, 2019, as the school celebrated its modernization and renovation. Another opportunity for alumni and the general public to tour the building will be on Wednesday, September 25, from 4 to 7 PM (drop in anytime during those hours). See the Lincoln Lynx Alumni Association page for more info.
Ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 3, 2019 at Lincoln High School. Photo by Valarie.
Did you know that Seattle residents live under 240 days of gray skies per year? The cover illustration of this wonderful book, Seattleness, is a histogram featuring color samples from the Seattle sky measured over a year’s time and laid out in lengths of hours. The daily colors-of-the sky photos were taken from a camera mounted on the tip-top of Seattle’s Space Needle.
August is a festival month in Seattle, with parades and outdoor events around the city. In the first weekend of August 2019, Blue Angels Navy pilots zoomed over Lake Washington on Seattle’s eastern edge, while hydroplanes roared in the water.
Sunday, August 25, 2019 will be a day of summer fun in the Wedgwood neighborhood of northeast Seattle. The annual Wedgwood Car Show and Cancer Fundraiser will be held at the Wedgwood Broiler, 8230 35th Ave NE, from 10 AM to 3 PM.
The car show, held in the parking lot of the Wedgwood Broiler restaurant, is free admission for spectators. It is a great day to come out in the sun and fun!
Seattle geologist and author David B. Williams
The City of Seattle has at least fifty streams flowing across its ridges, through meadows and wetlands into bodies of water including Puget Sound and Lake Washington.
There is no one source for a list of Seattle streams and their names. Geologist and naturalist David B. Williams has compiled his research into the stream names, which is a journey into Seattle history.
Seattle historian Rob Ketcherside has previously cataloged the street names which were reorganized in a major City ordinance in the year 1895. This was when the decision was made to have streets keep one name along their entire length, instead of each segment having a name chosen by that area’s land developer. This first street name table organized by Rob, is included in my article about how Seattle’s streets were named.
Now Rob Ketcherside has added info about street names in Seattle north of Lake Union, including Fremont, Wallingford, Latona, and the University District (originally called Brooklyn). Here’s the street names of the nearby Green Lake neighborhood.
Guidepost at the Center of the Universe in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.
Fremont is one of Seattle’s most art-filled neighborhoods, with many murals, sculptures and other indoor and outdoor artworks. As written on the webpage of the Fremont Chamber of Commerce, “Where else will you find a troll, a drawbridge, a rocket, dinosaurs, art you can dress up, and a Lenin statue…???”
One of Fremont’s art installations is called The Guidepost, supporting the claim of Fremont as The Center of the Universe. The story is that back in the 1990s the claim of Center of the Universe was first made by Fremont’s artistic community, the Artistic Republic of Fremont. But actually, the claim of Fremont as the center of Seattle life goes back much farther, to the early years of the neighborhood.
Even though elephants are only native to Africa and Asia, elephants appear in art, literature and cultural references worldwide.
The Elephant Store in Seattle, far right, as photographed in 1878 by Peterson Studio.
Perhaps the earliest elephant-reference in Seattle was in the 1870s. In this 1878 photo, we see the Elephant Store on First Avenue at the southeast corner of Columbia Street. We don’t know exactly why it was called the Elephant Store. In his commentary on this photo, Seattle historian Paul Dorpat speculated that “presumably both the bargains and the selection were oversized.”
The Fremont neighborhood of Seattle is well-known for its art installations such as Lenin, the Troll and the Interurban statue. There currently is no elephant-art-motif in Fremont, but historically Fremont has had its own connections to elephant lore: an elephant named Wide Awake who lived at the nearby Woodland Park Zoo, and an elephant art piece created in Fremont which is displayed as a store’s sign at 8808 Aurora Avenue North.
