Belltown Messenger - Neighborhood News

April 11 will be Sol Amon Day in Seattle. Amon, celebrating 50 years as owner of Pure Food and Fish, is commemorating his golden anniversary with cake and balloons at noon. Amon is donating the day's proceeds to the Market Foundation.

His dad Jack Amon came to the Market in 1911; "Solly" has been here ever since, through it all. Nearly 25 years ago, Sol became the first Market merchant to support the Foundation's efforts to fund the Market's services for low-income people. Today, he's the Market's longest-tenured merchant, and has been proclaimed the 2006 "King of the Market." The pragmatic Amon is still here most days. Modestly, he says, "our job is pretty simple. We sell fish seven days a week, and it's the best and freshest you can find anywhere."

Jay Lavernie, a longtime employee at Dan's Belltown Grocery, won the second annual Mr. Belltown contest, a pageant parody produced by Ariel Basom and NadaMucho.com at the Rendezvous on March 26.

Lavernie was one of 13 entrants in the contest, including two women. Lavernie's talent segment began by miming an allegedly typical day at the checkout counter, then segued into the vigorous juggling of fresh produce. His prize consisted of $100 and a custom jacket. The other finalists (Rick Klu, Bella Biagio, and Bob Russell) won gift certificates from area businesses, plus such novelty gifts as a "lifetime supply" of three condoms.

Chris Snell has just opened the Can-Can, a vaudeville-inspired kitchen and club, in the former Patty Summers' Cabaret in the basement of the Corner Market building at First and Pike.

The placement and dŽcor ooze a subterranean sort of David Lynch feeling with chandeliers, live music, red velvet booths, dancing waitresses in one-of-a-kind Can-Can outfits, good food and kicks.

Dancer/waitresses get up on the stage every so often throughout dinner and dance with the house band trio (every night except Monday). After 10 p.m. Can-Can switches into late-night-mode with guest entertainers and performers. Snell's father Jim Severo did the construction, and his mother Patty Severo designed the interiors. Snell's sister and brother-in-law Carmen and Jeff Malloy, owners of the Carmen restaurant in North Boston, came to oversee the kitchen. They're calling the menu "Fritalian," Mediterranean influenced French/Italian cuisine. Dinner now is the focus, a late-night menu is also available, and within the next month or so Snell hopes to include lunch.

Paul Allen's planned 172-unit condo at Fifth and Lenora, across the alley from Allen's Cinerama Theater, is now planned to include four stories of above-ground parking at its bottom. But Allen's design team plans to make the garage levels more neighborhood-friendly, by sticking big art on them. At the March 13 meeting of the Belltown Housing and Land Use Subcommittee (BHLUS), Allen's senior project manager Brandon Morgan said the condo's designers are currently considering two large surfaces of small reflective pieces, which would move with the wind to create wave patterns. These art surfaces would extend 40 by 120 feet on the building's Fifth Avenue side, and 40 by 108 feet on the Lenora Street side. Morgan said a similar installation can currently be seen at King County Metro's Issaquah Park & Ride lot. At the same BHLUS meeting, member Ron Turner presented some initial analysis of a recent neighborhood demographic survey. It showed there were few children in Belltown (3.6 percent versus 18.5 percent for all of Seattle), and small household sizes (1.3 persons vs. 2.08 for Seattle as a whole). There's also a higher percentage of men in Belltown (59 percent vs. 49.9 percent in the city at large).

There's a new plan to save the Seattle First United Methodist Church building on Fifth Avenue and Marion Street downtown. The church currently plans to build a new building in Belltown. It would swap its current site to developer Martin Selig, and build on a Selig-owned tract at Third and Wall. Selig would then build a 33-story office tower at the current Methodist site.

Save Our Sanctuary, a coalition of preservation activists not affiliated with the church or with Selig, announced on March 31 that it wants to move the 99-year-old building to a new site. The group says it might be able to land historic-preservation grant money for the move, which might cost as much as $10 million. Still unknown: Where it would be moved to, who would manage the moved building, and what (if anything) would occur inside it. Further info can be found at friendsoffumc.org.

- ML and CH