Seattle. The neighborhood I checked out that is completely different from mine is Beacon Hill. Though I lived there for six months previously, it was only temporary and my memory of the FEEL of the place had faded. I found, while driving through there at night, that I had a quiet longing to be in this quietly diverse neighborhood, removed just enough from the city core to be an entirely unique locale. My friend who lives there told me there is no Starbucks anywhere on this hill. We both hoorahed for the preservation of grass roots in spite of seemingly inevitable gentrification in the form of change there. She is a white woman who moved there fourteen years ago. For the first seven years that she lived there , she had severe problems with the neighbors around her - copious cars blocking her driveway and overflowing trash getting into her yard being among the top complaints. For her the process of healing this rift meant finding out about them, realizing their faults were not as big as they could be in the scheme of things- no drug dealing or that kind of thing. She eventually learned so much about them that she loved them and now she says she has learned to be a good neighbor.
Anyway, I really like Beacon Hill. It's the most diverse zip code in the country, has big lawns and trees, simple but aesthetic houses, quietness. What's not to like?
By contrast, Pioneer Square, my primary home for the last twelve years, is occasionally preciously quiet, often sprinkled with strange yelling people, regularly frequented by buses, trains, trucks and cruisers, people not aware that people living here letting loose like regularly when they would rarely if ever do so in a neighborhood like Beacon Hill. Great coffee, art all around, up and down, mixed in with bus travelers, houseless roamers, Mission residents, recent jailbird releases, small plots of plastic-fenced plants around sacred, sparse trees, mostly concrete all around. Hugest neighbor is state-of-the-art Fire Station.
