Not everyone was riding the train yesterday. Saturday was also the day of the big West Seattle Grand Parade, and West Seattle Blog brings fantastic coverage, photos and videos of the event.
Unfortunately the bulk of their coverage during the parade was done on Twitter, and while that’s great for folks who are watching live, Twitter’s handling of archives leaves a lot to be desired. So it’s tough to go back and look at their coverage, much less link to it.
Yesterday was the big day. Seattle’s light rail system finally opened to the public. Now I couldn’t be there to ride it and report on it, but many other people were, so there are tons of reports all over the web from the big opening day.
Seattle Transit Blog probably had the most persistent coverage. Several of their writers spent all day on the train, riding back and forth between downtown and Tukwila, checking out the people, the trains, and the stations. Their conclusion is that hopefully the train will bring Seattle’s neighborhoods together more than the bus or car ever could.
The Seattle P-I’s transportation blog also covered the opening day. They were at the big ceremony at the Mount Baker station, where the mayors of Seattle and Tukwila rode trains from the two ends of the line to meet in the middle. Ribbons were cut, and speeches were given, then everyone got to ride the train. They also reported that the trains were standing-room-only, as can be seen above, and that waits at the stations reached up to 30 minutes to get on board. The fact that the trains are free all day Saturday and Sunday probably helped that. All together 45,000 people rode the train yesterday.
Gardiner Davis in Crosscut brings a gripping story of a trip to the Methow River, about how it’s important not to underestimate Mother Nature, and how quickly a bad situation can turn worse.
I realized that I was involved with forces I had never experienced before. My waterlogged clothes were like a sail in the water. There was no way either I or the dog — aged, beloved, sodden, and dragged down with soaked hair — were going to have any control over the forces acting on us. It wasn’t personal. It was just nature doing its thing. We could die.
Today MyBallard put up a simple post about a couple of billboards that were vandalized in town. Starbucks and McDonald’s billboards were painted over, changing a few words to leave funny commentaries about the quality of their food. “It’s not just coffee, it’s Starbucks” became “It’s not good coffee, it’s Starbucks”. And so on. Good for a chuckle, I twittered it, and let’s all move on.
Until the commenters got involved, at least. Then it turned into a holy war about good graffiti, bad graffiti, capitalism, and “multinational earth raping corporations”. 88 comments so far, and doubtless more will be added over the night. Quite a launching point for some people’s sore nerves, it seems.
Last month I pointed to a “new” online news site, the Seattle Courant. Today everyone is pointing to the announcement that the Courant is shutting down, because the business model didn’t work like he thought it would and he didn’t have the available runway to make the business successful. Of course, one of the most-seen comments about the closure is, “Seattle Courant? Never heard of it.” So he had a short run, only six months, and he didn’t get the readership and he didn’t get the business side and relationships with advertisers going. Maybe you could say he was too ambitious with his plan, to build a site that would support several paid reporters with ad revenue. But sometimes going big leads to a big win; it just didn’t this time.
In his good-bye message he does have some interesting thoughts about why online news will never be as lucrative as paper news. Ultimately it comes down to what the advertisers are willing to pay, but why do they balk at paying high rates for online?
As everyone knows, traditional newspapers generate their revenue largely from selling ads. Running an ad in the newspaper is pretty expensive, but running a banner ad on a Web site isn’t. Let’s face it, online publishers will never be able to charge anything approaching the rates traditional print publishers charge, and here’s why.
Newspapers are able to charge such high rates for their ads was because they are doing something novel. Printing a newspaper every single day is a lot of work, and it requires a lot of skill, people, equipment and expertise. Running a Web site does not require a lot of skill, people, equipment or expertise. Just about anybody with a computer and an Internet connection can do it.
The Seattle P-I is looking to boost their online offerings by starting up several neighborhood blogs, run by the P-I but written by residents of the neighborhoods in question. The thing is, Seattle already has many excellent neighborhood blogs, independently owned and run. So while in other cities this kind of thing would look like a no-brainer for the town newspaper to start up, in Seattle it seems like the P-I is wanting to go head-to-head with these established brands rather than working with them.
I’m glad to see the P-I being agressive in the online space like this, and they’re showing signs of keeping their momentum up even now, months after the newspaper stopped printing. But if the blogging community starts to feel like the P-I is elbowing into their space, there could be a backlash brewing. I definitely want to watch how this plays out.
In Seattle Waterfront History, Chapter Six, Paul Dorpat takes a close look at the Seattle waterfront, before humans covered it up with train tracks, parking lots, and viaducts. This week he starts out by looking at the beaches below Belltown, and the original bluffs that are sorta still there in the area where the Battery Street tunnel comes out into the sunlight. He looks from up close, then from far away using a couple of early panoramas of Seattle, which show the Belltown area as a wild forest far from town. It’s all excellent stuff, and quite possibly the most in-depth examination of Seattle’s original shoreline that has ever been done.
So you may be sad that you missed out on the chance to buy one of the old Steel Electric ferries. It was reported yesterday that the sale of the four oldest ferries in the fleet had been finalized, and they were going to the scrapyard. But it’s not too late to get your hands on a newer ferry, the M/V Olympic.
The Olympic sailed for Washington State Ferries for 40 years, from the early 1950s to 1993. It was then mothballed, later sold to a private buyer, and now sits in Eagle Harbor where it can watch ruefully as the newer ferries pull in and out of the Bainbridge dock all day. But the construction of a new marina is pushing it out of the harbor, and the owners are looking to get rid of it and send it off to a good home. So they’ve put it on eBay.
For only $200,000 (the BuyItNow price) this fine marine vessel can be yours. It may be retired but it’s still operational and seaworthy, although its Coast Guard inspections have expired. The owners are hoping to sell it to someone who will restore it for use as a “hotel, corporate training retreat or exclusive events center”. It’s not completely unheard of…the former Skansonia has found a second life on Lake Union as a permanently-anchored event center, and you can get married on the car deck for a handsome fee. The same kind of life could be had for the Olympic, either moored somewhere or even afloat, roaming the Sound.
Of course renovations could be costly. The ship has been laid up for 16 years, and though the owners attest that the machinery still works you can bet there would some kind of overhaul needed. And the superstructure has been slowly collecting a coat of rust. The Olympic’s sister ship, the Rhododendron, was put through a similar overhaul around the same time the Olympic was retired, and it ended up going way over budget. But that little ship came out of it in great shape, and it’s still making the run at South Vashon today. Although it sounds like it’s in the shop more than out of of it these days, and might be the first one retired when some new boats come in.
So I hope someone can rescue the Olympic. I remember the first time I saw it tied up in Eagle Harbor a few years ago (above), and wondered why such a useful-looking ferry was sitting there all alone. It deserves a second chance at life. Of course, so did the Kalakala, and look how that turned out.
Via Seattlest comes the news from WSDOT that the venerable Steel-Electric ferries have finally been sold off for scrap. The four ferry boats Quinault, Illahee, Nisqually and Klickitat were retired in 2007 after problems with their hulls were discovered. Fixing them would have cost too much, so the state decided to put that money towards developing a future class of ferries rather than putting band aids on the old. Now, 18 months later, the boats have been sold to Eco Planet Recycling, Inc. of Chula Vista, Calif, for $50,000 each. They’ll be taken to Mexico and cut up for scrap.
These four boats were known as the “Steel Electrics“. They were the oldest boats in the fleet, being commissioned in 1927 for use in the San Francisco Bay. After the Golden Gate Bridge was built ferries were no longer in as much demand, so the four boats, along with two of their sisters, came up to Puget Sound and went to work on the Black Ball Line. Since then they’ve sailed the sound, finding themselves on just about every run imaginable. They ended their careers on some of the lower-traffic runs, including the Port Townsend-Keystone route and doing inter-island service in the San Juans.
For now the boats are still tied up in Eagle Harbor, but next month sometime they’ll be towed away to Mexico, leaving the Salish Sea forever.
SeattleHound A Seattle placeblog, written by a Nevada resident who hopes to be a Seattleite sometime soon. More...
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