Image via Wikimedia Commons.

I need to make it out of Southeast Seattle more often. Columbia/Hillman City—while booming by its early 2000s standards, with a fantastic new Puerto Rican restaurant, a revamped Columbia City Theater coming soon, and a killer pinball/ice cream parlor—has got nothing on Ballard these days, at least judging from a walk I took through the neighborhood early yesterday afternoon (and not, despite the name of this post, last night). In Ballard, as in neighborhoods all over Seattle, things are looking up despite the economic downturn, with new apartments, stores, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops popping up all over the place.

The Ballard Farmers Market is easily one of the most exciting (and raucous) in town, with vendors hawking everything from thin-crust pizza to foraged nettles to oysters to fresh pasta to raw milk ("I hear it's really dangerous," a vendor from Sea Breeze Farm on Vashon joked).

After slogging through the river of people (twice as many as used to show up when I lived in Ballard, way back in sleepy 2001), we wandered over to Snacks!, the new-ish late night hipster convenience store, where we sampled bacon jam and salivated over Dante's Inferno Dogs, on offer all day and night. Then we headed over to the Miro tea shop, where we tasted fruity Roobois and heady black teas. Finally, we ended up at Blackbird Candy Shoppe, where we sampled a crispy dark-chocolate-pumpkin-seed confection and bought a  bag of not-too-sweet honey licorice candy for the bus ride home.

Obviously, Ballard's renaissance isn't limited to food (nor is it, naturally, beloved by everyone). But even if, like me, you don't go in for massive, soulless blocks of condos and stratospherically priced clothing boutiques, you can still enjoy a leisurely Sunday stroll through one of the city's most dynamic, rapidly changing neighborhoods.