The West Edge: a neighborhood name without one

Entertaining story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer this week about neighb names and the real estate hype behind them. They'd have you believe that Fifth and Virginia is now "Midtown," as in Manhattan. New York Alki, indeed. I worked for years in the "West Edge." I think that's a particularly pathetic effort to invent an image. Despite the signs, banners, and murals, it's never caught on. Just like Mayor Charles Royer's signs declaring that Seattle is a "Kid's Place" didn't make it so. (Now good schools, that might have helped ...) The odd thing about the West Edge is that the area already had good names. The First Avenue stretch was called Skid Road – who wouldn't want a multimillion dollar condo in a place with a name of such a yeasty, urban significance? Just downhill from that, on Western's furniture row, was the Commission District, the area where all the wholesale grocers ripped off farmers and sparked the rebellion that created the Pike Place Market a century ago. That would be an appropriate name today, memorializing Seattle's real estate agents. Not sure why it hasn't caught on.