breakfast first: "Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest"

One of the comic adventures awaiting anyone who moves to Seattle is learning the street naming conventions here. Once you know something about it, it can be very helpful; but if you're unfamiliar with it, you're in for some laughs.

The city is split up into a number of different geographic regions: NorthWest, North, NorthEast, West, East, SouthWest, and South. These compass directionals are used in conjuction with the street name to help identify where in the city the address is located. But, naturally, there are some twists. For streets, the directional is a prefix (for example, "W Raye Street"); for avenues, it's a suffix (for example, "Phinney Ave N"). Amusingly, I've seen at least one street that had both a prefix and a suffix (different, of course), which pretty much fried my circuits at the time. (The wikipedia has a decent piece on the history and Byzantine rules of Seattle street naming.)

After you catch on, these directionals are useful for figuring out what part of the city things are located. If someone says "85th Ave NW", you go, "Ah, that's in Ballard!" which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, I've found that the directionals can trip up mapping services. Shortly after I moved here (and before I understood the directional system), I found a hardware store online. I looked it up on Yahoo maps, and saw it was located downtown. Before I left, I decided to call the store and discovered that they were in Magnolia -- the opposite direction from downtown! The problem was the directional -- the trailing "W" wasn't taken into account.

So the moral is: learn your directionals, be careful when using mapping services, and if you're sending me anything, be sure to include the "SW". (Oh, and about the weird title: it's a mnemonic to help remember the street pairs of the central business district: Jefferson/James, Cherry/Columbia, Marion/Madison, Spring/Seneca, University/Union, Pike/Pine.)

Comments

Sheesh!

Posted by: Trevor | May 18, 2005 at 06:29 PM

There is no 85th Ave NW in Seattle - that would be out in the water.

Posted by: Brian Curran | May 24, 2005 at 03:17 PM

Whoops -- I meant to write NW 85th Street, not 85th Ave NW. See? So confusing! :)

Posted by: Michael | May 24, 2005 at 10:28 PM

Very quick and conveninet way of downloading files is torrents format. Moreover, numerous http://www.torrentbasket.com/ torrent search engines ease this process.

Posted by: Dale | September 24, 2010 at 04:04 AM