Springtime Comes to 2nd (and 1st, too)!

Last week, during some aimless wandering around the neighborhood, I spotted a lone tree in bloom along 1st Ave. It was really nice to see. It was also an odd sight for February. Usually, things are really grim this month. The gloom is near-constant and people with SAD barricade themselves in their apartments and refuse to come out till spring. Well, here's a sign that spring is just around the corner: the plum and plum hybrids along 1st & 2nd Aves. are beginning to bloom. That single tree has inspired a host of others. This is a unique happening to 1st & 2nd; 3rd Avenue's trees are mostly those awful skeletal honey locusts that get their leaves late and lose them early, 4th & 5th's majestic oaks, maples and plane trees are still months away from foliage and 6th Avenue...well, there's just not much to see.

I'm still not sure what's going on with these trees, whether it truly is a byproduct of warm El Nino temperatures or climate change or whatnot. My friend Jim says that the purple-leaf plum and the plum-apricot hybrids bloom early, but I've never seen them pop in February. So yes, this is kind of a cool thing - and it's happening in terrible Belltown. Here are some pictures from along 1st Avenue:






This is what 2nd Ave. looks like:




So that's how things are looking around here. Pretty soon the lovely pear trees are also going to bloom. This is how most of them are looking now:

Once again, it's really unusual for this to be happening so early. Last year, most of these trees didn't bloom until May.

You know, the last few winters have seemed to last for an eternity. I think it's about time we got an early spring. Then again, what with Seattle weather being what it is, we may well get snow, freezing temperatures and general gloom well into April. But I'd like to think that the trees know best about how things are going to go down.

Welcome to 1st Avenue! Please Enjoy Our Scaffolds!

What's going on? When did 1st Avenue become blighted with scaffolds? Well, I guess it was a gradual thing, but now it's too prevalent to ignore. Lots of things get past me, but this isn't one of them. Let's have a look:

This is the Ellington at 1st & Clay. It appears that they're installing weather-stripping or something similar and not trying to counteract the building's groaning cheapness. As far as I know, the Ellington is a very nice, very well constructed complex.


Here's the Alex at 1st & Bell. Isn't that place done already? Apparently not, because they need a full-frontal scaffold to take care of business there, whatever that may be.


Next door at the semi-super-ugly Bell Tower, there's a baby scaffold right above the front entrance. But a baby scaffold is still a scaffold, so it counts. They're doing some renovations around there, so why not have a scaffold?



Finally, we have the lovely Terminal Sale Building at 1st & Virginia. There seems to be a lot of grinding going on. It sounds a lot like the toils of the dwarf army on the side of the McGuire, only the Terminal Sales is a much, much cooler building. My guess is that they re-mortaring the bricks, which is an upright, American thing to do.

There you have it, folks. Your guide to 1st Avenue's scaffolds of mystery. Sure, none of them are nearly as extensive as the McGuire, but they're also not as unsightly. Enjoy them while they're around!

The Sidewalk Talks Again!

This time, it's not commanding you to do anything; it's just saying something that doesn't make any sense. This bit of public art is old. I mean, it predates me. It goes back at least to the eighties and possibly the seventies. What's remarkable about it is that it has occupied the same spot at 1st & Virginia for the entire time. That patch of sidewalk used to run in front of a parking lot. Now it hosts this:

Yeah, it's a reflecto-riffic piece of the urban skyscape, indeed. But all through the construction process, great care was taken to preserve the nebulous phrase so that future generations could be puzzled by it. That's pretty admirable, because they usually come in, destroy everything and leave behind an ugly building. This time, they just left behind an ugly building. Well done (for once), construction guys.