Update: 9 p.m.Wednesday, July 31

The transplanted Summer Social was a smash success, despite the temporary location at Olympic View Elementary School, the thunder and raindrops right up to opening hour, and the automatic sprinkler system that came on just after opening. See photo of sprinkler head(s) covered with chairs, and, later, pickle buckets from Maple Leaf Ace Hardware.

More photos tomorrow from Dane Doerflinger Photography.

Update Wednesday July 31: Summer Social in 4 1/2 hours!

Original post :

Photo from 2012 Summer Social by Dane Doerflinger, a photographer and Maple Leaf resident.

Maple Leaf’s annual celebration of community and ice cream is coming up tomorrow at a new venue as we await the grand opening of the new Maple Leaf Reservoir Park later this fall. Join the neighborhood from 6-8 p.m. Wednesday, July 31, for the Maple Leaf Summer Ice Cream Social at Olympic View Elementary School, 504 N.E. 95th St., for free ice cream, live entertainment, fun for kids, and informational booths from neighborhood businesses and city agencies.

Be sure to stop by the Maple Leaf Life booth and say hi! We put out requests for photos from our proud gardeners, but so far have only one submission. We’ll post that and hope to receive more photos for our Best Garden contest that we’re letting you, our readers, stop by and vote for.

We’ll post the winning photos here and on our Facebook page. See you tomorrow night at the Summer Social!

Just before 5 p.m. today a motorcyclist flipped his bike at Northeast 105th Street. The responding emergency vehicles temporarily closed the street.

At about 5:15 p.m. Holly emailed:

Roosevelt Way Northeast is currently blocked off right now due to a recent accident in front of my house. A single motorcyclist apparently flipped his red motorcycle. A bystander said it looked like his breaks locked on him although this is unverified. It looks like no other cars were involved, thankfully! Police, fire dept and medics were all on scene. He seemed to be okay as the medics were not in any rush to take him away in the ambulance.

Dionnie emails this morning to say the Shih Tzu Maltese she’s dog-sitting for her sister went missing Sunday afternoon.

Shiro was lost around 3 p.m. from Northeast 75th Street and 14th Avenue Northeast. The dog has a tag with an address on Northeast 128th Street, but those owners are out of town.

Please call 206-335-3569 if found.

Summerfest, the new free celebration at Thornton Place, returns this afternoon, July 27, with “Paris on the Plaza,” from 3-6 p.m.

Thornton Place kicked off the summer festival in June with the Latin-inspired “Side of Salsa,” and is following it up this week with a jazz trio complemented by dance lessons from Century Ballroom, which will be offering an East Coast swing lesson.

In addition to your dancing shoes, be sure to bring your appetite as there will food available from 314 PIE and Crisp Creperie.

Seattle Police this morning said they have arrested a suspect in a shoplifting/robbery incident at the J.C. Penny store at Northgate Mall on Saturday.

They believe he is the same suspect who shoplifted $800 in alcohol from a store on Northwest Market Street in Ballard earlier this month, police said.

In both cases the suspect was confronted by security officers at the store, and was found to be carrying weapons, said Detective Mark Jamieson, a police spokesman.

Shopliftings are common at the mall, and sometimes turn into assaults or robberies when they escalate. (If they remain shopliftings, we rarely report them.)

Jamieson’s full report:

Robbery detectives are investigating two North Seattle robberies that occurred in recent weeks believed to have been committed by the same suspect.

On the afternoon of Friday, July 12th, a lone white male entered a grocery store in Ballard and shoplifted $800 worth of alcohol. Store security confronted him as he was leaving the store. The suspect fought with security and pulled out a knife and attempted to stab one of the security officers. The suspect fled before police arrived.

On Saturday evening, July 20th, a similar incident occurred inside the J.C. Penny store at the Northgate Mall. The suspect was confronted by store security and fought with them after he was observed shoplifting. The suspect was detained and taken into custody by officers. Two knives were recovered from the suspect. The suspect was taken to the hospital after he was refused by the jail for a medical issue. The 53-year-old suspect was eventually booked into jail yesterday.

The detectives assigned the cases compared notes and determined that it was the same suspect. Both cases have been forwarded to the prosecutor’s office. Robbery detectives continue to follow up on the investigations.

The fourth annual Spoke and Food, an event created and organized by Maple Leaf residents Garett and Heather Slettebak, returns from 5:30-9:30 p.m. July 30 and again includes a stop at Judy Fu’s Snappy Dragon, 8917 Roosevelt Way N.E.

Participants are asked to bike to one (or more!) of the 20 host restaurants participating in the event, which also includes nearby Duke’s Chowder House in Green Lake, Vios in Ravenna, Peaks Frozen Custard in Roosevelt, and plenty more if you’re willing to ride a little farther.

From the website:

Participation is easy. All you need to do is to bike to and from one of our participating host restaurants on the evening of our event. Invite your friends or family to meet you, bring your neighbors, pack up your kids or go at it alone.

Each of our participating host restaurants have agreed to donate 20% of ALL of their patron revenues from the evening of the event directly to the local non-profit that we select each year. This means 100% of the funds raised via the restaurants go to helping a local Seattle area non-profit. The 2013 Spoke & Food event will benefit the Bike Works non-profit.

Last year, participants helped raised more than $4,450 for FamilyWorks Resource Center & Food Bank.

Do you plan to participate in this year’s Spoke and Food? How far do you plan to ride?

The buckets of cash that Seattle’s school-zone speed cameras are raking in - $3 million in their first half-year of operation - will now only be spent on school-related projects. (Editor: see comment by Lisa, below.)

That includes the 6,000 tickets issued through June by Maple Leaf’s cameras, on Fifth Avenue Northeast outside Olympic View Elementary School.

The Seattle City Council unanimously voted this afternoon to restrict how cash from the $189 tickets from the eight school-zone cameras, in four locations, can be spent, our news partner The Seattle Times is reporting.

The separate fund the council established today would require every penny to be spent on operating and maintaining the cameras; safety education; and capital-improvement projects, such as repainted crosswalks, new sidewalks, lights and more camera installations.

The vote was a defeat for Mayor Mike McGinn, who wanted to keep the cash in the city’s general fund, while promising to prioritize school improvements.

At past Maple Leaf Summer Socials, Maple Leaf Life has asked its neighbors what they love about the community and posted photos of their response.

But this year, we’re hoping to do something different at the annual event on Wednesday, July 31, at Olympic View Elementary School, starting at 6 p.m.

The new theme of the Maple Leaf Life booth is the impeccable gardens that grow throughout the neighborhood. To honor our neighbors and the joy their gardens give all of us, we’re having a Best Garden contest at the Maple Leaf Life booth.

Think you’d top the list, or just want to show off your yard? Send us your photos at [email protected] by 5 p.m. Friday, July 26, and we’ll post them at the Summer Social and let the community vote. And if you can’t get your photo to us by then, go ahead and bring one at the beginning of the Summer Social and we’ll add it to the selection.

Even if you don’t have a photo to share, be sure to stop by our booth to check out Maple Leaf’s best gardens and vote for your faves!

Periodically - “or whenever news breaks” - we update readers on crimes that affect the neighborhood.

Periodically, neighbors complain about reading crime news.

Periodically, somebody says we have, comparatively, a lot of crime in Maple Leaf.

We don’t think so, and have spoken to it repeatedly, most directly a couple of years ago.

Now a couple of outside reports back up that belief.

This month Walk Score Seattle crunched the numbers of crimes committed per capita here in two categories - violent crime and crimes against property (burglaries, stolen or prowled cars and the like).

Their citywide maps are posted at right. Take a look. Violent crime is on top; maps show crime per 1,000 residents.

To play with the originals, go to the “safety” section of the Walk Score site.

The most common crime victims in Maple Leaf - and Seattle in general - are cars. Most are “prowled” - broken into. A lot are stolen (particularly around the Northgate Transit Center). But we’re nowhere near the top.

A few weeks ago the National Insurance Crime Bureau published statistics on stolen cars. It basically said they are up, nationally, after eight years of declines.

Interestingly, of the top 10 cities for stolen cars nationwide, eight are in California. (The leader, per capita, is Modesto.)

The other two were in Washington - Yakima and Spokane. The Seattle metro area is number 17 on the list, after places like Detroit and Oklahoma City.

Periodically - “or whenever news breaks” - we update readers on crimes that affect the neighborhood.

Periodically, neighbors complain about reading crime news.

Periodically, somebody says we have, comparatively, a lot of crime in Maple Leaf.

We don’t think so, and have spoken to it repeatedly, most directly a couple of years ago.

Now a couple of outside reports back up that belief.

This month Walk Score Seattle crunched the numbers of crimes committed per capita here in two categories - violent crime and crimes against property (burglaries, stolen or prowled cars and the like).

Their citywide maps are posted at right. Take a look. Violent crime is on top; maps show crime per 1,000 residents.

To play with the originals, go to the “safety” section of the Walk Score site.

The most common crime victims in Maple Leaf - and Seattle in general - are cars. Most are “prowled” - broken into. A lot are stolen (particularly around the Northgate Transit Center). But we’re nowhere near the top.

A few weeks ago the National Insurance Crime Bureau published statistics on stolen cars. It basically said they are up, nationally, after eight years of declines.

Interestingly, of the top 10 cities for stolen cars nationwide, eight are in California. (The leader, per capita, is Modesto.)

The other two were in Washington - Yakima and Spokane. The Seattle metro area is number 17 on the list, after places like Detroit and Oklahoma City.