(Image: St. Joseph School)
The kids at Capitol Hill’s St. Joseph School sometimes probably can’t wait to go home and get out of the place but they joined together recently to mark a big milestone. The school marked the 100 year anniversary of its 18th Ave building by recreating a historical photograph of the student body across the ages.
The school has continued to grow with an expansion to the campus about ten years ago and plans for a new playfield structure in the works.
The photographic celebration came on the 100th anniversary of the school building but a few years short of the present-day church structure’s centennial. They’ll mark that milestone in 2030.
100 years ago (Image: St. Joseph School)
The school’s current student body — say cheese (Image: St. Joseph School)
The old school received a boost relatively recently in its long life. A decade ago, the school set about improvements that included a 4,400 square-foot expansion that connected its campus and created a central 18th Ave entrance.
More changes are coming. The school’s strategic plan includes an initiative to create a new combined playfield above a parking structure — a badly needed resource on the campus that has seen a busy neighborhood fully fill in around it. The nearby Holy Names all-girls Catholic high school completed a similar project to construct a new gymnasium and underground parking structure — but only after some drawn-out debate with nearby homeowners.
For now, the pavement of the St. Joseph parish’s large surface parking lot will have to do for recess and cars as it has for decades.
While the families of the private Jesuit St. Joe’s are celebrating, public school families in the area are taking an at least temporary sigh of relief. Seattle Public Schools announced this week it will hold off on any campus closures due to budget shortfalls until the 2025 school year.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE THIS SPRING
🌈🐣🌼🌷🌱🌳🌾🍀🍃🦔🐇🐝🐑🌞🌻
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support 👍
Calling a new parking garage in north Capitol Hill “a badly needed resource on the campus that has seen a busy neighborhood fully fill in around it” makes sense until you consider that the city, county, state, and country have climate goals that this isn’t aligned with.
Yes let have more parking lots around schools and playgrounds. Clearly not enough children are being killed by cars
Please no parking garage! What a terrible idea to drive more traffic to the neighborhood with more people driving kids to school rather than walking, biking, or taking transit. Under what case is investment in very costly places to store cars a smart idea? Bad for the neighborhood. Bad for students. Bad for the environment we all share. And a terrible legacy for today’s parents to saddle in today’s youngsters. Bad idea all around.
The community and the City of Seattle should oppose the building of a parking structure on this parcel. This would be an extremely expensive investment in infrastructure that improves the convenience of driving, which contributes to congestion in one of the most dense, urban, and walkable neighborhoods in Seattle. The school should be leveraging those funds to invest in transportation alternatives instead. A parking garage could end up underutilized as well, with drivers opting to still park on surrounding public streets to avoid the surge in congestion that occurs during school start and end times. The garage would likely only have one or two exit lanes and it could take 10-20 minutes to actually get out of the garage, making it an inconvenient option during those peak demand periods. Think about a time you’ve been stuck in a garage waiting behind a line of traffic trying to exit after a concert or event ends. Many schools that build parking garages or parking lots still create spillover parking demand into surrounding neighborhoods for this reason. This is an expensive band-aid solution that does not address the core issue that too many people are driving cars to access this school. We should be holding private schools accountable to be using their resources to promote carpooling, walking, biking, and public transportation.