The Washington State Open tennis tournament started at the Seattle Tennis Club today— for the week, and I went out today to go and take a look. The facility is not even 2 miles from my house, but I have never been there. All other times of the year it is members only and very exclusive.
It was $30,000 to join the Club in 2015 (a figure almost certainly higher by now), plus annual dues. The wait list time is said to be 8 years or so. Rumor has it that Bill Gates wanted to become a member, but now has to wait his turn, as well.
The Seattle Tennis Club on the shore of Lake Washington. That’s the city of Bellevue in the distance. There are 19 tennis courts on the roughly 8 acres of real estate. As it turned out, the guy in red is the No 5 seed in the Men’s Open section, and I watched him play a match just a little later.A little bit of history, from a banner put up on one of the fences. The first tournament here, was held in 1890, only 13 years after London hosted its first Wimbledon tennis tournament in 1877.The Washington State Open logo, done in flowers and greenery.Here’s No 5 seed Riley Smith (22 yrs old, from Long Beach, California). He’s 6’7″ tall, and makes full use of it to smack his serves down into the opposite court. Bam!His opponent was Jesse Schouten from Mill Creek WA (north of Seattle). Shouten is a good player, but lost in straight sets against Smith.
I encountered a small group of ‘very fine’* Trump supporters on Broadway today, flanked by a large contingent of police officers (to protect them from a much larger group of protesters, I suppose).
From where I was standing, a much larger group of people followed along on the opposite sidewalk, all the time yelling loudly ‘FASCISTS, GO HOME! FASCISTS, GO HOME!
*Trump’s characterization of the Charlottesville white nationalist protesters, made when he talked to the press on Aug. 15, 2017.
The little group of ‘very fine’ Trump supporters were all of 7 or 8 people. That’s the yellow Gadsden flag with the rattlesnake on, and the words ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ (so are you all snakes?). Two Trumpsters carried Stars & Stripes flags, and two had Trump flags.
The construction crews are making good progress on the three new apartment buildings by the Capitol Hill train station.
The three new buildings called A, B and C, from a draft proposal that I found online. The buildings are 7 stories tall and will offer a total of some new 350 apartments. I believe the assumption is that these apartment dwellers will NOT own cars. They have trains and buses (and Uber drivers) on their doorstep to take them anywhere in the city, after all.The view from Denny Way, looking northeast. This is as tall as the new apartment buildings will go. The open space between the A building (left edge of the picture) and the B buildings (right) will be a public plaza.This is a late afternoon picture, looking north on 10th Avenue with the B buildings on the left. The homeowners on the right are getting some shade from the warm sun in summer, but they have lost a lot of sunlight that they used to have in winter!
The sidewalk on the left is the one that I always take to walk to the grocery store, and there is a really bad tree root bump in it.
One of the city’s transportation crews has dug into the soil today. An arborist will advise if the trees can survive, once the troublesome roots had been taken out. I hope the trees will be OK! I guess I will soon find out.
This is on Republican Street, between 16th & 17th Avenue.
The walkways around the Denny Substation opened yesterday, and I went to take a look today.
The view at the top of the walkway at Denny Substation. This is at a 2nd floor elevation, and close to the corner of Denny Way & Stewart St.One can now stand under the ‘Transforest’ artwork and, um, learn to appreciate it a little more!Here’s a view from Stewart Street towards the Space Needle. The site in the middle of the picture is under construction (1200 Stewart St), and this current view will change dramatically over the next 18 months or so. Two 45-story towers on a 3-story podium will be constructed with some 1,050 apartments and retail space. (Whoah). The new building partially fitted with its glass windows is 1120 Denny Way: a complex of two 41-story apartments buildings. Upon completion, it will be the largest apartment building in the city’s history with 1,179 apartments.The construction of the new ‘Building Cure‘ for Seattle Children’s Research Hospital is about to be completed. I love the mirror finish on the lettering. This is on Terry Avenue.Also by the Building Cure are these colorful sidewalk chairs that can swivel.A giant astronaut in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, promoting an exhibit of the 1969 moon landing in Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
Today marks ten years since the opening of the Seattle light rail transit system. I was one of the 45,000 riders that boarded the light rail train for the first time, on July 18, 2009.
The initial line ran from downtown to Tukwila International Boulevard (close to Seattle-Tacoma airport). Four more stops have opened since then (Seattle-Tacoma airport & Angle Lake to the south, Capitol Hill and University of Washington to the north). The next extension of three more stops to the north, will open in 2021.
I made a run to the downtown station today, to buy this 10-year anniversary transit card. There’s the train in the background. There are currently 62 train cars in the system. They are made by a train car manufacturer called Kinkisharyo, in Osaka, Japan.
I went bicycling with my friends on today, and tried out an electric-assist bicycle for the first time.
The bicycle has three gears, and performed very well. As far as I could tell, the electric assist from the battery is always-on (so no way to turn it off).
On even grades, the electric assist feels a little like cheating! – but it does come in very handy on long uphill climbs.
I’m ready! I found this bike a few blocks away from my friends’ house, with the help of Uber’s app, scanned its QR code with my phone, unlocked it, and it was ready to go. JUMP is Uber’s bike-share service that competes with Lime, the other bike rental player in Seattle.Here’s Lake Washington, during a quick stop in Seward Park. It was a beautiful day (75°F/ 24°C) with sun and puffy white clouds.
Newspaper front page after the 2001 Nisqually earthquake.
I woke up to a shaking house at 3 a.m. this morning.
The shaking went on for only a few seconds, but I was sure it was an earthquake. It turned out there was a magnitude 3.5 quake, and the one I experienced must have been the 4.6 quake that followed just two minutes later.
The epicenter of the quake is about 26 miles from my house. No real damage or injuries in the Puget Sound area or from elsewhere, were reported.
P.S. The Nisqually earthquake of 2001 near Olympia was several orders of magnitude stronger, at 6.8. It damaged the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the dome of the State Capitol building in Olympia, and Starbucks headquarters in Seattle.
Here’s a beautiful double rainbow, that we saw on Wednesday night from my friends’ house in the Mt Baker neighborhood.
P.S. Yes, it’s not your imagination, there really is a second one above the first!
A double rainbow is seen when sunlight is reflected and refracted into its different wavelengths twice (in the suspended drops in the atmosphere). So the observer sees two different reflections, coming from different angles.
It was a gray Sunday, with a little rain, here in the city today.
I did run out to go check on the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s gradual disappearance (on-going demolition), and the new buildings under construction nearby.
Looking south from the upper deck at Pike Place Market. No Mt Rainier in the distance, just low clouds.Looking north. There’s the Norwegian Bliss at the Bell Street Cruise Terminal (Pier 66), just getting ready to set sail for a round trip to Skagway, Alaska. It will be back early next Sunday morning.The neon sign at Pike Place Market is almost as iconic as the Space Needle. It has been there much longer (since 1935), and was designed by architect Andrew Willatsen.Nearby is The Emerald, a 40-story, 265-unit condominium high-rise. The mural artwork is for outdoor store Fjällräven (Swedish for arctic fox), around the corner. (Scientists recently published an article that tells of a female arctic fox that had trekked an astonishing 2,700 miles from Norway to Canada, across arctic ice, in just 21 days).And how is the new Rainier Square Tower on 5th Avenue progressing? I believe it still has 15 to 20 floors to go before topping out.I always walk by this building on the way back from Pike Place Market and even though it now sells discount clothing, it has a storied history. It was built in 1940 as a major West coast store for the F. W. Woolworth Company. These the waning days of Art Deco architecture, but the building still has many Art Deco traits. The terracotta and lighter cream colors go together nicely, and I love the styling of the clock with its horizontal ‘wing’ accents.
We had light rain for most of the day here in the city – a welcome change in the weather, given the dry conditions around Western Washington.
July is the driest month of the year, though*. So we may not see a whole lot more rain, soon.
*July average rainfall is 0.9 in., compared to 6.1 in. for December.
Current drought conditions in Washington State. The city of Seattle falls in the ‘D2- Severe Drought’ area on the map. So far there is no large wildfires burning in in the State – always an elevated risk when conditions are dry. [Source: https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/washington].
Happy Pride! My friends and I checked in on the Seattle Pride Parade today, and here are a few pictures.
Here comes the Amazon contingent. (Very convenient that ‘Amazon’ has 7 letters that exactly match the number of colors in the gay rainbow flag!).I loved the ‘pink unicorn’ walking with the Walmart delegation.Drug manufacturer Gilead. The giant blue pill in the truck is the miracle HIV prevention pill called Truvada, that have already saved countless lives all over the world. Only thing is: in the United States a month’s supply cost health insurers a fortune (almost $2,000). Gilead generated global Truvada sales of nearly $3 billion last year, of which about $2.6 billion came from the United States. In Gilead’s defense: they have spent some $6 billion on HIV/AIDS research since 2000.Yay! for University of Washington Medicine, and their beautiful big rainbow flags.
I helped out as a volunteer at the Seattle Classic tennis tournament today.
The tournament is sanctioned by the Gay & Lesbian Tennis Alliance (GLTA). The GLTA is an international body that oversees an impressive worldwide circuit of tennis tournaments (check out the table below).
The tournaments do not have prize money to speak of, but it is a great way of encouraging the LGBT community to participate in the wonderful sport of tennis (of which I am a lifelong fan).
Doubles play in progress today on one of the six outdoor courts at the Lloyd Nordstrom Tennis Center at the University of Washington. The speck at the top left is a float plane.There are six indoor courts as well. The different divisions for different skill levels: Open, A, B, C and D. Some tournaments add draws for over-35 or over-45 players.
Some of the construction projects in South Lake Union are nearing their completion: the Nexus condominium tower, the Denny Substation and the Google office buildings. I took these pictures today.
Here is the 41-story Nexus condominium tower at 1200 Howell St, viewed from the south. The ‘cubes’ with their 8° offsets add a little interest to the building.This is the fancy main gate and its door, of Seattle City Light’s Denny Substation (see the ‘LIGHT’ in big letters?). The walkways on the outer perimeter alongside the building are still closed to the public, though. The $210 million substation will be fully operational by year-end.Hmm .. and check out the artwork that has now been installed: the 110 ft (33.5 m) tall ‘Frankenstein’ transmission tower (my name for it). Its official name is Transforest, and it was designed by Lead Pencil Studio.There are no cranes on the Google building anymore – just scaffolding to complete the outside cladding. I’m looking west, and that’s Mercer Street on the left, onto which the construction crane had crashed on April 28. The cloud logo stands for Google Cloud Platform, a suite of cloud computing services. Google employees will start to move in later this summer.
It’s the official start of summer here in the North today.
We have had mild temperatures (68°F/ 20°C) and not much rain in June, tracking at about 50% of the month’s average.
Sunset tonight was at its latest for the year, at 9.11 pm here in Seattle.
I walk by these neon pink flowers on their silvery gray stems almost every day, and finally looked it up: they are rose campions (Lychnis coronaria). They bloom in late spring and early summer, and like full sun and drained soil.
Only two of the five amigos could make it to the Elysian for beer night tonight.
Our beer of choice was an Elysian Space Dust, a hoppy Imperial Pale Ale with a whopping 8.2% alcohol by volume.
A sticker display on one of the doors inside the Elysian Brewing Company’s Capitol Hill pub. Look for Bigfoot (aka Sasquatch) from the Pacific Northwest, sneaking by the Church of Saint Andrew in Aying, Germany. Aying is near Munich in the southeast corner of Germany, and is famous for its Ayinger Brewery.
Johannesburg in South Africa is sometimes said to be the real ‘El Dorado’: the city that was built on the discovery of gold*. Seattle, for its part, was a pioneer outpost in the late 1800s, and was lifted out of an economic slump and prospered by 1900, due to the discovery of gold.
Here is a brief timeline of Seattle at the end of the 1800s: 1889 Seattle’s Great Fire reduces 50 blocks of downtown to rubble. 1893 The financial Panic of 1893 causes a national recession. 1897 On July 17, the Portland Steamer docks in Seattle, carrying half a ton of gold from the Klondike region in Canada.
Some 10,000 men and boys leave for the Alaskan and Canadian goldfields. 1898 Canada creates the Yukon territory. 1900 By the time the decade and the century ended, Seattle’s population had doubled to 81,000.
*The Witwatersrand Gold Rush was a gold rush in 1886 that led to the establishment of Johannesburg, South Africa. There was once a massive inland lake, and its silt and gold deposits from alluvial gold that had settled there, formed the gold-rich deposits that South Africa is famous for.
A retrospective (printed in 1996) of Seattle Times articles from the late 1800s, that I found in the Seattle Public Library.
It’s nice to see that the City of Seattle has applied new paint on some of the rainbow pedestrian crossings here on Capitol Hill.
I guess it’s too bad we cannot stop pedestrians and traffic from dirtying them up all over again, right?
Here’s the corner of 11th Avenue and Pine Street on Capitol Hill with its freshly painted pedestrian crossing. The real rainbow has seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. On rainbow flags and gay symbols the indigo is left out. The green in this paintwork looks like teal to me, but hey, it’s all fine. I love the colors.
Should a city such as Seattle with really expensive housing costs, adopt rent control* measures? Maybe, but probably not.
It usually turns out that rent control creates a whole new set of problems. Renowned economist Paul Krugman writes that rent control inhibits construction of new housing, creates bitter tenant–landlord relations, and in markets with not all apartments under rent control, causes an increase in rents for uncontrolled units.
A better approach for city councils could be to provide housing subsidies or tax credits to renters.
*Rent control or rent regulation is a system of laws, administered by a court or a public authority, which aim to ensure the affordability of housing and tenancies on the rental market for dwellings. [Source: Wikipedia]
Could I sign her petition for rent control? asked the lady at the grocery store entrance today. ‘Hmm- I don’t know enough about it’, was my honest reply. So she gave me this brochure, but all it said was ‘We need rent control’. Well, in a free market and in order to be fair to everyone, even rich people – those that own entire apartment buildings – it’s just not that straightforward.
I stopped for a moment on the way to the dentist this morning, to take a picture of the colorful rainbow flag at the entrance of the new Hyatt Regency. (June is Gay Pride month).
The Hyatt Regency has been open for business since November. I’m not sure if they are already able to fill their enormous hotel to its full capacity, with guests. They may have to be patient and wait for the extensions to the nearby Washington State Convention Center, to be completed. That date is still more than 18 months away though, some time in early 2021.
