As a followup to this May Times article about University Village’s expansion plans (highlight: a huge new parking garage on the south edge, just north of the Viaduct), I was curious to see what the building permits would look like when superimposed on overhead imagery of the current mall layout. Areas in red above represent new construction — you can see the way that surface parking is gradually being replaced by stacked garages as the area becomes more dense. And as the graphic shows, that Key Bank on 45th isn’t long for this world.

Actually, it appears this afternoon’s incident was the result of an under-the-influence driver, who fled on foot after an ill-fated attempt to negotiate the ramp down from 25th Ave. Police, fire trucks, and UV’s own Security are out in force to deal with the results.

This has apparently been there for a few months, judging from reviews around the web (1, 2). As a previous devotee of the Redmond taco truck (Taqueria Guadalajara) I’m just glad there’s one a little closer to home. The burrito I ordered (carne asada) was delicious, and the two salsas I tried out of their selection (an avocado-based green and a smoky, creamy red) brought some hope that future trips to big-box stores in North Seattle could be accompanied by reasonably-priced, authentic taco truck detours.

The store transforms what had been a rather blank, anonymous brick wall into a much more pleasant stretch of sidewalk, with large windows that look into both the store’s open floorplan as well as their small cafe. It’s a welcome addition to a neighborhood that has surprisingly few other places to browse.

The Foals made mention of their previous appearance at the venue, which apparently involved some (British-accented) ‘naughtiness.’ However most of the misbehavio(u)r that night occurred during the end of Wolf Parade’s set, where some impromptu crowd-surfing caused a little lightweight intervention from security. Join the discussion on who’s at fault over at Three Imaginary Girls, but for the record I have a pretty low tolerance for craziness and never felt like things were getting out of control.

This summer is the winter of independent cafes’ discontent. First Broadway loses Vivace to the transit bulldozer, and now the UDistrict’s own Allegro is facing a construction challenge of its own: While the location itself is not threatened, the empty lot across the alley is being developed. This will mean a severe change of atmosphere for the business, which has no frontage on the Ave itself and instead opens onto the alley between that street and 15th. Although we’ve known this was going to happen since 2005, seeing the construction fences up on the old parking lot still comes as a shock, and if the eventual construction ends up being six stories as planned, that corner is going to look a lot different in a few years.

God knows what the scene was like earlier, but one possibility is that the line has actually grown over time as massive slowdowns in the iTunes infrastructure necessary for the mandatory in-store activation have hobbled the launch of Apple’s highly-anticipated new phone.

Any reports from line survivors, either in AT&T stores or Apple Stores in the area?

As the blogosphere crowdsources a definitive list of which locations Starbucks will be closing as part of its 600-store retrenchment, University Village mall just celebrated the opening of its fourth store, an expansion and refurbishment of the previous SBC location inside the QFC supermarket. The new store — a licensed one by the looks of it — joins the large central location at the mall, the smaller branch in the Crate & Barrel building, and the licensed location inside the Barnes & Noble. Fiddling while Rome burns, or a sign of things to come as UVillage prepare for a major expansion?

While enjoying the new Tutta Bella that’s just opened its doors in the 2200 Westlake building, the conversation turned to the surrounding neighborhood of South Lake Union. Vulcan’s towers are rising around what used to be the only tall building around, which will eventually turn a flat part of the city an interesting urban room.

South Lake Union will probably never be same kind of space as Columbus Circle in New York:

But Westlake and Denny shares some characteristics with Central Park South and West: a crossroads outside the central business district, made up of both residential and office towers, near an open space engineered to transform part of the city. The media and communications companies that formed the core of Midtown Manhattan have, in Paul Allen’s eyes at least, their counterpart in the biotech researchers that will one day fill his offices.

And as Veer, Rollins and others near completion, what used to be a somewhat desolate area after 6pm holds the promise of becoming much more lively. The ding of the (nearly empty) streetcar as it passed by Tutta Bella’s patio every 15 minutes added to the feeling of urban potential, however as-yet-unrealized.

Yet that feeling of being in the midst of a transformation is what gives the neighborhood its peculiar energy: right now, what does exist feels tremendously over-engineered for the amount of use it’s getting. One person at our table, who works nearby, recounted how her (new) bank branch has the kind of personal service usually associated with small-town America: there just aren’t enough customers yet to create a feeling of impersonality. Our dinner itself, at 8pm on a Friday night, on one of Seattle’s rare warm and sunny June days, took place on an open patio with nary a care about a wait for a table. The future is a foreign country, into which one has deplaned just a little bit earlier than the throngs whom the pleasant hosts expect to welcome any minute now.