Where did Seattle’s mayor’s live? It’s a simple, honest question. But apparently no one has ever assembled the data together in one place.
It started when I was pulled into a Twitter conversation by my friend Ben:
The question: where did Seattle’s mayors live? There was once a discussion of purchasing a surplus admiral’s home on Magnolia for a ceremonial house, but Seattle has never had an official mayoral residence.
Immediately I knew how to answer the question: dig through the city directories on Ancestry.com to find each mayor at the time that they were elected. A few of hours of searching and indexing and learning the quirks of Google’s new Map Engine, and you get the following map:
(In 2024 I removed the embedded Google map, because it broke on other pages, and replaced with the above image. Here is a link to the browsable map on Google.)
Oh, and here’s the raw KML. Feel free to use it for whatever you like: Seattle_Mayoral_Residences . If you do something interesting with it, please drop me note.
EDIT 6/11/2015:
I have added five Mayoral residences through Norm Rice, who left office in 1998. The list originally ended with George Clinton in 1964. (I had it labeled 1963 for some reason.)
There are four mayors remaining before this is complete: Schell, Nickels, McGinn and Murray. I’ll take care of that sometime soon. (2024 update: I decided not to do more recent mayors for privacy reasons.)
Further reading:
- I wrote about Mayor Dore on a Capitol Hill Seattle Blog post.