Visit DowntownHolidays.com to ensure your holiday season is merry and bright!
The DSA/MID, Seattle Center and Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau are proud to announce the 2011 Holidays in the City seasonal campaign. Now in its third year, the annual campaign – geared toward helping promote downtown Seattle as an outstanding destination for holiday travel – offers an exciting assortment of holiday happenings from Pioneer Square to Seattle Center. The holiday season begins this November with season favorites like the Argosy Christmas Ship Festival, Macy’s Holiday Parade, the Holiday Carousel at Westlake Park and Winterfest. Visitors from near and far can begin mapping out their holiday plans on November 1 with the launch of the official Holidays in the City website, DowntownHolidays.com.
A must-have resource, DowntownHolidays.com is a one-stop shop for the 2011 holiday season featuring a comprehensive events calendar, maps, travel deals, visitor information, a downloadable holiday guide and more. Find information on the city’s most popular holiday events, such as the Jingle Bell Run/Walk and Pacific Northwest Ballet’s beloved Nutcracker, as well as where to find the city’s best holiday light displays and festive attractions.
DowntownHolidays.com is also the place to enter for a chance to win the Holidays in the City grand prize giveaway. This year, the Holidays in the City grand prize is a Seattle Center 50th Anniversary themed prize package including: a two-night stay at Seattle’s beautiful Pan Pacific Hotel, $250 Pacific Place gift card, $250 dining certificate to the Space Needle’s SkyCity restaurant, a commemorative 1962 World’s Fair coffee-table book and set of six retro 1962 World’s Fair tumblers, four exhibit-only tickets to the Pacific Science Center, four round-trip tickets for the Seattle Center Monorail, and two Seattle Center parking passes. The grand prize winner will be selected on December 31, 2011.
As the holiday season nears, visitors can pick up the official Holidays in the City guide at the Seattle Visitor Center and Market Information Center as well as various retailers throughout downtown and the greater Seattle area. The free guide – featuring 16 pages full of family fun events – can also be found inside the November issue of Seattle Metropolitan magazine. Many of Seattle’s favorite holiday traditions are highlighted in the guide, including Magic in the Market, Toyland Village at Waterfront Park, Black Nativity and more. For a full list of participating retailers carrying the 2011 Official Holiday Guide, visit DowntownHolidays.com.
In addition to the official Holiday in the City website, information about all of Downtown Seattle’s holiday happenings can be found on Facebook (www.facebook.com/
Did anyone see the brass instruments, umbrellas, and revelers in Pioneer Square last Friday night?
They started outside of Marcela’s Creole Restaurant, and headed up 2nd Avenue (going who knows where).
Just another reason why I love this neighborhood:
p.s. you can follow other Pioneer Square photos that I post on instagram, user name pioneersquare
MapQuest has started a new site called m(q)vibe, which gives a “Vibe Score” for neighborhoods. The score is “a composite of Walkability, Popularity, Going Out, Edginess, Burbiness, and Residential scores,” which include what it would take to achieve a vibrant lifestyle in that community, compared with other neighborhoods in Washington.
Pioneer Square has an overall Vibe Score of 10.
Here is the breakdown of rankings for our neighborhood (or at least my best guesses based on the graph):
Popularity: 10
Going Out: 10
Residential: 1.5
Burby: 1
Edgy: 2.5
Walkability: 10
[I had to laugh at our "edgy" score as the definition for edgy is "how likely you are to meet the more questionable or colorful aspects of urban society in that neighborhood, compared with other neighborhoods in the same state."]
All said, we currently rank 4th in Seattle, but the system is still new and needs to have a lot more user input before it’s accurate.
Vibe Scores can go up and down by people “liking” the neighborhood on Facebook, and voting for businesses in the neighborhood. Go check it out and see what you think.
Just last month, tech company Stray Boots announced “a new way to explore Seattle.” You can now tour Pioneer Square (+ Pike Place + the SAM) through a great interactive walking tour with your cell phone as your guide.
Seattle: The Game combines the fun of a scavenger hunt with the sights and history of a top-notch tour.
- Start when you want and go at your own pace (see below for recommended starting times)
- All tours take about 2-3 hours to complete
- All tours are great for all ages
- Any US cell phone with text messaging works – no need for a smart phone
- You have a year from purchase to complete your tour – you can buy online and play when you want
A writer from SunBreak recently tried the tour and said that “the tour takes you places you normally wouldn’t go, like the nautical-themed store Cuttysark, and the great retro sports shop Ebbets Field Flannels. It also made me actually pay attention to the totem poles.”
The tour costs $12 (on sale right now — originally $20) and runs about 2 – 3 hours.
Remember the news back in June about Charley Royer being named DSA’s 2011 Downtown Champion? They put together a video to honor Charley and all the amazing work he’s done for the city (most especially Pioneer Square), that was called “Mr Royer’s Neighborhood,” a cute parody to Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.
Apparently staff from the Fred Rogers company saw the video on youtube and reached out to Charley, stating that “Fred Rogers would have been impressed of all that you do for your city.”
And included some gifts to congratulate him on his great work:
Went on a walk through Pioneer Square this weekend, and joined the Instagram craze and took a few photos of what may be the last days of summer weather in our neighborhood:
From the Hornall Anderson blog:
We were honored to participate in this historic event, and in turn chose to pay homage to Seattle’s 619 Arts Building on Western Ave., which has been a bastion for artists and patrons since 1979. Upon embarking on this project, we discovered the building was in the midst of a controversial eviction where its tenants were forced to vacate by October due to structural reinforcements from the Viaduct Replacement and Tunnel Project. This month marks the end of 32 years as an artist loft and a rich creative outlet in the Seattle community – we had to create something truly special to mark this transition.
The Design Mark is essentially a “sound sculpture” enigmatically covered top to bottom with over 200 white arcade-style buttons. One discoverable red button prompts visitors to record a message through a small, nearly invisible microphone. Each response is recorded, and can be played back as a collective dialogue that will evolve over the 10-day festival. The marker includes a QR code that takes users to a teaser video featuring the 619 Arts Building, which is narrated by some of the tenants of the building.
Our neighborhood has the following advertisement on 60 buses over the next 8 weeks, plus a billboard heading south on 99 coming into town.
The ad reads “aboveground is a big part of the story, too…. Pioneer Square, the heart & soul of Seattle.” It is tied to rebranding services done by Karass Creative.
An early post about traffic signs installed upside down
It seems like just yesterday that we moved into the square — I remember having the same misconceptions that most people (still) have. I planned on wearing tennis shoes every day — you know, just in case I had to run away from an attack. I made sure to never be alone when out in the neighborhood, even during the day. I purchased mace to keep on my keychain, and I got to know the 9-1-1 operators from how often I used to call in drug deals in front of our apartment.
The amazing loft and low rent that drew us to the neighborhood in the first place, are not what keeps us here now. It’s the small neighborhood feel, right in the middle of a big city. It’s the feeling you get when you walk into the local businesses and know the owners, or run into other residents out walking their dogs. It’s the events that pop up in Occidental Square Park, like the Seattle Square Market, the Chess Tournament, Dancing til’ Dusk, artSPARKS, and more. It’s the amazing architecture from the historic buildings — my very favorite building is the Grand Central Building with an entire wall of ivy facing the park. As huge sports fans, it’s the good feeling I get when we leave a game, and walk three blocks to our apartment, passing all of the cars stuck in traffic.
But most of all, it’s the relationships with residents, business owners, and other individuals down in Pioneer Square who are trying to make a difference. This neighborhood has its fair share of struggles, but it also has incredible people that work tirelessly to make it better, one day, one week, one month at a time.
I recently had a reporter comment that my blog had changed from being kind of random, and about events, to being more about politics and issues. Although that’s definitely true, I’ve enjoyed taking a look at some of the posts from when I first started:
For example, the highly intelligently-named post: “Drugs + P2 = no good”
The husband and I were walking around Pioneer Square last night when we passed a man standing in a store entryway on the corner of 3rd and James. With just a casual glance, we saw that he had a thin line of “white powder” and was getting ready to use it.
We walked around the corner and called 911 while we kept walking, although I was a little freaked out to be telling the 911 operator out loud about the guy using drugs just around the corner with a bunch of other P2 familiars still milling around. I thought for sure someone was going to yell “snitch” and beat us up or something. I also watch lots of movies.
Or the post, inspired from all of the good lines I hear from the guys that hang out at the Lazarus Day Center every day, titled “What single guys could learn from the homeless:”
I was taking a picture of the bricks at Fulston Square for my post the other day, and as I turned around to head back to the apartment, one of the Lazarus guys walked up to me and said “are you taking pictures?” I told him that I was, to which he responded “Will you take my picture? Will you? Take my picture so that you’ll always remember me…. [wait for it].… ‘Cause I’m always going to remember you.”
I started this blog without caring that much about who read it, or what they thought about what I wrote — but instead, used it more as a medium to catalog what I experienced here, from the many homeless individuals I passed every day, to the new businesses that popped up, hoping to thrive in this historic neighborhood. Being new to the blogging world, however, and writing a post or two that resulted in a myriad of negative comments, I changed what I wrote about, and the carelessness with which I wrote about it.
Early post titled "Why I hate Carl"
Maybe now that I’ve reached 2 years of blogging (and 500 posts!), I can claim to be a blogging veteran and can remind myself to share some of the personal, whimsical stories (like about the seagull named Carl, who refuses to leave our deck), along with the more serious, political ones.
I can just see a whole new series of posts, titled ” ______ + P2 = ________”
The possibilities are endless.
These were installed at a festival in Denmark after event organizers were “unable to prevent revellers [from] urinating against their trees.”
If we don’t get better public restrooms options down here soon, I propose the same for our trees (and particularly the one right outside my house).
But instead of bright orange, maybe a more Pioneer Square-y color like brick red or ivy green.