Naming Rights: Queen Anne
This is the latest in a series of posts examining the naming origins of our Seattle neighborhoods. Last week we hit up the University District and its previous designation of Brooklyn. Today it's up Queen Anne Hill, via the Counterbalance.
Queen Anne Hill, the tallest of Seattle's original seven hills, isn't named for the actual British queen, but rather the lavish style of architecture popularized during the1880s, long after her reign.
David Denny filed a claim on part of the hill, as well as Lake Union, and honeymooned with his bride, Louisa Boren, on a hillside meadow in 1853.
Early settlers referred to the hill as Eden Hill, Galer Hill or simply North Seattle. The area developed slowly until the the 1880s boom years. Fueled by timber, coal and real estate wealth, Seattle's nouveau riche began building houses reflecting their newfound wealth. The moniker we know today actually began as a mockery of sorts. As HistoryLink essay author David Wilma writes:
As residents built their homes up the south side of the hill, they followed an architectural style known as Queen Anne, imported from England. The Rev. Daniel Bagley (1818-1905) asked people in jest, if they were going to "Queen Anne Town?" The name stuck and by 1885 Queen Anne appeared in real estate ads. That same year, the city approved a wagon road between Temperance Avenue (Queen Anne Avenue) and Farm Street (Aurora), which became Mercer Street.
Electric streetcar lines finally reached the top of the hill in 1902 making it possible to develop the top of the hill, and businesses and upscale homes quickly followed. The hill's steep grade required some extra engineering to help get cars safely up to the top. Paul Dorpat and Walt Crowley's National Trust Guide for Seattle explains the system:
The solution was a pair of weighted counterbalance cars running in tunnels beneath the tracks. An ascending streetcar hooked itself to a cable linked to a counterbalanced poised at the top of the hill and then used its descending mass to help haul it up the hill. Similarly a descending streetcar pulled the underground counterbalance back up to the crest.
Photo via Queen Anne Historical Society, via UW Special Collections.
The system was a "curiosity" even back then, according to this Seattle PI article, and the tunnel still remains beneath the roadway. Actual counterbalance attendants would hook up the cars to the counterbalances. The Queen Anne Historical Society has an audio of a woman's memory of a car rushing down the hill without the weight of a counterbalance, an event, she says, that was the talk of Queen Anne High School for weeks after.
The cars were replaced with buses in 1940, but some longtime Seattle residents still refer to that steep stretch of Queen Anne Avenue as "the Counterbalance." Counterbalance Park, that odd little patch by the Metropolitan Market on Lower Queen Anne was named for this system.
