SEPTEMBER 2026
Madison Park Times Serving East-Central Seattle since 1983
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Seattle Says Slower Streets Are Safer. Drivers Didn’t Get the Memo.
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Staff Report
M
ayor Wilson has issued a new executive order aimed at accelerating Seattle’s Vision Zero efforts, nearly 11 years after the city committed to eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries. The order contains a little bit of everything: protected bike lanes, pedestrian head-start signals, better street lighting, intersection improvements, automated traffic cameras, safer city vehicles, an updated Vision Zero Action Plan, a new online dashboard and, because this is Seattle, an interdepartmental team to coordinate it all. Apparently, the missing ingredient in traffic safety may have been more meetings. Sarcasm aside, Seattle has a very real problem. Thirty people were killed and 221 were seriously injured in traffic collisions on Seattle streets in 2025, according to the mayor’s executive order. The order also says 93 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur on arterial streets, and that 80 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur on multilane arterials.
VISION ZERO, 3
The Overture to Autumn Page A5
Someone to Love Page A6
CITY OF SEATTLE, OFFICE OF THE MAYOR
Mayor Wilson’s Executive Order sets new timeline for priority safety projects, expands proven safety tools, and strengthens coordination across City departments.
Occidental Fine Arts Center: A Home for Beautiful Things telling you not to touch anything. These were the hottest technology of their day, and they were built to be gorgeous on purpose.” That combination—technical skill, usefulness and beauty—runs throughout the three-story Occidental Fine Arts Center. The first floor is a gallery and gathering space, available for exhibitions, arts groups and community programming. The second houses Beautiful Things, a collection of technology from days gone by. On the third, seven accomplished artists are finishing a year spent making new work. One of Conru’s favorite introductions to Beautiful Things is a stereoscope. “Do you want to see a 3D VR headset from 125
ARTS, 6
Revisiting the Park Page A7
The Market is Balanced
A MA D I S O N PA R K J E W E L Visitors fill the Occidental Fine Arts Center during Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Art Walk in June, where works by the inaugural Seattle Prize fellows were on view. Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Art Walk—the nation’s first and longest-running monthly art walk—brings free exhibitions, open studios, and arts programming to venues throughout the historic neighborhood.
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n a Pioneer Square building, century-old machines come back to life while a new generation of painters works above— each part of a larger idea about craftsmanship, beauty and what art can give to a Laura city. Marie Walk Rivera into the Occidental Fine Arts Center and you may hear it before you see it:
music coming from a machine with nobody at the keys, housed in a carved wooden cabinet built more than a century ago. It is part of Beautiful Things, a collection of hundreds of objects dating roughly from 1850 to 1950: automata that move, music machines that still play, stereoscopes that turn photographs three-dimensional, and objects designed to be as beautiful as they were functional. “Some people call them antiques,” founder Andrew Conru said, “but that word makes you picture a roped-off room and somebody
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