White Center Now: The blog about White Center

Just posted at partner site West Seattle Blog: Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg — who has longtime White Center ties and lives in nearby Normandy Park — is the guest at this Thursday night’s White Center/South Delridge Community Safety Coalition meeting; read about it here.

The King County Sheriff’s Office sent this news release today:

The help of the public is needed to catch a robber who hit the Lucky 7 store twice in less than a two week period, and may have robbed a store in Seattle as well.

The Lucky 7 incidents occurred on January 27th and February 7th, at 1:40 PM and 8:15 AM respectively. The store is in White Center at 9618 – 4th Ave SW.

In both robberies the suspect violently pushed the 71 year-old female clerk to the ground then went to the cash register and stole cash and lottery tickets. No gun or other weapon was seen.

The suspect is described as an Asian male, about 5’ 2” or 5’ 3” tall, around 135 lbs, clean cut and 18 to 19 years old. He wore a NY Yankees baseball hat, and in one of robberies a hoody as well.

In the first robbery the man was seen fleeing the scene in a silver, 2-door, Mercedes or BMW.

If anyone has information about these crimes or knows the suspect they are asked to call the King County Sheriff’s Office at (206) 296-3311, or 9-1-1.

Here’s one of several images shared by KCSO (more to come) – the robber hopping the counter in one of the heists (not a big or clear photo, but best they have):

As we have elaborated on partner site West Seattle Blog, this same robber may be linked to a heist at a West Seattle gas station weekend before last (read more here).

Although descriptions of White Center often include the adjective, “gritty,” the reality is that the neighborhood has, in recent years, changed considerably.  Not long ago, prostitutes flaunted their wares throughout the area, drug markets operated openly, drunkards stumbled from tavern to tavern and ruffians roamed the area like extras in a Mad Max movie.  As Herb, the owner of Central Heating on Delridge, put it, the stretch from his business on Cambridge to Cafe Rozella was a freeway of drugs and prostitutes.  I, who have seen some rough neighborhoods, would not step out of my car on the stretch of 16th Ave south of Roxbury.  As far, as I was concerned, this was a no-man’s land of losers and predators.  I am not sure how the area became so blighted but part of the reason lies in its netherworld as a piece of unincorporated King County.  In many ways it was the lawless wild west.

White Center was changing before we decided to open Cafe Rozella in 2004.  King Country Sheriff’s Deputy, Steve Cox was well underway in his campaign to clean up the neighborhood.  The community had been up in arms against the criminal element for some time.

I grew up in the south side of El Paso, Texas, where biculturalism is a norm.  As well, there were some pretty rough areas and you had to hold your own in a fight.  So when Leiticia and I looked at White Center as a location for a traditional coffee house, one that would honor the best traditions of the European gathering place, we were not put off by the rich medley of cultures.  To the contary, we embraced the immigrant communities who were opening up markets, restaurants, Pho shops, fruit stands, taquerias and carnicerias.  This melange of people were in the process of changing the character of White Center.

In 2003, we scouted out a location for our cafe.  After much searching, we found a lovely gem of a building sitting unadorned in the heart of White Center.  We decided that the Rozella Building would be perfect for what we had in mind.  The Rozella Building was built by Italian immigrants and named after Patriarch’s daughters.  Good kharma there.

As we took possession and started the demolition before the build-out, we started to get a taste of the old White Center.  Every morning, as we got to work, we would find used condoms, needles, malt liquor cans, and other paraphernalia of the sordid in front of the building.  A resident of the apartments upstairs, told us that four people had died in the aparments in the last year, mostly from acute alchohol intoxication.  Doug, from Center Tool Rental informed us that his alarm went off so many times, he was getting sick of being fined by the police who often arrived after the miscreants had left.  At least two of the upstairs apartments were notorious drug dens and homes for alcoholic denizens looking for a place to pass out.  The laundry room was used by prostitutes to take care of their clients.  And the gangbangers regularly parked in front of the building, hip hop blasting, cold stares at my crew of workers.  Yes, this was going to be a project.

As patrons of the cafe know, we have an outdoor sidewalk cafe with tables and chairs.  Drunkards saw the outdoor cafe as just another place to squat while they downed their cans of malt liquor.  When you are as large as I am, it usually doesn’t take much convincing to get these guys to move on.  But occassionally, one would mouth off and refuse to leave.  I found it effective to grab their cans of liquor and squash them.  A couple of times they would lunge at me and I would push them into the cement.  This eventually discouraged vagrancy.

The prostitutes usually showed up on the weekends.  I would take out my digital camera and say, “hey, how’d you like to be on the web?”  The pictures were emailed to the Sheriff.

The gangbangers were a little more difficult.  Lucky for us, Deputy Cox was quick to respond with a couple of extra deputies.  “Ricardo, you want me to move these guys out?” he would ask.  But by this point, the sight of three patrol cars was enough to scatter them like roaches in light.

More pernicious still were the dealers upstairs.  They had a good gig going and they were not about to let it go — easily.  I shot pictures of their customers, and of the dealers and passed them along to Steve Cox.  Still, these guys were obstinate.  Even friendly visits by Cox and his deputies would not convince them to shut down. One of them was especially mean and violent and he not only threatened me but also that big rock of a man Steve Cox.  Weed and Seed folks talked to the landlord and finally convinced him to start removal actions.  The landlord would invariably ask me to serve the legal papers as he was too frightened to do it himself.  A couple of times, Deputy Cox and his deputies had me go do a knock, as they searched for cons with outstanding warrants.  It was a rush.

During this time we had the support of the community, including Russell Parks, Betsy Harris, Peggy Weiss, Melinda Bloom and the weed and seed folks, amongst others.

But what really changed the course was the cultural events that we began to sponsor.  Shortly after opening, we had a Brazil night and a Mexican Independence Day celebration.  For the latter, we hired a wonderful conjunto band from South Park.  The place rocked. People were dancing outside of the cafe on a Friday and Saturday night.  Nobody had seen anything like this in White Center.  It was a blast.

During the summer we started having at least one weekly musical performance in front of the cafe.  Where once the place was littered with vagrants, prostitutes, drunks and dope dealers, we had families and children enjoying the music, frolicking and dancing under the stars.  Surprisingly, there was resistance from some of the old timers in the business community.  But the community loved it.  We followed up with poetry readings, a writers’ group, a conversation cafe and other cultural affairs.  Things changed and the continue to change.

We’ll bring you two reports on news from last night’s White Center/South Delridge Community Safety Coalition meeting, because there’s PLENTY to report. For starters, though, a quick update on what King County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeff Hancock reported on area crime in the month since the group’s last meeting: No burglaries; only one robbery, and it involved “two people who knew each other”; two felony assaults — one in front of Brewsky’s that left the victim with “13 staples to the head,” according to Deputy Hancock, who added “The victim and suspect were back drinking beer together (yesterday)” — the other involved “a group of homeless people attacking another homeless person with sticks.” He also reported a gang-related “drive-by shooting” in which nobody was hit or hurt – 11 rounds fired at a “gang member’s house” just off Roxbury on 11th SW (county side) last Saturday night. Car-related crime was busier – three car prowls in the area, and, the really big stat – 14 car thefts in the past month in the unincorporated area, 9 of those in the White Center “Weed and Seed” area. Deputy Hancock called this a “huge spike” and said KCSO has contributed a detective to a special area Task Force that will be working on the car-theft problem. More news from the CSC meeting later today.

6 pm tonight, it’s the first White Center/South Delridge Community Safety Coalition meeting of the year, St. James Place, 9421 18th SW (map). Previous White Center Now coverage of this group’s meetings is archived here.

From Alison, who lives near Evergreen High School:

I just discovered that our garage on the far side of our yard has been broken into. Doesn’t look like anything was taken, if the thieves had looked through the window they would have discovered that it looks like a bomb went off in there and its impossible to get past the door. Equally annoying was the fact they ripped the hasp off the door-the padlock was not locked since it got water in it. We don’t keep anything of value in there so it was all for naught on the thieves part. I guess with the way things are people are pretty desperate, but I don’t think tarps and plastic flower pots really fetch much at the pawn shop these days.

King County Sheriff’s Office has burglary-prevention advice online.

From the Seattle Times, the man accused of shooting and killing 38-year-old Dar’Rel Miller of White Center at the Federal Way Transit Center a year ago has just been set free, charges dismissed just before his trial was to begin. The Times article doesn’t say why; a P-I story does – quoting a prosecutor’s office spokesperson as saying the man no longer was considered a suspect.

As we reported late last fall, some of the most dramatic cuts proposed for King County public-safety services were avoided (the “storefronts” will all stay open, including the ones in White Center and Boulevard Park, for example) – but the budget ax hasn’t quite finished making its cuts yet – so this e-mail message from County Sheriff Sue Rahr may be of interest: Read the rest of this entry »

We reported New Year’s Eve that photos and video were out from a recent robbery rampage that included a December holdup at the Lucky Seven in White Center. Early this morning, after a robbery attempt at a West Seattle 7-11, Seattle Police arrested three suspects and are working right now to establish whether they are linked to this series of robberies. Here’s our full report on West Seattle Blog; we will let you know when more information is released.

Just posted on partner site West Seattle Blog: An update with video and photos from a series of robberies in South Seattle/White Center/West Seattle including the December 11th holdup at Lucky Seven in WC (one of those photos, shown above). If you have any idea who these robbers are, CrimeStoppers is offering a reward: 800-222-TIPS.

One more reminder – last White Center/South Delridge Community Safety Coalition meeting of the year is coming up this Thursday night, different location – 6 pm, Boys and Girls Club, 9800 8th SW (map). (Find previous White Center Now coverage of this group’s meetings is archived here.)

A deputy goes on trial next week, and a flyer urging support for him is sparking controversy – read about it in the Times.

The P-I analyzed driver-attack reports on Metro routes and came up with a “top 10” list that includes Route 120, which runs through White Center (here’s the map). Even one attack is too many, of course, but do take note that the number of attacks that landed Route 120 on this list is … 6 per year.

The modern debate on urban housing policy takes as its starting point the post-World War II period when the country invested heavily in developing cities and its suburbs.  An outgrowth of the New Deal was  the belief that government should ameliorate the problem of housing for those unable to afford the cost of commercial or private housing.   The response to the housing problem was a mixture of modernist thought, good intentions, government bureacracy, racial attitudes and local politics.   While this subject is vast and would require tomes to fully comprehend it, we are here most concerned with the present moment in Seattle’s urban design and specifically the philosophy behind the Greenbridge Project.

The model against which much of the current thinking pivots is the Chicago Housing Authority and its notorious housing projects such as the Cabrini-Green projects.  Witold Rybczynski is an architect and an astute observer, with a sweeping knowledge of urbanism and a very accessible writing style.  I was introduced to Rybczynski’s writing when I was designing a home about 15 years ago and happened upon his meditative tome, “The Most Beautiful House in the World.”  Rybczynski took Cabrini-Green as a paradigm for the development of urbanism for a 1993 article entitled, “Bauhaus blunders: architecture and public housing – 1950s public housing estates Cabrini-Green, Chicago, Illinois, US“:

Cabrini-Green is but one of the most notorious housing projects known for its drab and sterile concrete towers of festering poverty, rampant crime, trash-strewn stairwells and unmitigated squalor.  Most of the towers are now being torn down.

The oldest housing on the site dates from 1941, not long after the Housing Act of 1937 that signaled the first involvement of the federal government in funding housing for what there then called the deserving poor. Frances Cabrini Homes was named after a soon-to-be-canonized Chicago nun, famous for her charitable work, and it was built on the site of a notorious Italian-American slum kown as Little Hell. The new housing consisted of almost 600 dwellings in two- and three-story brick buildings; the total area of the project was relatively small: sixteen acres. The unassuming architecture of these row homes–every dwelling had its own front door on the street–was not substantially different from the popular urban housing then being built by the private sector in the surrounding city. The brick facades even incorporated some decorative elements. The overall design, like that of most prewar public housing projects, is modest but unremarkable; it was taken for granted that poor people would prefer to live lie everyone else.  (emphasis added)

Although Cabrini-Green has become synonymous with large government-run slums, they were not the largest or worst of its kind.  Hunt D. Bradford has written a concise piece on the Robert Taylor Homes, a larger Chicago Housing project in piece entitled, “What went wrong with public housing in Chicago? A history of the Robert Taylor homes.”

Cabrini-Green towers undergoing demolition.

Cabrini-Green Tower

Crime was rampant in Cabrini-Green

The consensus it that the project tended to congregate poverty and stigmatize the residents.  As articulated by Rybczynski:

Although Cabrini-Green occupies almost as much land as the Loop itself, it is not the biggest public housing project in Chicago–that dubious honor belongs to Robert Taylor Homes, said to be the largest public housing project in the world. But Cabrini-Green was the first of the big projects, and it did become a model for how municipal authorities would rehabilitate deteriorated inner-city real estate and provide large amounts of public housing. The solution–bulldoze existing houses and replace them with tall apartment slabs spaced far apart in open parkland (created byh closing off existing streets to make immense “supper-blocks”)–reflected the prevalent social and architectural thinking of the time. As Bauer pointed out, his was not how the majority of Americans really lived–or would choose to live–but the idealistic housing reformers felt that they knew best.

Architects and planners maintained that high-rise buildings were better because they occupied less land, and provided their occupants with sunlight and unobstructed views, but the Chicago Housing Authority was probably attracted to Modern architecture for the same reason that many commercial developers were partial to the designs of Mies van der Rohe–their cost. The truth is that standardized, stripped-down, and undecorated tall buildings can be erected quickly and inexpensively. It is also likely that the plain architecture suited the puritan view of many Americans–and certainly of the housing reformers–who felt that social housing should not be fancy. Soon, utilitarian high-rise apartment towers were accepted as the best solution for public housing.

High-rise slums

However, it was one thing to build apartment towers for the upper-middle-class, as Mies did, and quite another to adopt them as solutions for housing the poor. The well-off have doormen, janitors, repairmen, and baby-sitters; the poor have none of these things. Without restricted access, the lobbies and corridors were vandalized; without proper maintenance, elevators broke down, staircases became garbage dumps, roofs leaked, and broken windows remained unreplaced; without baby-sitters, single mothers were stranded in their apartments, and children roamed unsupervised sixteen floors below. In Cabrini-Green, there were problems with the design of the buildings: To save money, no private balconies or terraces were provided, access galleries and elevator lobbies were left open to the elements (in frigid Chicago!), and despite the lack of air-conditioning, the unshaded apartment windows of the tall buildings faced east and west.

Equally unsuccessful was the overall layout which dispensed with the familiar street and supplanted it with parkland, although what little landscaping there was quickly disappeared and was replaced by beaten dirt and asphalt parking lots. In any case, the open pedestrian spaces were problematic: windy, unappealing, and more crime-prone than conventional streets and sidewalks overlooked by individual homes. In the name of housing the poor, the well-meaning social reformers of the 1950s invented a new type of urbanism, quite foreign to any previous American ideal of city planning. It is hardly surprising that the projects acquired a social stigma. This, as well as crime, drugs, and poor management, explains why today one-third of the apartments at Cabrini-Green remain unoccupied [and are now being demolished].

The reaction to the failure of Cabrini-Green style projects was a return to a style termed, the New Urbanism.  Again,  Rybczynski:

Which brings us to the Greenbridge, High Point and Holly Park developments in Seattle.  Each of these projects reflects completely the philosophy of the New Urbanism and the rejection of the Cabrini-Green model.   The development are designed to mix inhabitants of different income levels.  As well, the housing is of a human scale with an emphasis on street life, walkability and sustainability.   Most critically, these developments aim to look like housing, that anyone, regardless of their station in life, would choose to live in.

First online report is from KOMO News – says one person’s been shot and is undergoing CPR. Deputies are searching the mall, according to the scanner. More as we get it. 4:31 PM UPDATE: We will post any major developments here when the info becomes clearer – but we will be tracking it more closely for now at partner site West Seattle Blog (here’s the post that’ll be updated) 4:53 PM UPDATE: Times says 2 victims, which is what we also heard on the scanner a few minutes ago. No word on conditions. 9 PM UPDATE: We know a lot more about the victims. A 16-year-old boy is dead, a 15-year-old boy in the hospital. No one under arrest yet. The WSB post linked earlier in this one has first-person stories from local people who were at the mall when it happened.

Usually the White Center/South Delridge Community Safety Coalition meets toward the end of the month, but not this time – we’ve just received a reminder that the next meeting, last one of the year, will be on December 11th, different location too — SW Boys and Girls Club, 9800 8th SW (map), 6-8 pm.

Dick Thurnau with Friends of Hicks Lake reports that graffiti vandals hit various structures, including the picnic shelter and restroom, at Lakewood Park (home of Hicks Lake) on Tuesday – one day after a paintover of previous vandalism. “Even over the student-painted murals,” says Dick, who says something has got to be done about this recurring problem.

Reminder that Thursday night’s when Detective Joe Gagliardi is giving another one of his popular and thorough gang-awareness presentations – and you can get the full benefit by driving a few miles south — read on for details provided by the city of Burien: Read the rest of this entry »

Will check to find out more – two tips about a robbery/police activity at the Shorewood Grocery on 26th SW (map). We’re on the way there to see what we can find out. More when we get it. 8:42 PM UPDATE: White Center Now’s FullTilt was there immediately afterward and reports, “Two guys with guns left on foot. I got there right after it happened. … I overheard it was two black males in their 20’s, both with automatic handguns.” He counted 8 King County Sheriff’s Office cars. 8:55 PM UPDATE: Our reporter says officers were gone when he arrived; the person on duty at the store did not want to say anything more than “a little bit” when asked if the robbers got away with anything.

Sketchy reports so far on TV news; here’s a short online report from KOMO – just watched a KING5 on-air report that says family members at the scene told reporters the victim was actually 17. So far, no word of an arrest. 12:10 AM UPDATE: Here are a few more details from the P-I. The address was 1800 South 118th; here’s a map.