You can now see the hills and valleys of America on Google maps. It’s not available for non-Google sites yet (including Estately). I love being able to see the direction of the valleys left after the retreat of the Cordilleran Glaciers just 10,000 years ago. Here is an example that is just south of Bremerton:
Marketers and developers - the same place as nearly any other young city. I like the concept that even the oldest and hoity-toitiest Seattle neighborhood names come from developers:
But even Seattle’s crunchiest neighborhood got its name from land developers, who named it after their hometown in Fremont, Neb.
Capitol Hill owes its name to turn-of-the-century superdeveloper James Moore, who bought property and persuaded a state legislator to introduce a bill to move the state capital there.
“It was really just a real estate promotion,” said Seattle historian Paul Dorpat. “There was no chance in hell they would do that … but he knew he could get publicity.”
Another name that stuck first appeared in a Seattle Weekly article in the late 1980s about how the industrial area south of downtown was changing with new businesses and artists moving in. Editor Rose Pike suggested the name Sodo for SOuth of the soon-to-be-blown-up KingDOme.
The name really caught on after developer Frank Stagen erected red neon signs on top of the area’s huge Sears building — until Starbucks replaced them with its mermaid.
I personally like descriptive, genuinely bottom up names like “Pill Hill” (aka “first hill”), “Frelard” (Between Ballard and Fremont), and the Denny Regrade (the area where they dragged tons of dirt from the top of Denny St. its base, thus regrading it).
A quick check using our text search shows no one (not a soul!) advertising a “West Edge,” “Park District,” or “Midtown” property. Maybe the Park District developer should learn from history and get his state legislator to promote a resolution to move Olympic National Park to North of downtown.
Sure, the Seattle-area real estate market is slowing down to “normal” rates while the rest of the nation wonders how long the downturn will last. But the online land rush, the domain land rush, is still going strong. Computer.com just sold for $2.2 million. Investment.com for $900k. No Bank of America no-fee-but-still-bad-deal loans available for these guys.
Off topic, but sort of on topic, here’s one map of the domains of the world (unfortunately size is not proportionate to registrations):
via: StrangeMaps
I like tiny, single purpose web apps, even if I immediately forget their names. Here’s my app of the day: a.placebetween.us. Give it 2 or more addresses and what you are meeting about and it will give you suggestions right in the middle of your places. Note: not that helpful if you are a Seattleitte meeting with Eastsiders.
via: Brian Dorsey (founder of NoonHat), who faintly reminds me of Dustin Luther.
If you have a big screen, Estately is one of the only real estate search sites that will fill it up with real estate search goodness. Small screen? We shrink to your level unless it’s tiny. Seriously: go to Estately’s Seattle real estate page now and try resizing your browser - see how everything scales to fit your needs? Regardless, some people have asked us for even more map and even more room for photos and today we deliver, but only if they really want it.
Hanging out between the map and the search options is a little triangle in a long thin bar. Click on it and Huzzah! the map is full screen. Once you’ve set up your search, you can shrink that sucker down and just cruise the map, going from listings to photos to neighborhood information. Want it back? The same bar is still hanging out on the left side of the map. Click it again and Huzzah! it’s like it was never gone.
Before:
After:
My suspicions were confirmed by Strange Maps the other day: as a Seattlite I am surrounded by a lot of dudes. Not just locally; all along the West Coast it’s as though we’re still feeling the effects of the gold rush of decades ago.
I’m guessing the Microsoft area of Redmond bring up the stats considerably, especially given their 75+% male makeup. In fact, with 33,000 Puget Sound employees, Microsoft employs approximately 16,000 of the unmatched men in Seattle.
