The Greatness that is North City

I admit a sense of being a traitor at the start of this post. I enjoy identifying myself with Seattle, and yet have felt quite let down by 'my city' as I've experienced living North of Northgate. The basis of this disappointment is nowhere more obvious than crossing NE 145th into one of Seattle's neighbors to the north, Shoreline.

Shoreline incorporated as a city in 1995, and has done some truly impressive work in the 13 years since. I'll give Seattle the benefit of the doubt here - Shoreline is a much smaller city and I dare say it has a higher level of per-capita tax funding than Seattle. Working with that assumption, I imagine it has more money for public works than Seattle does. There are also notions about what modern urban design includes, as well as laws regarding amenities on new construction.

Most of Shoreline has sidewalks. A significant portion of Shoreline's roads have painted and signed bike routes. This is something you can't say for the northern reaches of Seattle.

Another thing Shoreline has that's missing from Seattle north of 85th is a friendly urban corridor composed of interesting and useful shops. The area I speak of is Shoreline's east-side neighborhood called North City. North City has within a 7 block stretch from NE 173rd to NE 180th along 15th Ave. NE:

• a pretty good Safeway (not my favorite store) with a BECU service center (our bank)
  
• a post office (the one where we have to go for undeliverable items, by the way)
  
• a Walgreens drug store (handy if you're there anyway)
  
• a very good coffee shop, Hotwire Online Coffee
  
• a fine greasy-spoon diner with all-day breakfast, Leena's
  
• and several other useful places like a lumber store, a CB/electronics shop, and so on

The whole setup strikes me as a blue collar answer to Capitol Hill's Broadway, a place where you can get almost anything you would need of a practical nature, and a few frills to top it off. Shoreline has put a lot of money into making this strip feel the way I've described it: wide sidewalks, traffic calming measures like variable curbs, and tasteful lighting.

A mere five blocks to the west of this little gem is the Shoreline branch of the King County Library System. We've taken to using this one quite a bit because of its proximity to North City, and the fact that it's just posh as hell compared to either the Lake City or Northgate branches of the Seattle Public Libraries. They have an amazing kids area, iBook laptops you can check out and use in the library and a huge collection of everything.

The biggest thing that sends me north instead of south to Northgate is scale. North City is still about people and walking and more practical needs. Northgate is about playing the Dance o'Death with speeding cars, trying not to get hit at all the entrances and exits to the Mall, and absorbing the concrete and asphalt, bummer atmosphere that permeates the whole thing. While I think the Northgate Library and Northgate Community Center are excellent additions, they have the feeling of being tacked-on afterthoughts to the real reason anyone should be in the area: to play good little consumer at the Mall. For that reason, I'd rather ride a bus 50 blocks north than 15 blocks south. The ride might be longer, but I'd have to walk 10 times as far in Northgate to get to all the same things, and that's just not fun.

Getting there by bus: Both the Metro 347 and 348 will get you from 125th & 15th to 175th & 15th, though the 348 gets there a little quicker. In the afternoons during commuter hours, you can also take the 77.