Capitol Hill

I moved to Capitol Hill in 2005. I had been subletting in the U-District for just under two months, time in which I was supposed to figure out where to live and get a job (I ended up about 50% there). Capitol Hill is just east of downtown Seattle, and is known for being the epicenter of both hipster culture and gay culture. It has unique shops, bars, and coffee shops. I was up there today re-living the past, and trying to find a good spot for a picture that would sum up Capitol Hill for me. I couldn’t find one, so here’s my own little tour of the Capitol Hill I lived in.

I drew a crude map. The star is where my apartment was.


I lived on East Mercer, a block off Broadway, the main thoroughfare. The other big thoroughfares in Capitol Hill are 15th Avenue and Pike/Pine. I’d go up to 15th to go to Victrola and read. The coffee is so strong at Victrola that when I would leave, even my book would smell like coffee for a few days. Other things that are up on the 15th include Group Health, a few laid-back bars, and grocery stores. Pike/Pine is where a lot of the bars are, so I drank my fair share there. These streets also lead down to downtown.

Capitol Hill has a lot of apartments, but also some nice houses/mansions. From my apartment, I could run through the last little bit of hipster housing and through the mansions to go running in Volunteer Park. Volunteer Park is a nice, green park, with the Seattle Asian Art Museum, a view of the Space Needle, and a water tower. I could easily do a few loops and run back to the apartment without getting bored. By night, Volunteer Park has a pretty shady reputation, but by day, it’s where I exercised. The weirdest thing that ever happened to me while I was running there: a car flagged me down, I guess to ask for directions, but then the husband and wife got into an argument about what to ask to me, with no shame about making me wait five minutes to try and help them.

Just a block off the other side of Broadway lived my friends Katy and Nekesa. Katy I met at Old Navy, and in walking home together one night, we realized how close we lived to each other. Katy knew Nekesa from camp. As our friendship blossomed, so did our explorations of Capitol Hill. Every Wednesday, Katy and I met at Joe Bar, a little coffee spot that was near their building, to catch up on life and whatnot. This was the origin of “Bev Night,” a tradition that continues to this day (though not with Katy), that I should write more about later. After a beverage at Joe Bar, we’d go over to Nekesa’s and watch reality tv.

Katy left Seattle to join the Peace Corps almost a year after I moved to Capitol Hill, but other places still make me think of her every time I go by. We’d eat or get takeout at Magic Dragon, a cheap but delicious Chinese place on Broadway. Julia’s, a little farther down on Broadway, was a place where Nekesa, Katy, and I would meet for brunch every now and then. At the Value Village at the south end of Capitol Hill, Katy and I had quite the adventure trying to squeeze a chair into my car for her apartment.

We didn’t drink a ton together on Capitol Hill (Katy didn’t like smoke, and this was pre-smoking ban), but one Cap Hill evening I’ll always remember is one Halloween. Katy was a cow, Nekesa was Raj from the Apprentice, and I was a blind date (reprising an old college costume). We went up and down Broadway that night…Katy the cow making sad faces in front of Dick’s and playing with sex toys in the adult store on Broadway. Nekesa/Raj running into Donald Trump at Barca…those two definitely made living on Capitol Hill a lot of fun.

I walked a lot in those days, mainly because I had a weird employment situation at the time. I’d go to an internship downtown in the morning. In Capitol Hill in the morning, you see all the bums waking up. I’d walk down Olive, work for four hours, and then head back up the hill. Then I’d either run or watch movies, maybe run errands before heading back down the hill for the night shift at Old Navy. Walking in the late afternoon/late night was more comfortable in Capitol Hill…the restaurants were open and people were out and about. Olive’s about the middle of Broadway…as you walk down it, you’ll pass Half Price Books (a place I spend entirely too much money and one of my favorite places to browse), a Starbucks where’d I’d go to a lot to write, an internet café that had something painted on the wall—something like “I’ll always love the illusion I had of you”---something like that; it always seemed profoundly relevant to my romantic situation at the time but I can’t remember the exact wording right now.

On Olive there was also Agent X Clothing; it always had this one woman in there sewing interesting things, and I’d make up stories about her in my head, and wonder if I’d ever have enough money to buy something from a store like that. There was the City Market Deli, with its cutesy signs; things like “We found the WMD in our freezer—weapons of mass deliciousness!” There was this old woman who used to stand there frequently with her hand out, and she was the angriest beggar I’ve ever seen. It seemed you’d feel her wrath if you gave her money, or if you didn’t. It was all the same.

Mainly I went down Olive, but sometimes I’d walk all the way down Broadway and cut down Pike/Pine. I didn’t like that end of Broadway as much. The shops were a bit more run down, there were more panhandlers, and you had to spend a lot of time walking by things like funeral homes and community colleges (not that those things are bad, it was just more fun to window shop at the other end of Broadway).

Those were the main boundaries of my neighborhood as I saw them. Things have already changed a lot up there. They are putting in condos at the corner of East Mercer and Broadway..there used to be a Safeway at that corner when I moved in, but it went out of business when the brand spanking new QFC went in a few blocks from me (I spent quite a bit of time in that grocery store). There are new restaurants and shops, and of course, a ton of new people. When I first moved to Capitol Hill, I was out in a bar, and a guy told me about the high Capitol Hill turnover. “New people live here for a year or two, then they get sick of the drama and move to Queen Anne.” That sounded crazy to me; I thought I’d live in that neighborhood forever. Well, I can’t say I had a lot of drama in my life at the time, but after a year on East Mercer, I high-tailed it to Queen Anne. It was nothing against Capitol Hill, it was just the right thing to do at the time.