Yarrow House

Small Towns of Seattle: Beacon Hill

When I need to shop for Mexican food, I run up to the Red Apple on Beacon Hill. I used to go to the Red Apple for Japanese food, but over the years the udon noodles and nori have slowly been replaced by tortillas and hot peppers. The change in ethnic food reflects the change in the hill’s demographics. For much of Seattle’s early history, Beacon Hill was isolated from the city by its geography. This isolation kept property values low and made the hill a natural location for minority populations to move to as they climbed the social hierarchy out of Chinatown and Nihonmachi (Japantown).

During the 1930s, Seattle had the second largest Japanese population on the West Coast, and Japanese formed the largest minority group in the city. Many lived on Beacon Hill. The shift to a Latino flavor on the hill began to happen in 1972, when a group of Chicano activists occupied the former Beacon Hill Elementary School and established El Centro de la Raza to serve Seattle’s growing Latino population.

In its long history on the edge of downtown Seattle, the 10-mile long ridge has gone through a variety of names. The Duwamish people called the ridge qWátSéécH “Greenish-Yellow Spine,” perhaps for the many bigleaf maples growing on it. For a while the area was called Holgate and Hanford Hill after the brothers-in-law John Holgate and Edward Hanford, who logged and settled on the hill in the 1850s. But, eventually, a marketing comparison with Boston’s Beacon Hill stuck, and when a streetcar line was built to the top of the ridge in 1891, it was called the Beacon Hill Line. In the 1950s and 60s, people called the hill “Boeing Hill” because so many residents worked at the base of the hill in the Boeing airplane factory.

My friend Ann and I explored some of North Beacon Hill on one morning walk. We started at the north end of the hill, admiring the art deco design of the 84-year-old former U.S. Marine Hospital. The 16-story building occupies the brow of the hill above the Dearborn cut. In 1910, wanting easier access to Rainier Valley, the city dug through what was then called the Jackson ridge, creating Dearborn Street and isolating Beacon Hill from the rest of Seattle. Since the hospital closed in 1987, the building has had a variety of occupants, including the original Amazon headquarters and, currently, local offices for State legislators, Pacific Medical Centers clinics, and Seattle Central College’s various medical programs.

We walked south from the hospital on a street lined with modest bungalows and mature trees, reflecting the age of the neighborhood. During the 20s and 30s, many Japanese families lived in these houses, but because of the Alien Exclusion land laws forbidding Japanese immigrants to own property in Seattle, as well as elsewhere in Washington, they had to have white friends hold the titles for them. In 1966 the Alien Land Law was finally removed from the State constitution, and Japanese could at last own land in their own names. Ann and I continued our stroll south, past El Centro and the new Beacon Hill Light Rail station, which has helped rejuvenate the little shopping district strung along Beacon Avenue.

Military Road, which extended north from Fort Steilacoom near Tacoma to Fort Bellingham, once ran along what is now Beacon Avenue, past what was to become Jefferson Park. Before that hilltop stretch became a park and golf course in 1915, it was the location of the county “pest hospital,” for isolating patients with small pox, tuberculosis, and other contagious diseases. It was also the site of the county prison farm, known as the “Lazy Husbands Ranch,” for short-term imprisonment, usually for drunks, who were put to work clearing trees and building the park and golf course.

Jefferson Park overlooks Columbian Way. The cut in the hill that leads Columbian down to I-5, the extensive Boeing factory complex, and Seattle’s industrial area, began in 1895 as an ambitious plan by a former territorial governor to dig a canal from Elliott Bay through Beacon Hill to Lake Washington. Cave-ins and backroom political maneuvering finally stopped the project. Much of the soil sluiced out of that cut, as with the Dearborn cut, was used to fill the tide flats on the western base of the hill.The park’s rolling lawn covers the reservoir that once occupied the hilltop. A long winding path leads past rain swales landscaped with native plants, the Seattle Urban Orchard and a p-patch, all with a stunning view of the city’s waterfront and, on clear days, the Olympics beyond. The park gives no indication of its varied and sometimes questionable history.

For the two decades between the two world wars, the Japanese community used to gather for a summer picnic at Jefferson Park. The all-day affair included foot races and other picnic games for the kids, and was capped by an adults’ baseball game. After the Japanese were taken away to the internment camps in 1942, some Beacon Hill proponents of keeping Seattle white successfully petitioned the City to have the former picnic grounds eliminated so the Japanese couldn’t ever use them again. During the war, the park was filled with barracks and tents for more than 1,000 men, and an extensive recreation area for the soldiers. Now that the reservoir has been capped, the swath of lawn invites gatherings, but no place to play ball.

After the removal and internment of the Japanese, they were never welcomed back to Seattle in their previous numbers. In the 1950s Chinese families began to move onto Beacon Hill, and since then waves of new immigrants have followed—Vietnamese and Filipinos as well as Latinos. With the completion of the Beacon Hill light rail station, there’s been an explosion of construction on the hill, with apartment buildings clustering around the light rail station, and a stylish new library building, restaurants, and bars lining Beacon Avenue. The hill is becoming a hip new place to live, appealing to a cross-section of Seattleites. The mix of cultures has become one of its draws.Ann and I ended our walk back at my car, which was parked around the corner from the light rail station and, luckily for us, right in front of the Filipino bakery so we could finish our walk with coffee and a pastry.

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One-time reproduction for non-resale purposes permitted with the following credit line: by Judith Yarrow, © 2017