September 7

Where IS Maple Leaf, anyway? Part 2

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This weekend’s high-speed police chase, which ended here in a crash, has sparked a revival of the debate: “Where is Maple Leaf?”

The crash occurred on Northeast 75th Street, between Eighth and Sixth avenues.

Michael wrote to say: “The 6oo block of NE 75th is not in Maple Leaf….I believe this location to actually be in the Roosevelt Neighborhood.”

David Miller, from the Maple Leaf Community Council, who should know, chimed in to say: “Maple Leaf’s southern border touches 75th, but the precise location of the incident is just outside Maple Leaf’s official boundaries. Doesn’t mean it isn’t newsworthy, though.”

Problem here is that neither Maple Leaf, nor any other Seattle neighborhood, has official boundaries. Miller is referring to the community council’s adopted map, which looks like this:

According to the council’s map, the crash apparently occurred on  the WRONG SIDE of 75th  street to be in Maple Leaf. Had it occurred on the north side, instead of the south side, of 75th, it would meet David’s definition (I think).

Maple Leaf’s southern boundary is particularly nebulous, and Roosevelt and Maple Leaf are easily, perhaps inevitably, conflated. A blogger in Roosevelt last month tackled this problem and concluded, according to the city’s (unofficial) neighborhood map, that Roosevelt runs all the way north to Northeast 85th Street. Which, as we pointed out a half-year ago, is just silly. It cuts the neighborhood off right in the middle of the Maple Leaf Reservoir.

Now our news partners The Seattle Times have come up with a new crime map, which really confuses things. When you try to check Maple Leaf’s crime on it you’ll not be pleased to learn we’ve had 13 robberies and nine assaults in the past few months. Which is also silly.

What you’re really getting is statistics for the Seattle Police Department’s N3 beat. Which tries to be a combination of Northgate and Maple Leaf, but actually bears little resemblance to our hood. It is split down the middle by Interstate 5 and mostly runs north-south between Northeast 130th and Northeast 90th streets.

Oh, and you’ll find this: “Neighborhood names are approximate and not assigned by Seattle Police.”

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Sara W

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  1. Speaking to Simon’s and Ben’s points, here’s what the Northgate Chamber thinks is Northgate:
    “Northgate includes Haller Lake, Licton Springs, Maple Leaf, Victory Heights, and the Pinehurst neighborhoods. Both a very busy Aurora Avenue and I-5 (with over 250,000 cars a day) pass through the heart of Northgate.”

  2. Simon, I believe a lot of those “neighborhood” names you’ve never heard of are actually names of schools. It really is rather arbitrary.

    Haller Lake, on the other hand, is a very real (if small) lake.

    I’d love to do the study you speak of myself, except door-to-door would never work… too many doors!

    But yes, the city should probably at least have a map of what local CCs consider to be their own neighborhoods.

    Of course, this is how “RNA” made it onto that Big Stick map…

  3. I live in Meadowbrook near the border with Wedgwood which is NE 95 th street. Realtors regularly sell houses on my block, NE 98th St, as being in Wedgwood because you can get more money for a Wedgwood address than you can a Meadowbrook address. Several of my new neighbors were shocked when they found out they were in the Meadowbrook neighborhood and that they were represented by the Meadowbrook community council. I call it false advertising although Meadowbrook is a lovely neighborhood also.

  4. This is indeed a hornet’s nest. Roosevelt CC and MLCC agreed on the dividing line some time ago, or so I’m told by the “elders” involved with our organization.

    The map I posted is in our bylaws and was voted by our members. That’s what we take as official. The only overlap I’m aware of is the NE corner where we, by agreement, have dual representation of some Victory Heights CC members. I’m also aware people north of our boundaries and more than a few E of us consider themselves in “Maple Leaf” as you can see by business names.

    The city maps are purposefully left vague and inaccurate. Council doesn’t want to take the issue of boundaries up because they see no political goodwill in it. The executive branch doesn’t want to take it up because they can just claim, “We didn’t know that was your neighborhood because we have no maps” to explain lack of outreach. One might think the CNC would take it up, but they are more concerned with district maps and (frankly) have their own problems.

    DoN (Dept. of Neighborhoods) doesn’t even maintain an accurate list of the community councils and their contact info. The last accurate list dates from the Diers era… take from that what you will.

    This is actually a non-trivial problem. I think DoN ought to have an accurate map bilt off what local CC’s think their own boundaries are, even if boundaries overlap (as MLCC’s NE line does with the Victory Creek CC). They should certainly have accurate contact information. A required part of departmental outreach should be to notify the local community council(s) of projects affecting their borders.

    With modern mapping capabilities, all of which the City already has, this should be a relatively easy task. My sense is DoN’s neighborhood service centers already have much of this information, it’s just the powers that be in City Hall and the Muni Bldg don’t particularly care to see it organized.

    (When I started on the MLCC years ago this was one of my pet peeves so I dug around to figure out why it was so… in case you’re wondering where all the above came from.)

  5. We should look at acquiring Roosevelt and becoming Maplevelt. Might only cost us a few draft picks…

    Seriously, how tasty does Maplevelt sound? Makes me think of Tim Horton’s Canadian Maple doughnut. Great, now I’m salivating.

    Before moving to ML, I lived in the grey area between Fremont and Wallingford (affectionately called Wallingmont). The landlord called it Wallingford, and the wall that is 99 to the west certainly didn’t help, but technically speaking, we were in Fremont. It felt so arbitrary and wrong (nothing against Fremont, of course) to be told you’re part of one neighborhood when most of your dealings were with people and businesses that felt closer, yet fell in another neighborhood. I think this might be one reason the city doesn’t strictly define the boundaries. Doing so gets you into something of a mild caste system: “Sure, you live right by us, but you’re on the other side of (arbitrary street) so you’re in Neighborhood X instead of Neighborhood Y. What a shame, because Y is such an awesome neighborhood, and our crime rates are lower. Maybe you should move to Y.”

  6. Another thing that’s interesting about the city’s archive-related neighborhood maps is that they distinguish between superneighborhoods and subneighborhoods.

    For instance, “Northgate” is a superneighborhood composed of the subneighborhoods of Maple Leaf, North Campus Park, Pinehurst, and Haller Lake. I personally have only ever heard of Maple Leaf, of those.

    Similarly, the city uses Ballard as a superneighborhood, which is composed of the subneighborhoods of Adams, Loyal Heights, West Woodland, Whittier Heights, and Sunset Hill. I’ve never heard anyone use those neighborhood designations.

    No resident of Seattle perceives the structure of the neighborhoods this way, so it’s fascinating that the city ever came up with this system in the first place.

  7. Since neighborhoods are unofficial, and interesting study for some college class would be to interview residents house by house and ask them, “What neighborhood would you say you live in?” It would be interesting to see these answers plotted on a map, particularly along the perceived boundaries. That might actually provide a fuzzy but useful “social” delineation of a neighborhood’s boundaries that in many was would be more valid than the one the MCCC has adopted (and way more valid than the city’s unofficial neighborhood maps, which are just for archiving purposes).

  8. Interesting that you didn’t quote the part of my comment where I said “not in Maple Leaf as defined here on your blog”. I used your definition of Maple Leaf to say the accident occurred outside of your own definition of the neighborhood.

  9. I see comments are closed on Part One, by the way, but must make a note about David Miller’s comment. He’s right about the importance of city government–neighborhood organization relations, but then writes this:

    “Interestingly, a private map maker (Linda Burlingame and MapScoop.com and BigStickInc.com) got the 2002 Maple Leaf boundaries right — and, it appears, most of the city’s neighborhood boundaries — in a map they published in 2002. If they could do it, you think the city could… Maybe Mayor McGinn could make it a priority.”

    Sorry, but that map is terrible. My customer review at http://www.amazon.com/Seattle-Neighborhood-Map-Inc-Stick/dp/1929687052 tells the sad tale, but here are some excerpts:

    “It simply does not reflect the reality of neighborhood divisions as they are understood by its residents…’Madison Valley’ is shown as extending all the way to the shore of Lake Washington…A neighborhood called ‘RNA’ is shown located south of Roosevelt, east of I-5, and west of the University District. No such neighborhood exists…The Central District encompasses a huge swath of central Seattle, [but] on this map, however, it is limited to a few square blocks.”

    I could have gone on.

    I have a project in mind to someday do a proper neighborhood map of the city. This one isn’t it, and the city shouldn’t take it as a model.

  10. I always think of Roosevelt turning into Maple Leaf at N.E. 75th. But you’re absolutely right — there are no “official” neighborhood boundaries in the city (with the exception, I suppose, of gated communities like Broadmoor).

    I’ve long been interested in this… in some cases, the dividing line is obvious (no neighborhood crosses the Ship Canal, for example); in others, such as Roosevelt/Maple Leaf, or Fremont/Ballard, it’s anything but.

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