Capitol Hill, Seattle

Capitol Hill has a reputation as a bastion of musical culture in Seattle and is the neighborhood most closely associated with the grunge scene from the early 1990s, although most of the best-known music venues of that era were actually located slightly outside the neighborhood. The music scene has transformed since those days and now a variety of genres (electronica, rock, punk, folk, salsa, hip hop and trance) are represented.

The neighborhood figures prominently in nightlife and entertainment, with many bars hosting live music and with numerous fringe theatres. Most of the Hill's major thoroughfares are dotted with coffeehouses, taverns and bars, and residences cover the gamut from modest motel-like studio apartment buildings to some of the city's most historic mansions, with the two types sometimes shoulder-to-shoulder.

Capitol Hill is also home to two of the city's best-known movie theaters, both of which are part of the Landmark Theatres chain. Both theaters are architectural conversions of private meeting halls: the Harvard Exit (now closed permanently) in the former home of the Woman's Century Club (converted in the early 1970s) and the Egyptian Theatre, in a former Masonic lodge (converted in the mid-1980s). There is also Seattle's only cinematheque, the Northwest Film Forum, which in addition to screening films, teaches classes on filmmaking and produces film alongside Seattle's burgeoning filmmaking community. These theaters respectively host showings for the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) and the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival every year. The Broadway Performance Hall, located on the campus of Seattle Central College (SCC), also hosts a variety of lectures, performances, and films. The cast of MTV's Real World Seattle: Bad Blood lived in and were filmed in Capitol Hill during 2016.

Since 1997, Capitol Hill has hosted the Capitol Hill Block Party annually in late July, an outdoor music festival that occurs on Pike Street between Broadway and 12th Ave and Union and Pine Street.

Besides the large Seattle-based chains—Starbucks, Seattle's Best Coffee (now owned by Starbucks), and Tully's Coffee—Capitol Hill has been home to some of the city's most prominent locally owned coffeehouses. David Schomer's Espresso Vivace on Broadway is credited as the birthplace of artisanal coffee culture and latte art in Seattle and the United States as a whole.[13] The neighborhood is also considered a test market for coffeehouses by Starbucks Corporation, which placed two stealth Starbucks stores on Capitol Hill in 2009 and 2011 that were later closed by 2019.[14]

One of Capitol Hill's eleven rainbow crosswalks, pictured at Broadway and Pine Street

A bourgeoning counterculture community on Capitol Hill in the mid-20th century became a magnet for LGBTQ people seeking community acceptance at a time when the city's earlier gay capital in Downtown Seattle's (notoriously rowdy) Pioneer Square was in decline.[15] As a result, large-scale gay residential settlement of Capitol Hill began in the early 1960s, and the district continues to be home to a sizable number of LGBTQ people, making Capitol Hill Seattle's "gayborhood".[16]

The roots of the LGBTQ community on Capitol Hill can be traced to a change in the demographics and culture of the city as a whole in the 1950s and 1960s. LGBTQ Seattleites had long congregated in Pioneer Square, often interchangeably termed "Skid Road," and had built up a community in establishments such as the Double Header, the Casino, and the Garden of Allah (just north of the neighborhood). When the neighborhood, which houses many notable works of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, was targeted for urban renewal (and perhaps even prior), the Seattle Police Department engaged in extortion, allowing illegal homosexual practices and cross-dressing to continue only in bars which paid them off. The payoffs did not always guarantee security, and in 1966, citing alarm over the city's widespread image as a bastion of gay culture and tolerance, SPD planned a major house-cleaning of the gay bars in Pioneer Square. The gay community then began to migrate out of Downtown Seattle.[17][18]

The rise of American counterculture on the west coast took place during the same period. Although the University District, home to sites such as the Ave, the University of Washington, Parrington Lawn or "Hippie Hill", the Last Exit On Brooklyn coffeehouse, and the Blue Moon Tavern, was the primary hub of 1960s counterculture in Seattle, Capitol Hill also experienced a very noticeable influx of artistic and bohemian life. Largely driven by low rent from "white flight" in the steadily disappearing "auto row" of Capitol Hill's Pike-Pine Corridor neighborhood, LGBTQ Seattleites began to build the foundations of a community of their own deep in the structure of this evolving neighborhood.[19]

After the Elite Tavern, the first gay bar on Broadway, opened in the 1950s, the LGBTQ community on the Hill began to grow parallel to its decline in Pioneer Square. By the late 1960s, Capitol Hill was primed to become the local home base of the gay liberation movement and community throughout the decade following the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York City.[17]

Capitol Hill was the birthplace of many notable LGBTQ organizations during the first 25 years of the gay rights movement. In July 1969, only a few days after the Stonewall riots, the Dorian Society opened Dorian House in Capitol Hill's Hilltop neighborhood, a locale which soon became an important hub of LGBTQ youth outreach. Now called Seattle Counseling Service, it was the first mental health organization in the United States specializing in affirming treatment of ostracized LGBTQ youth. In 1974, the Gay Community Center opened in the Hilltop area. In 1991, Lambert House LGBTQ youth community center, also in the Hilltop, opened its doors and became a model organization for queer youth outreach. After moving from Downtown in 1982, Seattle's official gay pride parades took place on Capitol Hill for several decades, and the annual festival continues to hold block parties on the Hill.[19] In the 1980s, the Northwest AIDS Foundation, the Chicken Soup Brigade, and the Evergreen Health Advocates formed to combat the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic, and eventually merged to become the Lifelong AIDS Alliance.[20]

The gay and bisexual male community on Capitol Hill was the epicenter of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the region.[16] In addition to the organizations that would become Lifelong, more services were created to serve the growing health needs of the gay community in the 1990s, including Pike-Pine's Gay City Health Project, formed in 1995.[21] Among the deceased in 1995 was Washington's first openly-gay legislator, Cal Anderson, who was the state legislative representative for Capitol Hill and the University District. In remembrance of Anderson's legacy, Lincoln Reservoir Park, the main Olmstedian centerpiece to the urban landscape of the Broadway, Pike-Pine, and Hilltop neighborhoods which form the core of Capitol Hill's LGBTQ community, was renamed in his honor.[19] In 2020, the plaza atop Capitol Hill light rail station adjacent to Cal Anderson Park became home to the AIDS Memorial Pathway, a permanent outdoor public art gallery commemorating victims of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.[22] In 2019, the block of E Denny Way at the light rail station that connects Broadway to Cal Anderson Park was renamed E Barbara Bailey Way, after a notable small business owner and LGBTQ rights activist.[23]

During Pride week of 2015, eleven permanent rainbow crosswalks were painted in the Capitol Hill portion of the Pike-Pine corridor.[24]

In 1993, the oldest gay bar on Broadway, the Elite Tavern, was bombed by neo-Nazis.[19] Capitol Hill has become the target of an increasing number of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in the early 21st century.[25]