Here are a few more incidents to add to the Christmas week crime blotter for the East Precinct:

• ‘Tranny bashed’ — A Seattle writer contacted us via Facebook about a December 23rd attack the victim is afraid to tell police about. SPD has no record of the incident:

hey just wanted to let you know that i got tranny bashed on boylston and pine last friday in front of hot mamas

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shoved from behind and dislocated my left arm he screamed’ FUCKING TRANNIES as he shoved me

The victim tells CHS the assault happened at 11:30p that night. The writer won’t contact police because of outstanding warrants. “So please tell people to be careful there,” the victim said.

We reported on a fight at the same location on December 11th involving an assailant SPD described only as a transgender male wearing a diamond studded bikini top.

• She’s crafty — A man told police it wasn’t Santa he awoke to Christmas morning in his bedroom inside a 21st Ave residence. Who-ever the Grinch was, they made off with a booty including a couple of laptops. Here’s the SPD report on the incident:
• Short-staffed — This 19th Ave burglary is a house-sitter’s worse nightmare and reveals some interesting staffing issues that SPD faced over the holiday weekend:

How will we remember 2011 on Capitol Hill? It’s a fair bet that many of the things that seem important today won’t be remembered a few years from now. We’ve also been doing this long enough to have built a small historical record. Here are the round-ups from recent years:

• 2010
• 2009

You’ll note plenty of examples of news from the past that have faded into forgotten history. Below, we’ve once again collected the “most important” Hill stories of the year. They are listed in no particular order though some of the year’s biggest stories are included up top. We based our “importance” measurement on stories that were viewed and commented on the most during the year. We also took a look at which stories our readers spent the most time on over the months of 2011. As usual, it’s an arbitrary list. Even more arbitrarily, we selected what we feel were the biggest stories for a poll that you can weigh in on. Poll closes the night of January 1st. If you think there is a story we should have included but didn’t, let us know in comments. Thanks for being part of another memorable year at CHS. Happy 2012.

Looking for something to do to ring in 2012? Here’s our list of Capitol Hill NYE 2012 festivities.

You can also check out more of our 2011 Year in Review: The year Capitol Hill Food+Drink broke | 2011’s 30 most-commented posts | Hill Style Top 10 | The year in development (next week!)

Most important Capitol Hill stories of 2011

• Tunneling for the Capitol Hill subway began. And sometimes there were surprises at the surface.
• Separate from the excitement of building the light rail line, an important process to define how the area around the Broadway station will be developed began in 2011. Though its impact won’t likely be felt until 2016, this is the yearthe Capitol Hill Light Rail Station Sites Urban Design Framework was born.
• The First Hill streetcar route was (mostly) set.
• The March murder of Zachary Lewis — horribly beaten to death and left in the empty lot that will someday be a park at Federal and Republican — was never solved.
• On First Hill, Dr. Louis Chen was charged with murder in the grisly August stabbing deaths of his partner and 2-year-old son inside their 17th-floor apartment. Prosecutors have decided not to seek the death penalty in legal proceedings that will re-start with the New Year.
• There was only one moment where it really got out of hand. The pepper spray-dusted brawl that ensued in the middle of Broadway as cops and pissed-off protesters clashed outside the oft-targeted Chase bank was easily the darkest moment of Occupy Seattle’s six-week stay on Capitol Hill starting on Halloween weekend. Sure, the Occupy presence was, at times, a messy, frustrating distraction. Add anarchists and, yeah, it got a little nuts sometimes. But, in the end, the camp left Seattle Central’s campus pretty much like the whole thing had never happened. And efforts like this showed that the movement holds some hope of inspiring change.
• Construction of the “greenest” office building in the world, the $30 million-plus Bullitt Center, began on E Madison in August. After slapping down an attempt to block the project, the center is expected to be completed in late 2012.
• Development and construction was definitely a defining characteristic of 2011 on the Hill. Here we documented simultaneous work underway on eight different area projects. We’ll take a look at the full year in development next week.
• It was a peculiar year for Cal Anderson. The park experienced a safety crackdown inspired by one Capitol Hill woman’s complaints and a few nasty incidents. And then this happened.
• A summer tragedy brought a community together as friends, loved ones and lovers remembered Vivace’s Brian Fairbrother. The bicycle crash also helped raise awareness and rally support for increasing safety for all modes of transportation around the city.
• The awesome and awful power of social media hit home in Pike/Pine as the wrong guy was fingered for a crime of douchebaggery against a popular Cha Cha/Bimbos bartender.
• The promoters behind the Capitol Hill Block Party have to be pleased. They finessed a hostile posse of local business owners, re-shaped the new three-day format, went super local with the line-up and still pulled the whole thing off.
• A wave of cannabis dispensaries seemed to signal the start of a new era in drugs and medicine on Capitol Hill. But a late-year bust and wavering in Olympia sent fuzzy signals at best.
• The big news wasn’t really Sonic Boom calling it quits after trying to make a go of it in a new location on Melrose Ave. It’s more about the bigger story — the struggles of retail on Capitol Hill.
• Understatement: It was an unbelievable year in new restaurant and bar openings.
• The Volunteer Park Cafe zoning battle put some of the long-term themes of CHS coverage on full display as it balanced out issues around a burgeoning entertainment scene on the Hill against literal not-in-my-backyard frustrations of residents. In 2011, the compromise was cemented and life can now move on.
• A multi-year crime and courts story that enmeshed several in the Capitol Hill community came to a fizzling conclusion in 2011 as the prosecutor decided not to charge artist DK Pan on trumped up gambling allegations.

This is how much people are avoiding peak tolls on Eastbound 520. Looks like my bus commute just got a lot smoother.

We won’t have a sense of what it’s really like to live with the new 520 tolls until next week. Thursday morning’s debut in the middle of a holiday week was a good environment for a soft launch. It was pretty darned quiet in Montlake.

WSDOT says the early tolls got off to a bang, however — the first car registered by the electronic tolling system was reportedly a Honda CRV doing 76 miles per hour. The system only registers a toll, not a traffic infraction so the driver who was either eager to make history or trying to be the last car to beat the toll or just clueless won’t end up with a ticket.

The state’s toll projections predict it will take about 40 years to pay for the roadway’s new bridge. KUOW took a look at what the tolling will likely do to Seattle’s traffic patterns.

“It’s not just for those that are going across the bridge that are going to be tolled, it’s also going to be traffic on I–5, on 405, on I–90. Everyone who’s in the Lake Washington area probably just needs to plan ahead a little bit because there’s going to be some shifting around traffic.”

So, there you go.

Information on the toll rates and payment options from our coverage is here. CHS also documented the installation of the tolling equipment early last winter.

It looks like Lucky 8’s will be part of our 2012 year in review restaurant highlights. After our talk with chef Justin Strnad about his project’s push for a 2011 debut, the buzz following Wednesday night’s VIP preview at the 14th and Union restaurant is that Lucky is likely to be open for business starting Sunday, New Year’s Day 2012.

Lucky 8’s is part of the Oola Distillery complex built out of the old La Panzanella Bakery space but its main entry is on 14th Ave.

Sandwiched between bear bar Diesel and the under-construction Zoe, another 2012 debutante, Lucky 8’s will feature Strnad’s renditions of what they are calling “traditional” Chinese/American fare — including takeout and, eventually delivery.

Lucky 8’s joins 12th Ave’s Chungee’s in offering Chinese cuisine of the take-out or sit-down variety. Broadway’s Bako fills out the fancier end of the spectrum on north Broadway. UPDATE: Don’t forget Little Shanghai in the Harvard Market shopping center. We did. These guys are opening soon, too.

It should be another busy week for food and drink as we’re hearing talk of another project joining Lucky 8’s in planning to open any minute now on Capitol Hill. More on that soon.

 See full map at Seattle Times

With impact in how our area is represented on the other Capitol Hill, state politicos rolled out the new set of proposed Congressional districts for Washington to be used in the 2012-2021 sessions of the House of Representatives. Below is a look at the newly proposed district lines and a round-up of analysis of the changes. Our Capitol Hill would remain in District 7. But the proposal would mean our neighbors to the south would be carved off to help form one of the most talked about elements of the plan: a congressional district where the majority of residents are minorities.

• Seattle Times coverage of the changes and full maps: “Under the plan announced Wednesday, Washington’s 2012 political landscape will also see the creation of its first congressional district where racial minorities make up a majority of the population.”
• Publicola: “Marko Liias: The super liberal state rep was moved from the 1rst (sic) District to the 7th, which is certainly more of a fit (the 7th includes most of Seattle). But bad news: Liias, who was running for Inslee’s open seat, would now have to run against popular Seattle progressive US Rep. Jim McDermott.”
• Northwest Progressive Institute: “The new WA-01 is a swing district, not safe for either party. It includes the northern Eastside in King County (anchored by Kirkland and Redmond), rural Snohomish County towns like Monroe, Sultan, and Granite Falls, and rural Skagit and Whatcom counties as well. Ceis and Gorton claimed during their presentation that it is possibly the most evenly divided district in the United States.” and “The new WA-07 is safe Democratic, centered on Seattle, like the old WA-07. But it now stretches into Snohomish County, taking in Edmonds, Woodway, and Shoreline. At its southern end, it includes Burien and Normandy Park. Nevertheless, it remains urban and liberal. Jim McDermott should be able to hold it.”
• Tacoma News Tribune: “The four partisan commissioners face a Jan. 1 deadline or the job goes to the state Supreme Court. State lawmakers can only fine tune any final maps and they need a super-majority vote to do so. The commission’s nonvoting chair, Lura Powell, has said the recent progress was encouraging.”

Current districts

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Here’s what was going down on the streets of the East Precinct while visions of sugar plums danced in our heads.

• R Place sidewalk fight: With a victim so intoxicated he didn’t realize his arm was broken, Seattle Police had little to go on when they responded to a fight near R Place just after last call on Christmas Eve morning. According to the report, two witness saw a white male in his early 20s, around 6 feet tall, thin with buzzed brown hair and wearing a black peacoat and blue jeans push the injured man to the sidewalk.
• E Valley taxi fight: A woman was arrested early on the morning of Friday, December 23rd after fighting over the fare with a taxi cab driver who had just driven her from the U-District to a home on E Valley. According to the SPD report, the woman suffers from mental issues and may have been under the influence of drugs. “My initial observation of XXXXX was that she appeared to be very energetic. She was also very excited as well as anxious,” the officer wrote in the report. The woman struggled with the driver and took his phone during the altercation.
• His and hers bike rip-off: On December 22, police investigated a burglary at a 16th Ave apartment building’s storage area that left a couple without their bicycles. The rip-off netted $1,700 in bikes according to the report.
• Tool rip-off: Also on the 22nd, a man contacted police to report $800 worth of tools stolen from the storage area of an apartment in the 400 block of Boylston Ave E.
• Digital picture frame rip-off: The only thing apparently stolen in a Boyer Ave E residential burglary reported on December 23rd was a digital picture frame.
• Robbery shooting suspect pleads not guilty: The man charged in a botched October street robbery that ended with its victim suffering a gunshot wound to the stomach pleaded not guilty in pre-Christmas court proceedings. According to prosecutors, 29-year-old Ian Strawn pleaded not guilty to robbery and weapons charges.
• Cops found a lot of pot: An employee contacted SPD about a briefcase full of marijuana found inside a 15th Ave E coffee shop. The, um, case remains open as of this report indicating that nobody has yet stepped forward to claim the property.
• Suspicious 23rd Ave E house fire: This December 23rd house fire has been determined to have been intentionally set.
• Winter burglaries: CHS found that the end of the year is when Capitol Hill burglars are busiest.
• DOJ rips SPD: The feds have demanded Seattle Police shape up its act when it comes to the use of force.
• Clean getaway: In this December 18th incident, a Safeway security guard was allegedly pepper sprayed over a box of laundry detergent.
• Craigslist mugging: In this day-after-Christmas incident, a man was jumped as he tried to sell his iPhone on Broadway.

A man slipped and was knocked unconscious after striking his head aboard a Metro route 43 bus Wednesday night near E john and 12th.

Seattle Fire crews arrived at the scene on a rainy Wednesday night just after 6:20p and found the man in his 50s unconscious but breathing following the fall. He was transported to Harborview but we do not yet know the extent of his injuries.

A Metro spokesperson tells CHS the coach was coming to a stop when the man slipped.