En Plein Air Coffee Club will convene at 8am on Friday 4th September 2015 under this boat in South Lake Union. For more information on Blanche, the sound art installation pictured above, visit the Public Art Archive.

Sometimes strange things happen with property development. You acquire a piece of land with a certain plan for it, or for the airspace over it. When you’re done building something is left over. Los Angeles is currently trying to sell off some odds & ends, some offcut pieces of land that the city has decided it no longer wants. These include a narrow strip of sidewalk, the land under a funicular railway (but not the railway itself), and some bushes in someone’s yard.

Here in Seattle there were two unoccupied patches of land left on either side of the ship canal when the I-5 bridge was built in their airspace. The city, rather than leaving them vacant, dedicated them as North and South Passage Point Parks in 1977.

EPACC will convene at 8am on Friday 21st August 2015 at South Passage Point Park. Here’s a map.

Image derived from photo by Dennis Bratland, CC-BY-SA

The En Plein Air Coffee Club will convene at 8am on Friday 14th August 2015 along the Waterfront Trail by Union Bay. I have no direct evidence to support this, but I believe the clothing brand Union Bay is named after this fashionable body of water. Here’s a map.

Image courtesy Union Bay.

Continuing EPACC’s tradition of celebrating Seattle’s sister cities, we will convene at 8am on Friday 17th July 2015 at Bergen Place. This park is named after Bergen, Norway, and was dedicated in 1975 by the visiting King Olav V of Norway. His son, King Harald V was just in town in May to dedicate a mural at Bergen Place. Here’s a map.

EPACC will convene at 8am on Friday 10th July 2015 at the sundial in Cowen Park. Here’s a map.

Kate Fleming was a voice actress and audiobook narrator who drowned in her basement recording studio after stormwater overwhelmed drainage and sewage systems during the Hanukkah Eve windstorm of 2006. Fleming’s partner Charlene Strong was initially denied permission to see Fleming at Harborview Medical Center because the couple was not married.

This tragedy led to two tangible outcomes. First, Strong became a vocal advocate for recognition of domestic partnerships for same-sex couples in Washington State, which was signed in to law the following April. Second,  Seattle Public Utilities built and enlarged the Madison Valley Stormwater Storage Facility on 30th Ave E & E John St. The facility can hold nearly 2 million gallons of water in the event the stormwater system backs up again like it did in 2006. Another storage system was added in Washington Park later, where there is a memorial sculpture for Fleming.

EPACC will convene Friday 3rd July 2015 at 8am at the Madison Valley Stormwater Storage Facility. Here’s a map.

EPACC will convene at 8am on 26th June 2015 on the shore of Green Lake near Duck Island. Here’s a map.

In between Meridian Park and the Good Shepard Center is a nice community garden run by Seattle Tilth. There’s a red picnic table in the southwest corner. Let’s meet there for coffee at 8am on Friday 19th June 2015. I’ve always entered from the north, through Meridian Park. Here’s a map.