Gary Merlino Construction Co. crews uncover and recover Second Avenue in Belltown on Thursday. Working north to south, new concrete forms are set between Bell and Blanchard streets, while pile drivers rip up the old pavement between Lenora and Virginia streets. The City of Seattle is repaving Second in separate stretches from Denny Way to South Jackson Street, in a project that should last into mid-July.

• Joel Connelly doesn’t like the idea of still more street construction in Belltown, worrying that all these closed lanes and parking spaces could fatally disrupt business, especially if Nickels’s “park boulevard” idea (reducing Bell Street to one lane of traffic and plaza-izing the rest) goes through. I believe if Bell’s gonna be revamped, it might as well be done now, while all this other work is already going on on or near it.
• Our favorite expert on the domestic automotive collapse, Michael Moore, says good riddance to the old General Motors. (Say, since we the U.S. taxpayers now own the company, let’s bring back the Geo! And let’s make us some of those hi-speed passenger trains, too, OK?)
• As the Chase-ification of Washington Mutual nears completion, a lot of WaMu ATM cards have stopped working. The possible culprit: Chase’s deal to switch WaMu’s debit card handling services from MasterCard to Visa.
• Seattle Business Monthly depicts the Seattle Times-owning Blethen family as a dysfunctional clan worthy of soap-opera depiction.
• Our pals at the local news site PubliCola have some real investment behind them now, thanks to Greg Smith, the real estate developer who almost ran for mayor this year. Yeah, he almost ran against Greg Nickels, for whom PubliCola cofounder Sandeep Kaushik now does campaign PR.
• And the equally fine folks at another local news site, Seattle PostGlobe, have published another photo essay by yr. intrepid c’r’s’p'n’d't. It’s all about the demise of the Summit K-12 alternative public school.

My longtime acquaintance and zine publishing veteran Wendi Dunlap has launched a crusade to bring back the Waterfront Streetcar.

…to the item below, here’s “Artistdogboy” on “why we should stop screwing around and build the tunnel.”

We lose our NBA team, our biggest bank, our oldest newspaper, and now the biggest and greatest remnant of Seattle’s “working waterfront” era, the Alaskan Way Viaduct. At a Tuesday signing ceremony, city and state officials finalized the deal to build a “deep bore” tunnel to replace the elevated highway, and to redevelop the Viaduct land for more lucrative, corporate-friendly uses.

I’ve been involved in a heated Facebook discussion/argument over the project’s merits or lack thereof. I could reiterate the many various points of view presented in this discussion (why wasn’t this done decades ago; why isn’t there more transit in it; why etc.).

Invariably, two semi-inter-related arguments arise:

• San Francisco got rid of its elevated highway, therefore Seattle MUST do likewise; and
• This town totally, forever, SUCKS if it doesn’t do exactly what I want it to do.

My responses:

• No, Seattle DOES NOT have to do everything exactly the way they did them in Egoville USA. This place is its own place, with its own needs. Get used to it.
• The infamous “Seattle process” is not about achieving consensus, I’ve concluded. It’s about delaying consensus (or the imposition of political will) for as long as possible, so all parties can fully vent their emotional feelings of righteous superiority. (”This town totally forever SUCKS, man, because it won’t do everything the way I think it should do them.”)
• The Viaduct is a relic of the era of our maritime-industrial heritage, prior to the developers’ dream of turning the waterfront into a “harbourpointe.” That’s part of what I love about it.
• However, that day’s gone and it’s not coming back. Cargo’s now in containers. That action’s on and around Harbor Island and Interbay.
• If the central waterfront and environs must be remade, let’s remake them in a friendly, funky way, not in a pompous Olympic Sculpture Park way. Bring on the tacky tourist stands, the hot dog vendors, the skateboard ramps, the buskers, the “fine art galleries” selling kitschy oil paintings of whales and herons. The last thing Seattle needs is another impracticable monument to the declaration of world-class-osity.
• I still like the Viaduct. I always will. Even when it’s gone.

(via Chuck Mathias):

So the big-wigs are getting the gazillion-dollar tunnel nobody else wants (Guys! I don’t care how temporarily cheap the depression’s made gas–cars are OVER! If you had the foresight of the average
rat sniffing a trap, you’d use the few dollars left before hyperinflation sets in to renovate the state’s railroads, including the TRACKS THAT ARE ALREADY UNDER THE VIADUCT!) Just another notch to add to their shootin’ arns, I guess, next to the monorail lots of other people wanted but didn’t get, and the baseball stadium lots of other people didn’t want, but got stuck with anyway. There are probably other examples, but I’m a Tacoman and not well-informed (sorry for the redundancy).I guess the question is: Are liberal oligarchs supposed to be better than the other kind?

Your site’s a treasure, by the way–about the only blog of a strictly local nature I never miss.

Chuck Mathias

But I’ve a less hectic day-work schedule this week, so let’s try to catch up on the recent news:

• Microsoft’s new on-campus mall includes a miniature, officially licensed “Pike Place Market” area. Like all of the MS “Commons,” it’s open only to MS employees and guests. This is wrong on more levels than I want to enumerate here, but I’ll settle for just a few concerns: Does it include the Athenian Inn? Farmer-run produce stalls? The magic shop?
• 
  Can you dig it?: It’s official. The Alaskan Way Viaduct will be replaced by a tubular hole in the ground beneath First Avenue, a hole which won’t have exits to downtown or Belltown. Bah.
• 
  Otherwise, our Democratic-controlled Legislature behaved very GOP-esque. It passed an all-cuts budget, decimated social services, and quietly shut down any talk about making our state tax system less regressive.
• 
  Sand clogs the pipes at the Magnolia sewer plant, due to all the sand put on city roads last December. Hey, let’s make a new artificial beach!
• 
  GM to dump thousands of jobs, hundreds of dealers, and the whole of Pontiac. (Oh yeah, Saturn and Hummer are gong away too; but my urban-hipster conditioning prevents me from mourning Hummer, and I’m too old to have any teenage memories of cruising the strip-mall roads in a Saturn.)
• 
  Sounders FC’s off to a smashing start; while the Mariners approach their ‘01 glory days. Nice.

“We need a new mayor.com.”

Greg Nickels has more than worn out his welcome.

He’s wrested a lot of administrative power away from the City Council, only to use it for little more than developer giveaways and meaningless granstanding measures. He let the Sonics go with little more than a wave goodbye. He might have not predicted the December snows, but he sure didn’t seem to have a clue how to act when they got here. His interpretation of “roads and transit” seems to be becoming “ROADS, with a hint of transit flavoring.”

Hell, if nobody else will run against him, I will.

I’ve got no money and no experience in elective office. All I’ve got are ideas (some of which are good) and a sense of judgment (which sometimes proves wise).

French photographer Eric Tabuchi offers haunting, lonesome images of “Twenty-Six Abandoned Gasoline Stations.”

ICELANDIC WRITER Iris Erlingsdottir, meanwhile, wishes to remind you that merely having a female leader won’t, by itself, save her speculator-trashed country: “Estrogen Will Not Cure Greed and Stupidity.”

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS wants you to “Save the Words.” Simply mouse over the obscure word of your choice (the words will shout out “pick me” and “no, me”), learn its definition, and promise to use it in daily speech.

Two weeks ago, the options for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct had dwindled to two. Forget that. The politicians have gone to door number three and chose the tunnel-and-surface-park option. Does this stop the haggling and the arguing among various “stakeholders” and interest groups? Of course not, silly!