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A 36-year-old man was arrested outside a tavern in the 2300 block of Eastlake Avenue E. early this morning after getting into a fight with a 63-year-old patron, the Seattle Police Department is reporting.

The SPD is reporting that the two men had been drinking at the tavern when they got into an argument around 12:50 a.m. The SPD reports:

The suspect had promised to walk one of the employees...

The WashingTown Laundromat, 2501 Eastlake Ave. E., closed a week ago after burglars broke in, stole the coin box off the wall, and did some other damage.

Frances Skeete, who owned the laundromat for five years, says she was going to close anyway but the burglary just moved the date up a week. She had been planning to close this weekend.

Skeete had focused on a pick-up and delivery laundry service...

UPDATE: This post has been updated since it was first published. More detail on Lolita and Glenn Gray, owners of the tree, has been added.

I walk and drive by the tree at Franklin and Hamlin every day and I always enjoy the changing decorations that mark the seasons and holidays. If you're having a bad day, the tree is sure to make you feel better.

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The good news is: The tolls and years of construction hassles on the 520 expansion project will probably eliminate much of the traffic the bridge is being designed to accommodate.

But that's only if the project is ever actually built.

Representatives from the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) and the Montlake community spoke to a public meeting in Eastlake on Wednesday about the 520 project, which has been in the planning stages for almost 12 years and which the state would like to have completed by 2016....

UPDATE: This post has been changed since it was first published. Information on Matt Dillon's partnership in Nettletown have been added. Choi is a co-founder of Foraged & Found Edibles.

Eastlake native and wild foods guru Christina Choi will be opening a new restaurant in the old Sitka & Spruce location at 2238 Eastlake Ave. E. 

The restaurant will be called Nettletown and will open by the end of February, Choi says.

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UPDATE: This post has been changed since it was first published. I've added details on the event.

Just heard from Cormac: The March 6 thing is a one-off event in collaboration with some friends. He promises more details in a couple of weeks.

Our original post:

I don't know what it means but Cormac Mahoney (I assume it was Cormac) sent out a Tako Truk tweet about an hour ago:

yawning... stretching... listening to rain...  thinking that we should get together... say, saturday march 6, 2010... afternoonish?

And from Tako Truk's Facebook site:

You all still there. Something special coming March 6. Stay tuned........

I've got an e-mail in to Cormac to see what's up. Could coco piggy be in our future?...

I discovered the lead photo on this post while searching through Google one night.

It shows a postcard view of Lake Union and points beyond taken from the Eastlake neighborhood....

UPDATE: This post has been changed since it was first published. A photo of Fire Station 22 has been added as well as a link to a historic photo of the station taken around 1910.

Seattle will be marking the 16th Annual Neighbor Appreciation Day on Saturday.

The event is "a special day to reach out to neighbors and express thanks to all who help make your neighborhood a great place," according to a press release from the city.

As part of the event, fire stations all over the city will be open to the public from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Fire Station 22, 901 E. Roanoke, serves Eastlake. Stop by and meet the fire crews who keep Eastlake safe....

UPDATE: This post has been updated since it was first published. A link to Seattle Transit Blog has been added.

Two meetings are taking place this month (one this week on Wednesday, one later) that focus on the impact I-5 and 520 have on Eastlake:

• Eastlake Community Council public meeting, 7-9 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 3, Seward School, 2500 Franklin Ave. E.: This ECC public meeting offers neighborhood residents a chance to talk with representatives from the Washington...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Friday that it will review whether there was a "practical alternative" to awarding a lease to Newport, Oregon, for its Pacific fleet.

NOAA announced last August that it was moving its base from Lake Union, where its been based for over 40 years, to the Oregon coastal port.

The review comes in response to a decision by the Government...

The Tom and Peggy Stockley memorial bench features images from their lives in the tiles. (Photo courtesy Jo David from Flickr)

UPDATE: This post has been changed since it was first published. A photo of the memorial bench created for the Stockleys has been added.

A Seattle Times story this morning brought the reminder that Sunday will mark 10 years since an Alaska Airlines MD-83 airplane crashed into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, killing all 88 passengers and crew onboard. The plane was returning from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Among those killed that day were popular and well-known Eastlake houseboat residents Tom and Peggy Stockley. Tom was the wine columnist for the Seattle Times and "perhaps the nicest guy in Western Washington," as one Eastlake resident who knew him wrote to me this morning. 

Peggy was active in the Floating Homes Association and other community groups. In a 2005 rememberance of her parents, their daughter, Paige, said of her: "My mother strolled the docks in folk dresses from her many wine trips with my dad, taking care of the dock cats, chatting with the neighbors and working on the Floating Homes Association newsletter and other Eastlake projects."...

UPDATE: This post has been updated since it was first published. Susan Forhan is the sole owner of Eastlake Massage, not a co-owner.

As the saying goes, every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

For Eastlake's business owners, that single step was a meeting Thursday morning at Cicchetti where the possibility of forming a merchants association was discussed. About a dozen businesspeople talked about the neighborhood, the business district and how an association might help them promote and improve it....

SeattlePI.com's Casey McNerthney is reporting on an altercation at TOPS@Seward School last week that also made the Stranger earlier in the day.

McNerthney says the Seattle Police report says that in a French class, one seventh-grader asked another if he knew the "pen to skull" trick. When the victim said no, the alleged attacker reportedly held a pen in a closed fist and hit the victim in the head five times, drawing blood. 

Eastlake's new noise walls along I-5 are tempting targets for graffiti artists.

The walls are mostly inaccessible on the freeway side, but not totally. I noticed the graffiti...

UPDATE: This post has been updated since it was first publlished. Joe Mabel granted me permission to include his photo in the post.

Eastlake is already known for having one of the more unusual parks in Seattle: I-5 Colonnade Park, two acres of stairways and mountain bike trails located under the Interstate highway.

If Jules James, longtime Eastlake resident and businessman has his way, the neighborhood will be noted for another unique park: Submerged Parcel Park (SPP). James has submitted a formal proposal for funding for the park as part of the Parks and Green Spaces Levy Opportunity Fund.

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The Seattle Times' Providence Cicero reviewed Cicchetti, Serafina owner Susan Kaufman's new restaurant, and came away impressed. "A charming hangout with echoes of Venice," the headline from last Friday's paper says.

Eastlake Bar and Grill, 2947 Eastlake Ave. E., has a special fundraiser going on next weekend for victims of the Haiti earthquake: $1 from the purchase of every half-pound burger will go to the Red Cross Haitian Relief Fund.

The fundraiser will be going on at all four of the Neighborhood Grills locations. Besides Eastlake, those include Greenlake, Southlake and Lake Forest.

Another fundraiser coming up at the Neighborhood Grills will be on Feb. 3 and will benefit the University District Food Bank (full disclosure: I volunteer for the food bank).

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The Seattle School Board passed the attendance transition plan for the 2010-11 school year late this evening. The vote was 6-1 with school board director Betty Patu the lone dissenting vote.

The plan includes a one-year continuation of a tiebreaker provision setting aside 20 percent of kindergarten seats at TOPS@Seward School for Eastlake children. The provision has been in effect for several years but will probably disappear after 2010-11 when a new geographic zone tiebreaker is created for Seward....

And not just because Alcena Plum, owner of Louisa's Cafe Bakery, bought an article about the Eastlake restaurant in the Stranger's holiday Strangercrombie auction.

Bethany Jean Clement, the Stranger's restaurant critic, acknowledges that purchasing the article (which is in tomorrow's edition but online now) might have influenced her review but, she says, not much:

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Linda Shaw, the Seattle Times' education reporter, has a story today about Seattle parents unhappy with the school district's transition plan to its new neighborhood-based attendance strategy.

Shaw reports that the parents are upset that, despite their intense lobbying efforts, the transition plan, which the board is set to vote on tonight, doesn't guarantee that siblings will be assigned to the same school:

The affected families are those with children already in elementary school and younger ones still at home. They want their younger children to be able to attend the same school as their older siblings — something that was virtually guaranteed under the old rules and will be guaranteed again once the new assignment plan is fully in place in 2015.

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The Seattle Times is announcing today that six more local blogs are joining its Networked Journalism project. The Eastlake Ave. Blog is one of them.

The Times project, sponsored by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (its press release is here), which is funded by the Knight Foundation, began in August with partnerships with five leading Seattle blogs:

• Capitol Hill Seattle
• The West Seattle Blog
• Next Door Media, which runs My Ballard, Fremont...

Bob Simmons is reporting on Crosscut.com that the Web site is hearing from some civilian employees of NOAA -- "a small sliver of the 175-member civilian work force," he says -- that they aren't thrilled about the agency's pending move to Newport, Oregon.

Their main concern is about the quality of life in Newport:

The employees who are quietly in touch with Crosscut worry about the schools in Newport,...

I'm very excited and extremely pleased to welcome Eastlake Ave. Blog's first advertiser: Ruby Condos.

Thanks, Ruby, for joining up with Eastlake Ave. and Neighborlogs!

Ruby is the new condo building at 2960 Eastlake Ave. E. They're home to the restaurant Ravish and they're just across the street from the Eastlake Bar and Grill.

It seemed like half of Eastlake was at Cicchetti on Saturday.

The occasion was the annual Eastlake neighborhood "thank you" event put on by Susan Kaufman, owner of Cicchetti and Serafina. An Eastlake resident, Kaufman was busy working the room, chatting with friends and taking photos (check out the pictures on the walls at Cicchetti; they're Kaufman's work)....

It appears the Seattle School District heard Eastlake's parents at its Jan. 6 meeting.

A provision that sets aside 20 percent of kindergarten seats at TOPS@Seward School for Eastlake kids has been restored to the district's New Student Assignment Transition Plan (NSAP) for the 2010-11 school year. The set-aside, which has been in effect for several years, had been dropped from the plan, sparking a petition drive in the neighborhood and testimony at the Jan. 6 school board meeting....