Beacon Hill
Beacon Avenue is the street that runs north/south through the long narrow neighborhood of Beacon Hill. The northern part of the neighborhood overlooks downtown Seattle and the SoDo district. The neighborhood was named by financier M. Harwood Young, who hailed from Boston and named the area after one of the oldest and swankiest residential neighborhoods in his hometown.
However, unlike its namesake neighborhood, Beacon Hill in Seattle has never been a neighborhood of the upper class. Beacon Hill has long attracted immigrants during Seattle’s development and the ethnicity of the neighborhood is remarkably diverse today. Residents relish the diversity of the community and are united in community building activities such as tree plantings, building parks and putting on a local community festival.
The neighborhood is generally defined as being bordered by Interstate 90 on the north, Interstate 5 on the west, Rainier Avenue South and Martin Luther King Jr. Way South on the east and South Myrtle Street on the south.