Writing research question!

[annathepiper]

Okay, this is for the Seattleites (and denizens of places nearby to Seattle, and persons who used to live around here but who don't anymore) on my Friends list, a question I'm considering as part of my planning for books 2 and 3 to go with Faerie Blood. My question for you all is this:

What communities around Seattle would you consider to be 'local', and generally part of the greater Seattle metropolitan area? How far do you have to go before you feel like you're in a completely different city?

Feel free to move in any direction you like on the map in relation to Seattle itself.

Comments

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Huh, boy, that depends on context. If I'm in Texas, I tell people I live in Seattle. If I'm here, I tell them I live in Renton. But maybe that's mostly a time-saver. :-)

If I were to define the Greater Seattle Metropolitan Area, I'd include the east side (Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland), south (Renton, Seatac, Kent, Tukwila), and north (Lynwood, Woodinville, Kenmore.) I would not include Tacoma, probably not Issaquah, Edmonds, Marysville. Nothing across the Sound that you take ferries to get to.

But I'm sure other people will say differently.

[annathepiper]

Local context is what I'm looking for here, so this is neat. Thanks! :)

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

Edmonds is south of Lynnwood, for what it's worth.

[annathepiper]

*laughs!* Or west until you're in the Sound. ;)

[annathepiper]

Yeah well, I'm still learning the fine art of What Not To Remark Upon to the Reader. ;)

[ceallaighgirl.livejournal.com]

Hippies in the south?

[ceallaighgirl.livejournal.com]

Oooh, THOSE hippies. I thought you meant South Seattle! :-)

[auntmonkey.livejournal.com]

Funny, I thought you meant Olympia.
:)

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

having once biked from the u-district to domi's old place at hundred-and-mumble-something southwest, i must say that it doesn't feel like the same city even within nominal city limits.

[annathepiper]

Domi! That's the person I was trying to remember when mamishka was on the MUSH yesterday talking about a potential job in Burien. And you're right, Burien doesn't feel like the same city as, say, the U-district at all.

Which is a very interesting nuance to consider for working out what I'm trying to settle here. Thanks!

[ceallaighgirl.livejournal.com]

I live just south of Burien, in Normandy Park (west of Sea-Tac), and even though it feels like a neighbourhood, it still feels like we're in Seattle, because downtown is still really close and easy to get to. The post service even considers us Seattle. I tend to just bunch most of King County into Seattle. Well, no, I do leave out Issaquah and all that east stuff. Maybe go north to the stuff around the north end of Lake Washington . . . . okay maybe most things along the western length of Lake Washington to slightly north and slightly south, and west to the Sound.

[annathepiper]

This helps! Thanks for chiming in. ^_^

[chamois-shimi.livejournal.com]

Ditto that- I grew up in Burien, but I always say "Seattle"... mostly because everyone knows where that is, but partly because well, it felt like part of Seattle, really. We spent a lot of time going to ballgames, going shopping, going to museums, catching the train, catching the ferry, going to the zoo, etc, etc ... in Seattle.

And, until Burien incorporated in ... er. 1993? 94? All mail was addressed to Seattle, WA, and it'll still get there fine if you write that instead of Burien. ;)

As for the rest of it, as a kid I tended to think of Seattle as being everything from water to water E-W, and from some vague northern boundary (we didn't spend much time up that direction, but I would say Edmonds-ish) all the way to Federal Way. Kids are like that. I thought "North Dakota" was my grandparents' farm when I was small. Didn't know any better. ;)

Geography got a lot more defined when I was older, though. Now I tend to make a distinction between "Seattle" and "Greater Seattle"... the former being bounded by water on E (Lake Washington), W (the Sound) and S (the Duwamish River, more or less), and everything south of oh, say, Lynnwood or something. Greater Seattle being that plus everything else- Redmond, Lynnwood, Rainier Beach, White Center, West Seattle, Renton, Southcenter, Kent, Burien, SeaTac, Tukwilla... I'm still much more familiar with the south end than the north end. Heh.

[annathepiper]

Hee about the farm!

And thanks for chiming in with your thoughts. The way this is going to take shape for both of my pertinent characters, I'm beginning to suspect that the older one's perceptions of That Which is Seattle is going to line up a lot more with Seattle proper, while the younger character is going to be thinking more in terms of Greater Seattle.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends. There's quite a different feel between Seattle-proper, and the Eastside 'burbs, and farther out... and even between neighborhoods. There's Fremont funk, Cap Hill kitsch, the kind of gonzo yeah sure you betcha of Ballard, Leschi hoity-toity, and the really-big-city urban feel of Central.

Renton and Kirkland and Bothell all have a definite downtown of their own, and a definite neighborhood feel more like a small town. Woodinville and Newcastle and Kenmore/Lake Forest Park are definitely more suburbia. Redmond is *both*. And Bellevue is more or less its own city, but doesn't really have an old-school downtown like Seattle does.

There's rather a strip-city down I-5 from Southcenter to Burien to Federal Way to Fife to Tacoma... but it changes slowly as you go so that it feels different by the time you're in Pierce County.

And then places like Duvall and Carnation and Monroe are definitely "somewhere else"... as is anyplace else in Snohomish, like Mountlake Terrace or Lynnwood (more suburbia, but Snohomish, with its own attitudes) and then places further north like the city of Snohomish or Everett are definitely Elsewhere.

[annathepiper]

Oh, I definitely get that different neighborhoods themselves are going to have different feels to them. And I get that that's also a very subjective perception. But it's that subjective perception I'm asking y'all to tell me about.

Basically, I'm looking for when you stop feeling like you're in a different neighborhood and start feeling like you're in a different city entirely. All this helps! Thanks for chiming in. :)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know, I know somebody that lives out that way that's complaining the same way.... :(

[annathepiper]

Hah! Sounds kind of like my and solarbird's reaction when we moved to Kenmore, and then suddenly a farmer's market showed up at Lake Forest Park Town Center last summer. :) Dara was all "ee, civilization is following us!"

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

I'd say Lynnwood feels different northerly- definitely somewhere south of Everett.
If it's significantly east of the Eastside, it's somewhere else- Kirkland/Redmond/Bellevue are Eastside, Monroe not so much so.
South of the airport is Somewhere Not Seattle, as is any place which requires ferry transport or driving around Somewhere Not Seattle to get to- Bremerton, Port Angeles, Port Townshend are right out.

YMMV, significantly

[annathepiper]

Varying mileage is okay! I'm very aware I'm asking for subjective perceptions here--the thing I'm trying to settle is in fact very much based on the subjective perceptions of the involved characters.

So I'm wanting to get a feel for the perceptions on this from actual people, as I think about what my characters are going to be feeling themselves. :) Thanks for chiming in!

[kent.livejournal.com]

Pretty much the city limits (http://pics.livejournal.com/kent_s/pic/0001zqke) (my knowledge of our southern border is pretty bad) is where I stop thinking of being in the city and know that I'm in the suburbs. But I'm a local. Everyone else just wishes they could be in Seattle but can't afford to live there/don't want to deal with the urban area/other reasons. They tell people they live in Seattle, but they don't.

[annathepiper]

Ah-ha! Thanks--whether the city limits contribute to your sense of whether you're in Seattle or not is very, very pertinent to my question. :)

[kent.livejournal.com]

I grew up here, and back when I was a kid, going to Bellevue was very much a trip to another city. And then after that I was mostly a bus rider for many years, so getting anywhere outside the city limits was a pretty big chore. So I'm very conscious of the boundaries of the city, and anything beyond that seems very not-Seattle. To me.

[annathepiper]

*nodnodnod*

The differences in perception between someone who's only been around for a couple of years and someone who's spent the last several decades here are very, very specifically going to come up in what I'm working out here. This ties in very nicely with that. :)

Re: brief funny story to relate to city limits...

[annathepiper]

Hee! That is funny. :)

[firni.livejournal.com]

Here, although I tell people from out state that I'm 'around Seattle' because nobody has a clue where Everett is.

p.s.

[firni.livejournal.com]

I feel like I'm in Seattle (and therefore start to twitch) anywhere from the Burien/Normandy Park area all the way up to around Northgate.

Re: p.s.

[annathepiper]

*snicker* If it's any consolation, there are parts of the city that make me twitch too. ;) But thanks, this is exactly the kind of input I'm looking for.

[annathepiper]

Gotcha!

[annathepiper]

One of the involved characters does not own a car, and is in fact much older than the other involved character, so her perceptions of "That Which is Seattle" are significantly different than the younger character. I'm pretty sure that the younger character does actually have a vehicle, although he never actually used it in book 1. I'll have to doublecheck if I wrote anything about that. :)

Thanks for chiming in!

[howlinhobbit.livejournal.com]

I was going to post a dashedly clever comment but I think arialscribe hit it pretty well.

HH

[howlinhobbit.livejournal.com]

errr... damn! I meant "aerialscribe" of course.

(sorry!)

[annathepiper]

No worries! (Stupid not able to edit LJ comments. Sigh. It catches me every so often, too!)

[annathepiper]

Heh, cool, thanks for backing him up regardless. It's a good point he made, and I will be keeping it in mind--both of the characters under consideration for this entire issue are sans cars, so it's very pertinent. :)

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Faerie Blood or don't really know what it's about, but I think an urban fantasy story about disaffected teenage faeries living in the suburbs would be really funny. Sort of suburban fantasy if you will.

[annathepiper]

*snicker!* It would!

[hank.livejournal.com]

Then there are the mini-neighborhoods that the other neighborhoods of Seattle don't think of or know about.

I live in White Center, aka Rat City. We have a central shopping district (right around 16th Ave SW and SW Roxbury), our own mall (the Westwood Village), and a colorful local history that is the subject of dispute (the sobriquet "Rat City" was hung on the area either because when a Hooverville formed down on the flats in the 30's the rats came up into the heights -OR- because the acronym for the barracks that were used in WWII for soldiers in transit to the Pacific Theater was that they were "Reserve Army Transit" barracks).

What White Center also has is a low-class reputation that has made it forever unfashionable. This is where the blue-collar workers who built the Boeing planes from the B-17 to the 767 used to live, and "downtown" White Center (which phrase is always said ironically) used to be a strip of bars, with the spicing of a single tattoo parlor and a Harley Davidson parts and accessories store.

These days, the place may be the most multi-cultural place in Seattle. Because the house prices haven't gone quite as crazy as the rest of the city, the houses are getting bought by a lot of immigrants, and other folks without a concern for whether the area is fashionable or not.

The central shopping area has Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and hispanic markets.

The one thing we do lack is the tight cohesion of, for example, Fremont or the U district, where you have this sense that you can walk from one side of the neighborhood to the other in half an hour. Being a suburb, White Center is spread out, and it doesn't have the nice walks that other neighborhoods in Seattle have.

[casirafics.livejournal.com]

Rule number one: no one in Seattle ever seems to want to cross the lake, which to Eastsiders can feel kind of offensive. (...as evidenced by more than one person leaving my city off the list of what counts as Seattle, which really kinda pisses me off. ;)

So if you want to be fair, the Eastside counts. If you want to be accurate, it probably doesn't. But be aware you're going to make those of us over here want to thwap you. ;)

[annathepiper]

*giggle* 'Accuracy' is entirely not the point--personal, subjective perception is. It's the personal, subjective perception going into a question of magic I'm trying to settle here. :)

Thanks for chiming in!

[casirafics.livejournal.com]

heh, yes. :)

Really, my first reaction when thinking about commutes in Seattle was "uh, anything in the ride-free zone....?" Clearly I've spent too much time on Metro. :)

[annathepiper]

*laughs!*

Which does actually fit in rather well with aerialscribe's remarks about how for someone without a car, That Which is Seattle is very different than for someone with a car. Which I must keep in mind, as both of the characters I'm thinking about for this issue are without cars!

[auntmonkey.livejournal.com]

Living in Kent, I feel pretty far from Seattle. I grew up just south of the Seattle city limits, by about 3 blocks, so maybe that colors my sense of "Seattle" a bit.

At the same time, though, I definitely feel part of the "Greater Seattle Area" here in Kent. I can take a train to King Street Station in less than 30 minutes. Depending on which bus I take, I can get to the heart of downtown Seattle (the "ride free" part of the bus lines - do they still do that?) in 1/2 - 1 hour. So I'm definitely not far outside of "Seattle Proper," but in my mind Kent is definitely *not* part of Seattle Proper.

Does that make any sense?

[annathepiper]

It certainly does, and thank you very much for chiming in! :)