Crime went down in one neighborhood in the CD because two kids who lived in one house got locked up. Prior to the recent jail term every house in the neighborhood had been broken into within six months of the oldest kid getting out of jail. The two were the main players in a fencing ring and drug ring. They also started a turf war with some rival dealers in the area. They have been replaced and the activity is already starting up again.

The produce (and live chicken and duck) truck stands in the VA parking lot along Beacon Avenue have existed for decades. I can only vouch for the last 30 years.

I can't believe you missed this comment:

Ah that smell takes me back, back to Old Ballard. The Good Ballard. A simpler time of buggy whips and box socials, of cold water flats and cholera. Where packs of rosy-cheeked children roamed the streets without a care in the world, merrily pickpocketing wealthy men-about-town in their sealskin tophats.

You see, not many people know this but back at the turn of the last century Ballard was home to a wave of Italian immigrants, who came as part of the Great Spaghetti Rush. Naturally, they brought with them their treasured native foods. No one in Seattle had ever seen a tomato before! Oh there was such a celebration when people discovered you could eat them, and not just use them as a very ineffective substitute for bleach.

Am0ng those suspicious rarities was a green, nobbly, mysterious vegetable. We now know it as the humble broccoli. The center of Italo-Ballardian broccoli cultivation was based around the future site of the Ballard Bridge, and it became a booming business. At the time Broccoli was often used as packing material for the salmon fleet, as a suppressant for "base urges", and as an industrial lubricant. Unfortunately, time passes and the future marches ever on. The Ballard bridge trampled the Broccoli Grounds when it was constructed in 1917. Nevertheless, to this day descendants of the original broccoli farmers secretly plant their broccoli around the bridge, as a form of remembrance. Yearning for a time when Ballard was known by its old nickname:

Brassica Junction.

I love to sandbag.

...

oh, you meant for physical water floods. My bad.

Sandbags.

And get some chains for your car while you're at it.

I'm tired of you bitches complaining about the city not plowing up every damn snowflake from every street and alley around here.

@6: I take it you weren't here in 2008. Dumbfuck.