As part of its "Pride around Seattle 2024" collection, The Seattle Times Pacific NW Magazine featured research by two UW geography faculty in its long-form article "How Capitol Hill became Seattle’s gayborhood." Below are two passages from the article highlighting the work of Professors Michael Brown and Larry Knopp. Visit The Seattle Times for the full article!
C’mon. Just tell us. What’s the broad-strokes version?
There is a commonly accepted Grand Narrative: In Seattle’s early days, LGBTQ+ socializing was sequestered in the red-light district of Pioneer Square — a crossroads for racially, culturally and economically marginalized communities.
In the 1960s and ’70s, things shifted.
Socially, the city’s politics inched toward progressivism, and the LGBTQ+ community became more vocal and visible. Economically, fresh development hit Pioneer Square (some buildings were razed for parking lots; others were gussied up for preservation), putting the squeeze on old LGBTQ+ bars, which were also community centers. Meanwhile, partly due to the forces of 1960s suburbanization and an early-’70s economic downturn (including a recession in the aviation industry, contributing to the “Boeing Bust”), Capitol Hill had become a neighborhood of affordable, centrally located housing.
The scene migrated uphill, where it lives today.
But, as with all Grand Narratives, that story is a little too tidy.
“I don’t want to come off as the iconoclast, saying, ‘No, that’s all wrong,’ ” says Michael Brown, a geographer at the University of Washington who studies urban and political geography. “It did feel like a migration. But a lot of neighborhoods had queer spaces for a long time. It’s a diffuse map.”
Brown, in fact, made that map — titled “Claiming Space” — with a host of collaborators. Like McCaffray’s memories of 1950s Capitol Hill, it reveals all kinds of outliers: 1940s rooming houses for gay men in Fremont and Ballard, a 1950s lesbian bar (The Hub) just a few steps away from Seattle Center, an early-’60s dressmaker in Green Lake (Fashions by Mark) who specialized in clothes for drag performers, and many more...
Why did things bloom on Capitol Hill?
The neighborhood had attractive features: ample housing options (Pioneer Square did not) and LGBTQ+ businesses that weren’t bars (including A Different Drummer bookstore and a clothing shop called Peter’s, both of which had been operating since the ’60s).
Notably, it also had budding social, political and health organizations.
The Dorian Society, Seattle’s first formal gay-rights group, opened Dorian House in 1969, with meeting spaces, a crisis hotline and space for Seattle Counseling Services — which assisted people, particularly young people, with issues of physical and psychological health they were reluctant to discuss anywhere else. In 1970, the community-friendly Country Doctor Clinic opened in an abandoned firehouse on 15th Avenue East.
The list goes on.
“Which came first, the venues or the population?” asks Larry Knopp, another UW geographer who researches queer place-making. “It’s a little chicken and egg.”
Knopp was born in 1957, grew up in Madrona and remembers Capitol Hill being “a little bit fun but not super-vibrant” during his teenage years. He and friends would get burgers at Dick’s or go to a bowling alley on Broadway, but that was about it.