North Seattle is still rural in so many ways. Travel beyond N 85th Street and you're in a pastoral place, a land of gravel (well, OK, asphalt roads). A land my friend Jeff impolitely refers to as "where the sidewalk ends."

Yes, time has marched forward in Seattle, but for many of us, basic amenities have not. It's our greatest home-grown urban legend: the 1950s vote by North Seattleites to become part of the city - a vote that supposedly was won with the promise of sidewalks for everybody. We all have friends and neighbors who know the true story - or maybe it's a friend of a neighbor.

Whether we in North Seattle are owed sidewalks or not, the lack of them has chagrined many of us. That's why I've been pleased to hear Michael McGinn, president of the Greenwood Community Council, talk on several recent occasions of a new way to tackle the problem.

McGinn's idea is simple: organize sidewalk-less neighborhoods, north and south, to demand pedestrian improvements as a coalition. It's easy for the City to say "no" to one community council at a time, perhaps not so easy to say it to a crowd.

Right now, I'm 99 percent in agreement with McGinn. I'd be 100 percent in agreement except for one thing: the monorail.

While phase one of the monorail is planned to stop around N 85th Street in the Crown Hill neighborhood, a route to the Northgate area is already being discussed.

"We all think (a route to Northgate) is good idea," said Ed Stone, spokesperson for the Elevated Transportation Company, the public development authority that is studying ways to build a citywide monorail system. "It would be insane to go up to North Seattle and not connect to Northgate."

Stone added that the proposal for a monorail link to Northgate could be brought to the voters as early as next year.

What does the monorail have to do with North Seattle's lack of sidewalks?

The obvious route for the monorail to take from Crown Hill to Northgate is the Holman Road-105th Street Corridor. Imagine how the monorail would look, literally a few feet away from a house where residents are sill forced to park in their front lawns and pedestrians look with fear at the lack of a physical barrier between themselves and oncoming traffic.

And that's what is so great about it. It would be the living illustration of a time warp. On your right, roads of the 19th century, on your left, and mass transit from the 21st. A person could literally park their vehicle on a nearby patch of grass one minute and be hurtling towards Best Buy on a space train the next. I can't think of a single thing wrong with that picture - except that it might make us look ridiculous.

I wish McGinn and his supporters the best of luck. (

- LEAH WEATHERSBY, Broadview