Sidewalks, more trees in community plans

By LYNN STEINBERG
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Bitter Lake area housing is diverse. There are multistory apartment buildings and condominiums, simple family cottages, well-manicured brick ramblers and larger more contemporary homes. One family lives in a stylish little house once used as a chicken coop.

One block east of Linden, on Aurora Avenue, there is a shopping district that includes a QFC and an Albertson's.

The lake itself, formed from glacial melt-off, is just under 20 acres, and about 30 feet deep in the center. It is controlled by property owners with land abutting the shoreline. The only public property belongs to the Broadview-Thomson school, on the west side of the lake, and the city park on the south shore.

With its carnival past well-documented by local historians, residents are now planning for a future as an urban village centered at 130th and Aurora Avenue North.

Citizens from three communities -- Broadview, Bitter Lake and Haller Lake -- have been working on a neighborhood plan for the last three years, developing a vision for what they would like to see preserved and improved as the region grows over the next two decades.

Drainage has been a consistent problem. And residents have long lamented the lack of sidewalks in the area.

Residents of the three neighborhoods, who have been active in the planning process, envision wide promenade-style sidewalks on Linden Avenue -- one block west of the Aurora commercial district -- that would stretch North from 130th to the city limits at 145th.

The street would be oriented to pedestrians, with attractive benches, decorative street lighting and lots of trees.

They also want sidewalks along Aurora, a main thoroughfare for commuters, with landscaped strips planted with flowers and trees.

When lakeside resident Tom Hollowed thinks about his former home in Ballard, one of the things he misses most is the ability to walk through a neighborhood with a vibrant and attractive business district.

His new home is lovely, but the streets are oriented more toward cars than pedestrians.

"There are no sidewalks," he says. "On Greenwood, what separates you from the traffic is less than a foot."

That makes his little rowboat, which came with the new house, the preferred mode of transportation to school in the morning for his two children whenever weather permits.

During an open house at Broadview-Thomson in September, his daughter's teacher displayed a bar graph illustrating how students got to school each day.

The graph, which was a class project, had pictures of a bus and a car. There were children walking. And down at the bottom, by Elise's name, there was a rowboat.

"There are not many places in Seattle where you can do that," Hollowed says. "It's really neat."