Pub owners buy Pegasus

They’ll be pouring ale in one historic waterfront building, and now espresso in another.

Harbour Public House owners Jocelyn and Jeff Waite this week announced purchase of Pegasus Coffee House from Hazel Van Evera.

“We get asked quite often, ‘why don’t you come run something similar to the pub in our town?’” pub co-owner Jeff Waite said. “These are all great opportunities, but we were looking for something in our neighborhood.

“We live in the neighborhood, we work in the neighborhood. It’s all right there.”

Pegasus Coffee House was opened by David Dessinger in 1979, in a 1937-vintage building on Parfitt Way that once housed a hardware business. The brick and tile used in construction were previously part of the dry kiln at Port Blakely Mill.

Van Evera had owned the coffee shop since 2000; the business had been on the market for several months.

The pub is likewise housed in a historic building. The Grow house, its former name, was constructed in 1881. The eatery and watering hole was established there in 1987 by Jim and Judy Evans, Jocelyn Waite’s parents.

Jocelyn Waite said the couple is “thrilled to be able to preserve another Bainbridge treasure and maintain its homey atmosphere… a gathering place that is very special to many people in our community.”

The Waites said they don’t plan any immediate changes to the coffee house. Live music, lately a popular draw for the establishment, will continue.

“It’s been a going concern since 1979, we don’t see the need to make any drastic changes,” Jeff Waite said. “It’s different than picking up a failing business.”

– Douglas Crist

Mayor unveils $56M budget

Mayor Darlene Kordonowy unveiled her 2007 preliminary budget Monday, predicting almost $56 million in spending next year.

The mayor’s budget was crafted with three priorities in mind:

• Build an integrated transportation system with easy access to alternative and non-motorized options.

• Promote a more diverse range of housing options.

• Improve public safety.

As proposed by the mayor, the city would direct the largest share of the budget – at almost 40 percent – to capital projects, such a Waterfront Park promenade, road improvements and as an evaluation of a connection between Ericksen Avenue and Hildebrand Lane.

About 15 percent is earmarked for city staff salaries and almost 6 percent for contracted professional services, among other costs.

The City Council adopted a budget of almost $50 million for 2006, but the city did not spend about $14 million of it due to staffing issues and other challenges.

A lack of qualified staff will likely also plague the city next year.

“We have a great deal of width and breadth (in projects and goals), but not much depth,” Kordonowy said. “We’re spread thin.”

The city currently has 31 vacancies in a staff of 144, according to City Administrator Mary Jo Briggs.

“This is absolutely unprecedented,” she said, “As an organization, we’re definitely in the rebuilding mode.”

– Tristan Baurick

Beauty in the gardens of war

Despite the barbed wire, armed guards and foreign desert landscape, planting seeds came natural to many of the island’s Japanese Americans during their World War II internment at camps in California.

That same impulse – to plant vegetables and tend flowers in times of war – is shared by many whose stories were collected by author Kenneth Helphand in his book “Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime.”

Helphand will present a lecture and visual presentation based on his book Sunday at Bloedel Reserve.

Defiant Gardens describes, in many first-person testimonies and archival photographs, gardens created in times of extreme environmental, social, political, economic, or cultural upheaval.

The book’s images include depictions of a French soldier laying out a flower bed behind the lines of the Western Front in World War I; photographs of ‘victory gardens’ made by Japanese American internees in World War II; and an American soldier trimming his tiny plot of grass with a pair of scissors at a camp north of Baghdad in 2004.

These gardens, created with ingenuity in hostile environments by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians living in ghettos, internment camps and occupied countries, illustrate humankind’s remarkable perseverance and resilience, according to Helphand.

“‘Defiant gardens’ promise beauty where there is none, hope over despair, optimism over pessimism, and finally life in the face of death,” wrote Helphand. “(The) gardens attempt to create normalcy in the midst of madness and order out of chaos.”

Helphand is professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon and a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is also the author of Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape, and Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel.

Copies of Defiant Gardens will be available at this lecture through Fortner Books of Bainbridge Island, a dealer of out-of-print and rare books on gardening, cooking and photography.

The event begins at 4:30 p.m. and will include light refreshments. The $35 admission fee represents a tax deductible donation to Bloedel Reserve. For reservations, call 842-7631.

– Tristan Baurick

Tour of solar homes today

Thousands of solar-powered homes across the United States will open their doors Saturday, including four Bainbridge residences that harness the sun’s rays to heat water, power appliances and help meet other everyday needs.

The public is invited to stroll through the island’s participating solar houses as part of the American Solar Energy Society’s 11th Annual National Solar Tour to learn how they might incorporate solar technologies in their own homes.

Forty-four states, including Washington, and the District of Columbia will take part in the event, including the island homes and one residence in Indianola.

“Interest in adding solar power to homes and buildings is on the rise all over the country as energy costs take a toll on the economy,” said local tour organizer Tammy Deets. “With the threat to our environment due to burning fossil fuels becoming irrefutable, this annual tour invites the public to see for themselves how solar can be a clean, viable and practical alternative.”

In addition to solar electric, passive solar, and solar hot water, this year’s tour will feature energy efficiency technologies, resource conservation measures and alternative energy automobiles.

Public tours begin today at 10 a.m. and end at 4 p.m. Call 855-4893, or visit www.solarwashington.org.

Help welcome island salmon

The Bainbridge Island Watershed Council is seeking volunteers to help track how many salmon are spawning in island streams.

The project, which kicks off with a training session from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, expands on work that volunteers began last year.

Volunteers form teams of three but go out in pairs, so they have a substitute. Beginning in mid-October, they walk an assigned stretch of stream once a week and fill out a form noting stream conditions and the presence of living or dead fish or nests that salmon make.

With the possible exception of the first visit, the work typically takes one or two hours. Professional biologists join each team on their first visit and will be available for consultation later.

Last year, volunteers monitored sections of four streams, including Fletcher Bay, Manzanita, Woodward and Cooper.

Volunteers will also monitor the Winslow Ravine, which will soon be more accessible because of the bike path under construction; Mac’s Dam Creek, which leads through IslandWood property, and possibly upper Schel-Chelb and Weaver Creek through the former strawberry packing plant property on Eagle Harbor.

Volunteers will learn how to identify the different types of salmon, ways to evidence of salmon in streams and other skills during Saturday’s training session.

Training begins at 10 a.m. at City Hall and moves to Cooper Creek at noon. Because access to streams can be difficult, this project is not suitable for young children.

To register, call 780-3797.