Remember that dead project that car owners paid taxes on for 3 years only to have the plug pulled? The Seattle Transit blog covers what went wrong from a very pro-Sound Transit standpoint.
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:
In case you missed it, the Seattle suburbs are the center of the home grown pot operation universe, brought to you courtesy of the so-called “liar loan,” which allows (or allowed) people to get a loan without proof of income.
Steve Heaney, the president of the chapter of the Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers said:
“I don’t think anybody in my industry — other than the bad guys, and I believe they’re a very small percentage — really want to facilitate the drug dealers. But if we eliminate completely loans with alternative documentation, there’s certainly a lot of legitimate Americans who aren’t going to be able to buy a home,” Heaney says.
And he means Americans who make a lot of income that isn’t easily documented. Like drug growers?
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.
Georgetown, home of my favorite bar in Seattle, is a mix of grit and artsy hip. It’s also home to many people who can tune out the sound of Boeing Field’s myriad of incoming and outgoing flights a day and, apparently, one very political blogger and a not-so-frequent Seattle PI blogger.
Georgetown is so cool that a Beacon Hill blogger adopted it (she sez: “My blog was supposed to be about Beacon Hill, but nothing ever happens here. So it’s turned into more of a Georgetown blog.”). The Estately Beacon Hill outline is a little screwy, but Ms. Beacon Hill really betrays her need for local content when she says “It’s one of the largest neighborhoods in Seattle, and we don’t even have a Starbucks (not that we want one).” In Seattle? Just a mile or two from Starbucks’ world headquarters? How can that be? Does she mean no 2 Starbucks within 5 blocks of each other? Starbucks blog, please tell us!
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.
