Tag Archives: cars

Car prowl reports are down (actually) in Seattle — but not on Capitol Hill

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2022 totals projected based on reports through May

One of multiple cars busted into in a prowl spree last week around E Pike (Image: CHS)

Want a Seattle crime problem to solve, city leaders? Crack down on car prowls on Capitol Hill. Seattle Police statistics show that reports of car break-ins have actually dropped about 20% in the city over the past five years — but there has been not letup across the East Precinct covering the Hill and the Central District.

Around Capitol Hill, they are coming in bunches in 2022. Of the around 120 reported every month in the East Precinct, many now involve rounds of mutli-car smash and grabs. A recent spree involved 11 cars parked overnight last week on a block around Temple De Hirsch Sinai.

“They were probably looking for cash; at least in our case there was nothing visible on the car seats,” the CHS reader who alerted us to the spree writes. “The thieves rummaged through the dashboard and all they seem to have taken is some stray coins.”

A previous spree area was hit twice near Miller Community Center with a night of smash and grabs in late June in the same area of another night of busted car glass a few months earlier. Continue reading →

SPD busts up Capitol Hill takeover as drivers burn rubber in Pike/Pine

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They were fast and the cops got furious as drivers in souped-up cars and classic rides spun donuts and burned rubber in the middle of Pike/Pine’s nightlife scene late Saturday night.

Videos from the burst of petrol fumes and Vin Diesel-level testosterone spread across Seattle social media this weekend showing drivers cruising through the area and filling 10th and Pike with clouds of smoke from the noisy burnouts. Continue reading →

Capitol Hill auto garage in CHOP 911 controversy leaving 12th Ave as development moves forward

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(Image: CHS)

With reporting by Gabrielle Locke

A longtime 12th Ave small business that ended up playing an outsized role in the summer’s Capitol Hill occupied protest zone is closing shop and leaving the neighborhood — a move that will be viewed through the prism of months of protests but that has been in the works for years as part of a multimillion dollar land and development deal.

In 1999, John McDermott and Russell Kimble bought Car Tender, a Capitol Hill auto repair garage on 12th Ave at E Olive St.

“We have our craft and we do enjoy that but, like everything, it has its challenges. What we enjoy the most is helping people,” Kimble tells CHS. After 49 years of serving the Capitol Hill community, Car Tender is relocating to Shoreline. “Our move has been coming for a long time because our property sold, so moving has always been the plan,” Kimble said.

The business has been servicing European cars including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Land Rover, and others, in the city since 1971.

In 2016, the garage partners bought the property where their business was located in a $7.6 million deal. Two years later with early development planning in place, the property was sold to developer Mack Real Estate Group for $10.2 million. Continue reading →

Street Critic | Capitol Hill-style classic car field report: ‘a fleeting grand era of industrial design’

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There are certain ages where the zeitgeist leads to incredibly potent creative output.

Hellenistic Sculpture of the 4th through the 2nd Centuries BCE; Germanic orchestral and chamber music from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries; High-Modern Architecture from the early 20th Century through the 1930s; and Jazz from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s come to mind.

Of far lesser importance, but still a personal favorite, is automotive design from the early 1960s through the early 1970s; where, like the above-stated periods, no wrong could be done (okay, I’m excluding the Ford Pinto and AMC Gremlin, among others). Granted, a BMW 2002 or Alfa Romeo Giulia does not rank with the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy, or Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus in artistic merit, but as exemplars of grand design in their respective field, they hold their own. As luck would have it, the benign (i.e. non-salted) roads of the Pacific Northwest provide a good habitat (as it were) for conserving cars of this vaunted era.

While poking around Capitol Hill photographing architecture and landscape, I occasion upon a few prized specimens; happening frequently enough, as it turns out, to begin to share them. Thus, begins the hoped-for first of several reports memorializing a fleeting grand era of industrial design.

Continue reading →

City says Capitol Hill Uber and Lyft pickup zone will continue and there could be more to come

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The test of a new ride-hail pickup zone is achieving its goals and will continue and could be expanded to other nightlife and rideshare heavy areas of the city, the Seattle’s department of transportation announced Monday.

“We’ve seen improved traffic circulation in the area, and the Seattle Police Department has reported that their ability to patrol and respond in the area has been improved and that crowds are disbursing more quickly with fewer disturbances at the end of the night. Additionally, more riders are catching their rides at the curb and not blocking traffic in the street,” the SDOT announcement reads.

CHS reported in November on the start of the weekend nightlife pilot that carves out four pickup areas from existing Pike/Pine parking where customers looking for a ride with either Uber or Lyft are directed by the apps. The geo-fencing is in effect during the highest demand times for the services: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday between midnight and 3 AM and includes a total of 36 legal parking spaces that change to loading zone restrictions during the program’s hours.

The “ridehail zone” comes amid a continuing boom in the Pike/Pine nightlife economy where huge crowds can gather as last call approaches and revelers head for home. Police have long sought strategies to better manage the 2 AM rush to help cut down on traffic issues as well as assaults and fights that can break out in the crowds. Continue reading →

City seeks feedback on plan for EV charging station in the Central District

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After Seattle City Light’s previous efforts to install an electric vehicle charging station on Broadway were curbed, the organization is proposing to build a similar EV charging station in the Central District.

The charging station would be implemented on East Olive St between 21st and 22nd Ave as part of the City of Seattle’s pilot program to add EV charging stations throughout the city. The pilot program is part of the Drive Clean Seattle Initiative, which hopes to provide more EV charging stations as an incentive for people to drive EVs, aiding the city in meeting its carbon neutral goals. 

If the chargers are built, two fast chargers will be located along the curb while two existing street parking spots will be converted to “EV charging only” spaces.

The average EV charging session lasts between fifteen and thirty minutes, so drivers would be limited to an hour of parking at these spaces.  Continue reading →

LoJack: Why police and the Sheriff’s helicopter were searching for a parked Lexus in the Central District Saturday night

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Saturday night, Seattle Police were searching through the streets just south of E Madison as the King County Sheriff’s helicopter roared above. The search went on for 30 minutes as officers combed the area, street by street. They must have been looking for somebody — or something — very important.

They were. They got a LoJack hit.

“We want to find stolen cars,” an SPD spokesperson tells CHS.

Details of how exactly the system works are a bit of a secret — “We don’t want people working around it,” the SPD representative says — but here are the basics. Continue reading →

City collecting final feedback on proposed Broadway electric vehicle charging station

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(Image: City of Seattle)

City of Seattle officials continue to collect community feedback on a plan to install an electric vehicle charging facility on Broadway near Capitol Hill Station.

CHS reported on the plan and official insistence that the installation would not pit Tesla owners vs. bicyclists by sabotaging future extension of the Broadway bikeway prior to a Seattle City Light-hosted open house last week.

The city says it continues to collect feedback on “the proposed EV charging location” through this Thursday, March 14th. You can add your thoughts via email at [email protected].

Continue reading →

To boost the Seattle dream of an electric car in every affordable garage, public charging stations being added across city, including one on Capitol Hill

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(Image: Seattle.gov)

Elon Musk wouldn’t be pleased with the delivery timeline but Capitol Hill is lined up to host one of the city’s 20 planned public electric car chargers hoped to, um, jumpstart the adoption of electric vehicles in Seattle and make the automobiles more accessible.

Seattle City Light is making plans to install 18 more of the DC Fast Chargers for electric vehicles at 10 to 15 curbside and off-street locations across the city one of which will be located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

“We feel that as a public utility we have a responsibility to our ratepayers to invest in and implement solutions that support sustainability,” Jenny Levesque, community outreach manager for Seattle City Light, said at Monday’s Pike/Pine Urban Neighborhood Council meeting. Continue reading →

Capitol Hill’s only full service gas station up for grabs

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Mike Burke (Images: Alex Garland)

The Hilltop Service Station on 15th Ave E — one of Seattle’s last full service gas stations — could be at the end of the road of more than 50 years of business on Capitol Hill. The station stopped selling gas this month though the busy garage continues to serve drivers from Capitol Hill and beyond. The land is up for sale.

Station owner Mike Burke has mixed feelings about the situation.

“I’m sad it’s a part of the community soon to change dramatically,” he said, “but at some point one has to accept the reality and move forward.”

 

Gary Bergamini, who passed away last November, owned the property since the 1960s. His assets moved into a trust operating on behalf of his heirs.

Burke came along in the late ‘70s, moving up from a gas pumper to a business partner. He will not make any new business decisions, however, until he talks with the property’s buyers. They could negotiate for the station to stay a while longer. But a developer is actively pursuing the property, according to Burke.

“So what do you think is gonna happen in Seattle,” he said. Continue reading →