Bringing us up to date on 520

You might well think that there just is no stopping the State from doing what it wants to do to State Route 520.  To be sure, the project has quite a bit of forward momentum.  For example, the revisions to the Eastside portion of the highway, including the creation of two additional lanes, are well underway (that's the Bellevue Way overpass above 520 being demolished earlier this month in the photo above). Meanwhile, the State recently...

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Tile artists return to the Park on Saturday

Madison Park's Pioneer Hall is the venue again this year for the Handmade Tile Festival, presented by Artisan Tile NW.  Over twenty tile artists will be participating in this, the 6th Annual Festival.  Many of these artists will also be submitting their works for a juried show at the conclusion of the Festival. The theme for the show this year is “Signage." This is a reference to the old tradition of fronting shops, professional offices...

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Musings on the real estate scene

Madison Park: not hot, not coldThough we’re still a month away from our third-quarter report on Madison Park real estate activity, it’s already clear that the summer is ending on a pretty solid note.  There have been many more sales per month than in earlier quarters, and there’s a large number of properties pending sale. This bodes well for a potentially strong close to the year, at least in terms of sales.  It may also be the case that...

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A fine mess: City to detour E. Madison Street through Madison Valley beginning Monday

One-week closure has merchants up in armsIt wasn't supposed to happen this way.  When the Madison Valley Stormwater Project was conceived, nothing other than the intermittent blockage of E. Madison St. was anticipated.  That was then, this is now. Next week, due to "unavoidable" circumstances, Madison Street will be closed to traffic through the Martin Luther King, Jr. Way E./28th Avenue E. intersection (the red area shown on the map below)....

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Police Blotter 9/22/11

A month without a break-in?For a period of 29 days (August 18 through September 15), Madison Park did not experience a single residential break-in (or at least not one that was reported to the police). It was looking like we might actually experience a full month without a home burglary in the neighborhood. But it was not to be. On September 16, a late-afternoon break-in at a residence on the 3800 block of E. Crockett Street, in Canterbury, ended...

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More waterfront access for Madison Park?

City rethinking longstanding approachLongtime Madison Parkers can remember a time when the "Swingset Park" at E. Lynn St. and 43rd Avenue E. was a lovely, sand-filled beach providing year-round access to Lake Washington. Somewhere along the way, however, the City decided to replace the sand with riprap and ultimately concluded that topping the whole thing off with a chain-link fence was a wonderful idea.  What was once a favorite neighborhood...

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The great summer bee caper

Honeybee swarm causes a ruckusIt was a quiet, tranquil and, rare-for-July, sunny summer day on 42nd Avenue E. when the bees came.  As the morning wore on, however, it began to dawn on folks living on the block between E. Newton and E. Lynn Streets, that something was not quite right.  The neighborhood was no longer quiet and tranquil.  What was that loud humming, anyway? Where they came from, no one knows.  But the bees had arrived...

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A fun night in Madison Park

The opening of the Second Annual Madison Park Art Walk on Friday night was one of those occasions when everything just worked.  The weather was perfect, the art good-to-great, and the music infectious. Anyone experiencing the show, even the most curmudgeonly among us, would certainly have seconded the proposition that Madison Park is one fabulous village by the lake.The kickoff for Art Walk was a packed reception at Starbucks.  The event...

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Art Walk begins tonight

Opening-night reception at StarbucksThough Madison Park may suffer a dearth of art galleries (dearth, in this case, meaning zero), that doesn't mean we're a neighborhood where art and artists are under appreciated.  The lack of "proper" venues for art is simply not an impediment to a community that has shops, restaurants, salons, and offices in abundance.  It's now a tradition (assuming three years running can be so designated) that...

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New York Cupcakes arrives

Stories about new food outlets in the neighborhood are often the most popular postings on this blog.  So we expect that lots of readers will be happy to learn that New York Cupcakes has officially opened, though with this caveat:  "It's a soft opening only--this is still not everything we will ultimately have."  Nevertheless, things looked pretty much in place when we stopped by the new shop in Madison Valley yesterday afternoon.  By...

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Summer, glorious summer

We'd just about given up hope that it was going to happen this year: a three-day weekend that was sunny and warm from beginning to end. But mother nature pulled it off, and the Labor Day weekend was pretty spectacular in Madison Park. Not that many Madison Parkers stayed around to enjoy it.  It seemed to those of us left behind that a lot of the natives must have left town for the holiday (you could get an outside table at Cactus!, for example, without...

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Residential construction alive and well here

At the height of the local real estate market three years ago it was an unusual month in which three or four spec houses were not under construction in the neighborhood.  As we’ve reported, those heady days are long past, with the number of new speculative projects coming onto the local market each quarter falling to a single outlier, if even that.  This definitely doesn’t mean, however, that construction of new housing has come to a halt...

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September happenings

Art Walk returns next weekMore than two dozen artists from Madison Park and its environs will be participating in this year's Madison Park Art Walk, which will open on Friday, September 9 and extend through the end of the month. This is the second year for the popular event, which last year drew hundreds of art lovers to the neighborhood to view the wide range of art on display in neighborhood shops, restaurants, and other businesses. This year almost...

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