Trolley Hill Park, located at 5th Ave N and Blaine St on the east slope of Queen Anne, appears to have received some unintentional landscaping over the weekend. Reader Stephanie sent in these photos yesterday.

Tire tracks that appear to have come from a Bobcat tractor have dug ditches in the grass throughout the park. Though some of the tracks may have been caused by the recent landscaping work done next to the park, Stephanie finds the fact that the tracks are all over the park grounds a bit suspicious.

“There are tire tracks all over the lawn up there. There is a Bobcat sitting next to what looks like a residential rockery job adjacent to the park but it doesn’t look like simply collateral damage. Maybe someone came and took the Bobcat for a joyride?  If it’s Park Dept. or some landscaping employee, they need a map,” she wrote. “I can’t see any reason for the cat to have been up around the sign and there are also some tracks out in the middle of the lower lawn that are not to or from the project. Just makes ya wonder…Bobcat joyride on a Saturday night?’

I’m waiting to hear back from Parks and Recreation to see if they know anything about landscaping at Trolley Hill Park or the tracks. In the meantime, if anyone has any further information, please post in the comments below.

(Thanks to Stephanie for the tip!)

The Queen Anne Community Council‘s monthly meeting is tonight, Wednesday, April 7 beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the McClure Middle School cafeteria. Items on the agenda include a presentation on the SR 520 bridge replacement and HOV program by Montlake Community Council chair Ted Lane, a Smarter Highways presentation by WSDOT Project Engineer Jennifer Charlebois, a North Portal (the north end of SR 99 bored tunnel project) presentation by Glen Avery, and a presentation on the 15th Ave W Coalition by CC chair Ellen Monrad. Check out the full agenda here (.pdf).

Star of the Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch Captain Sig Hansen will be on King-TV’s new show New Day Northwest later this week. Hansen recently released his memoir “North by Northwestern: A Seafaring Family on Deadly Alaskan Waters.” Suzie at King-TV emailed us to let us know Hansen will be on the new show this coming Thursday. “We are looking to pack the audience with Sig fans!” she writes. Tickets are free, just email newdaytickets@king5.com. Audience members need to show up at 9:15, taping starts at 10:15 and will finish up around 11:30. If you can’t make it to be part of the audience, the show airs on King-TV, channel 5, from 11 a.m. to noon.

The United States Postal Service has put the Queen Anne Post Office, located at 415 1st Ave N, up for sale this week.

According to USPS media contact Ernie Swanson, the Postal Service is attempting to cut costs with the sale of ten Post Offices in Western Washington, including the location in Queen Anne alongside posts in Kent, Bremerton, Kirkland, Redmond, Federal Way, Tacoma, Port Townsend, and two in Bellevue.

“Postmaster General John Potter has made the statement that the Postal Service is “in dire financial straits.” USPS lost about $3.8 billion in FY 2009 and expects to lose as much as $7 billion this year. Mail volume was down from 203 billion pieces in FY 2008 to 177 billion pieces in FY 2009. Projections are that volume could go down to as low as 150 billion pieces by 2020,” Swanson wrote to QueenAnneView in an email this morning.

He said that although the economic recession does account for some of the volume loss the USPS has been experiencing, much of it can be attributed to the mass migration to electronic means of communication. With many people now communicating with family and friends via email, paying bills online, and “going green” by opting out of paper notifications, the Postal Service has been suffering nationwide.

“The sale of postal-owned facilities is going on around the country. We can improve our cash flow by selling facilities and replacing them with leased facilities,” he wrote.

According to Swanson, the Postal Service is simply looking for a buyer for the Queen Anne Post Office, which they would continue to lease; they are not looking to move.

“If we are able to sell the Queen Anne location we have a provision in the sales agreement that we would keep the Queen Anne Post Office at its present location (415 1st Ave. N.) for up to two years while we secured another retail site in the lower Queen Anne area,” he wrote.

The other floors of the Queen Anne Post Office building house the Seattle District offices and their personnel. Swanson said, upon sale of the building, those offices would be re-located within the greater Seattle area “without any impact on the public.”

Renown pediatric brain surgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson will be giving a lecture on health care at  1 p.m. at Seattle Pacific University today, Tuesday, April 6.

In 1987, Carson led a team of 70 in the first successful separation of craniopagus conjoined twins connected at the back of the head. During his distinguished career, he has received hundreds of awards and recognitions, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A highly regarded motivational speaker, Carson has addressed audiences from grade school classrooms to the National Prayer Breakfast. The 2009 movie Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., is based on Carson’s life.

This event is free and  open to the public. The lecture will be held in the Upper Gwinn Commons at SPU. For more information contact Bobbie Taylor at 206-281-2723 or btaylor@spu.edu.

(Photo courtesy of Tracy Norlen, SPU News and Media Relations Manager).

We know that many Ballard, Queen Anne and Magnolia families are mourning the three young men killed in the car accident in Ballard early Sunday morning. We wanted to share the latest coverage from our sister site My Ballard. The memorial is growing at the scene of the fatal car accident

Flowers, notes and photos are stacked around the Taco Time pole, the scene of the crash that killed 2008 Ballard High School graduates Spenser Millard, Kellen Jones and Mike Turner. While community members, teachers, students remember the three young men, the teenage girl involved in Sunday’s crash remains in the Harborview Medical Center ICU in critical condition.

Photo courtesy KING 5 News.

Washington state 36th District representative and Queen Anne resident Reuven Carlyle wrote this about the tragedy on his blog.

Our heart goes out to the families who weep in pain and who need family, friends and community support now more than ever in their lives…As the father of four young children, I can hardly contain my grief and terrible discomfort at this tragedy. My heart goes out to the families and to our community during this difficult time. To lose a child raises one of the great moral questions in all of life: Dear Lord, why?

If you have a memory or encouraging word to share, My Ballard has set up an online memorial for the three killed in Sunday’s tragic accident.

On the live music radar this week, John Hiatt will be doing a free, solo acoustic performance and signing at Easy Street Records on Tuesday, April 6 at 7 p.m. Check out his new album The Open Road before the show.

(As always, thanks to Easy Street for the picture!)

After this weekend’s fatal car accident, the Youth & Families Initiative caucus that was scheduled for this evening has been postponed. Mayor Mike McGinn’s office confirms that the town hall will not be held tonight. A new date has not been determined.

A lot of you have noticed that Top Pot Doughnuts is regularly setting up its “Mobile Airstream Cafe” in the parking lot of the old 7-11 at 16th and Dravus. It made us wonder if the company has plans to make a permanent move to that location.

The developers in charge of renovating that building say Top Pot is one of the names at the top of their list when it comes to bringing in new tenants. Jeff Thompson of the Freehold Group, the Seattle based company heading the project called “The Corner at Interbay”, says Top Pot took part in “mobile chow downs” that recently attracted thousands of residents to the site to sample food from various vendors. Thompson says Top Pot is now testing the market with its mobile trailer to see if the Interbay location would work in the long term, and feels they would be a great fit for the project. Top Pot employees operating the mobile trailer wouldn’t comment on the possibility, and we’re still waiting to hear back from the corporate office.

In addition to “The Corner,” developers The Freehold Group are also trying to attract residents and wineries to other parts of Interbay. Thompson says 1500 units of housing are in the works, along with a “wine district” complete with loft and warehouse space. Top Pot currently has locations in Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, Downtown Seattle, Wedgwood, Bellevue and Mill Creek.

On Wednesday, March 28 a woman called police and reported being pick-pocketed at Club Diamond, in the 300 block of 5th Ave, according to a report from SeattleCrime.com.

The woman was reportedly dancing inside the club when she noticed that her phone was gone. Club staff helped the woman look for her phone, even clearing the the dance floor to search for it, though they were unsuccessful. From SeattleCrime:

The next day, when she called her phone, a man answered.

“When she asked for her phone back, the suspect began talking gang slang telling her he was a crip gang member,” the report says. The man then told the woman “If she wanted her phone back she would have to ‘suck me up’”.

According to the report, the woman then canceled her cell phone service and called police. Club Diamond has been a hot spot for crime lately, with reports of robberies and shootings being unfortunately frequent.

Just a reminder that from 7 to 8 :30 p.m. tonight, Monday, April 5, Mayor Mike McGinn will be hosting a community caucus on Seattle’s Youth & Families Initiative with El Centro de la Raza Executive Director Estela Ortega at the Ballard High School Library (1418 NW 65th St.). Mayor McGinn says he plans to use tonight’s community town hall to help shape his agenda on issues affecting families and children in Seattle from adolescence through a successful career track.

The Seattle Department of Transportation closed West Mercer Place from Elliott Avenue West to Fifth Avenue W last night after a small mudslide slid onto the roadway from the slope above the street. The slide was reportedly caused by a broken pipe at a construction site above Mercer. According to SDOT, the street will most likely stay closed through rush hour today, Monday, April 5, as the pipe causing the slide is located on private property and the owner must be contacted to fix it. If you’re looking for an alternate route, SDOT advises motorists continue south on Elliott and take Western which turns into Denny Way.

Update 10:45 a.m.: SDOT has just announced that W Mercer Place is now open in both directions after crews were able to clean-up and re-open the westbound lane from 4th Ave W to Elliott Ave W.

If you’ve been following the Chihuly “glass house” debate over the last few weeks, you’ve probably got an opinion. At least, some 400 people who attended the community meeting on the proposal Tuesday night did. Many were in favor of the 44,000-square-foot project, while others are calling for alternative proposals that make better us of public open space.

(Image by Studio 216 for Owen Richards Architects, courtesy of both).

Supporters of the project are now on a PR campaign, organizing speakers at the meeting, handing out “Chihuly at the Needle” buttons and offering incentives, like a $25 gift certificate to the Space Needle restaurant to people who become “fans of the project on Facebook (this promotion has since been taken down), according to a report by our news partners, the Seattle Times. Read the full story here.

On Thursday, April 8 from 7 to 9 p.m. FOLKpark will hold the third and final community meeting at Bayview Manor, located at 11 W. Aloha St., where they will present the final concept design for the redevelopment of Lower Kinnear Park by HBB Landscape Architecture based on community input from the first two meetings.

According to FOLKpark, the final concept design “coalesced around six major themes” expressed at the first two community meetings:

• Activate the park with improved trails to increase accessibility for all and expand ADA accessible areas of the park while opening sight-lines to increase sense of personal safety;
• Leverage supplemental funding through the Green Spaces Levy for an off leash dog park;
• Respect the park’s historical significance and uses by creating gathering spaces, viewpoints and restoring the tennis court;
• Restore the natural environment by removal of invasive plants and addressing issues of drainage and re-vegetation of a dying/changing forest, building a forest for the next 50-100 years;
• Enhance the entrances with a common identifying feature/planting and signage to attract visitors; and,
• Provide a connection to other trails in the Seattle Parks system and to the waterfront by expanding the trail system to the Helix Bridge and at the same time remove pedestrian and biking traffic from crowded streets.

If you’d like to sneak a peak at the final design before the meeting, take a look at the enhancement plan (.pdf). FOLKpark also encourages those interested in the redevelopment of Lower Kinnear Park to pass out meeting announcement fliers (here and here) to friends and neighbors in Queen Anne.

Ever since One Reel announced that it would have to cancel the Lake Union 4th of July fireworks show due to the lack of corporate sponsorship on Wednesday, the city has banded together to save the only remaining Independence Day fireworks in Seattle.

Seattle restaurateur Tom Douglas announced on 97.3 KIRO FM’s Dave Ross Show yesterday that he would donate $5,000 toward the effort, kicking off a rush of pledges from businesses and individuals to raise the necessary $500,000 for the fireworks.

According to MyNorthwest reports, Starbucks and Microsoft, both homegrown right here in the Seattle Metropolitan area, announced that they would pitch $125,000 each for a total of $250,000–or half of the funds needed–if Seattle businesses and community members were able to raise the remaining $250,000. And this morning the running total of pledges reached the $500,000 mark! Congrats Seattle! The fireworks have been saved!

(Full disclosure: Next Door Media, which powers QueenAnneView.com, has donated to this fund.)

During Mayor Mike McGinn’s inaugural address, he announced the formation of the Youth & Families Initiative. Next Monday, the Mayor will join El Centro de la Raza Executive Director Estela Ortega to talk about the initiative. The Mayor hopes these community town hall meetings will help shape his agenda on issues affecting youth and families from a child’s birth to their successful career track.

The community caucus will be held Monday, April 5th from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Ballard High School Library (1418 NW 65th St.) Here is an informational video about the Youth & Families Initiative.

You’ll be able to get into EMP|SFM tonight, Thursday, March 1 from 5 to 8 p.m. as part of their First Thursdays All Access Nights program. All Access Nights at EMP feature live music and entrance to all of the exhibits at the museum. For more information call (206) 770.2700. For a list of other museums in Seattle offering free admission, check out freemuseumday.org.