Do any of us deserve a portion of the city as our own? We can bemoan the change our neighborhood has gone through in the past 10-15 years, but it's constantly been in flux. We'll see even more change when the Link station is up and running. Does anybody expect Capitol Hill to remain 'funky' when Whole Foods is opening up? And the plethora of restaurants with craft cocktails and small plates? The creative class that made Capitol Hopill have it's charm made it safe for everyone else to come in. Now that creative class has been priced out, but have you noticed how Georgetown is thriving? Capitol Hill will be fine, if a tad less colorful. Other areas of the city will become more creative, but alas, they too shall become trendy and hip.

Who knows, it might be time to invest in property in White Center.

Did Boston Market pass for a "trendy restaurant" in 1999? I honestly think it might have.

Beacon Hill. There are already quite a few gay-friendly bars: Baja Bistro has an official gay night on Wednesday but any time you go in there it is filled with the gays. Inay's hosts fabulous drag nights. The Tippe & Drague proudly flies a rainbow flag. There are already quite a lot of gays who have moved here in recent years. I assume many leaving Capital Hill and heading here for cheap rents. There are quite a lot of empty store fronts in the business district just waiting for creative gays to get ahold of them and turn them into something fabulous. The light rail on BH offers good access to downtown and the rest of the city and soon easy access to Capital Hill for when you want to return to be nostalgic.

The Stranger was bemoaning the Death of Capitol Hill well before it was cool!
=D

Can gays still bemoan the death of gay ghettos, or are too many straight people now bemoaning the death of gay ghettos?

The problem is Capitol Hill isn't dying Dan, it's already dead.

The real question is, do we really need a gay ghetto in Seattle any more?

When I first moved to Seattle in the 1980s, living in a gay ghetto was important to me. It helped me find community, become comfortable with my sexuality, and feel safe in an otherwise unwelcome world. But in 2015? If I was a young gay man in my 20s in Seattle today, I don't think I'd feel such a strong need for a safe gay enclave. Today I feel safe and at ease anywhere in the city.

Maybe if I lived in Texas or Louisiana or Georgia, I'd want to live in a gay ghetto. Those states still feel pretty unwelcome overall, outside of a few liberal neighborhoods. But it seems pretty unnecessary in Seattle.

@8 beat me to it.
I think this city has outgrown the need of a gayborhood. Why limit yourself to a single neighborhood when you can have the entire city?

The changes on Capitol Hill is what The Stranger had advocated for years, through its writing and political endorsements.

1999 - wow the year of Y2K. The Stranger had to have an article about that. What a big deal. In fact, along with reprinting something about Y2K, can Slog just become all old old articles? The news today is ironic, derivative, and seems like its meant for teenagers more and more.

*kisses*

Going up the country. I left living in the city, 34 years ago. Almost bought a property in Balmain, Sydney for $25,000..decided on the North Coast of NSWs instead. Hippy Land.
Sydney now, only the rich. My question, where does all this money come from?

Interesting. Living in San Francisco I don't know too much about Seattle's gay areas, but I have contemplated the place the Castro plays in gay life in San Francico. And while still a gay area for the most part, it has seen it's shifting from a place where gays partied to a place where families settle.

I know I don't go to the bars in the Castro any longer. These days they are populated by the very young, the very old, or the very meth addicted. That and the pretty prevalent racism, which has always been there but I would have hoped would have died down a bit over the past few decades but hasn't, make it a place I visit rarely.

But something else comes into play as well. In San Francisco when first Polk Street and then Castro street became gay centers gay people went there because it was the place to be safe in the city and be who you are openly. These days in San Francisco pretty much the whole city is a safe place for gay people. I run into gay people all over. We can eat out as a couple in virtually every restaurant in the city without being made to feel unwelcome. Every dentist, doctor, broker, plumber etc. is going to give you good service if you are gay or straight. They don't really care.

We don't have the same need for these gay neighborhoods any longer. They are still fun and novel, which is why I think they have hung on this long. But they are fading.

I remember a while ago, it was the Advocate I think or some other similar magazine, did a list of the "gayest" cities in the US and San Francisco didn't even make it to the top of the list. The criteria was things like how may gay Yoga studios, or gay bars, or gay specific stores, or gay accountants were advertised.

But I felt the opposite was true. San Francisco is the gayest city just because we don't have as many of those kinds of things. We don't need them because you can just be gay here, in general, in any neighborhood, and go to any dentist, or shop in any store, and go to any yoga class, and you will feel perfectly comfortable. Gay people and straight people integrate much more here.

I have to think that at some point in the not so distant future almost all gay neighborhoods are going to vanish except in a few places, and in those places it will be a sign of lingering hostility more than anything, forcing gay people to huddle for protection surrounded by the last vestiges of anti-gay territory.

16 years later, verily, it has come true. But no new gayborhood at all. I doubt there will be any new gayborhoods (geighborhoods?) for another 40 or 50 years at minimum.

Creating gayborhoods requires a population that is at least modestly educated AND very marginalized - and gay people just aren't marginalized the way they were 50 years ago; and probably make up one of the highest performing economic groupings you could come up with today.

So, brace for it folks: the next generation of cool kids will be... people who probably hate your yuppie guts and will actively not want you coming to their cool places.

And here I thought gay people had all the money.

Who the hell is buying those condos anyway?

I refer you to Robin Williams in "Moscow on the Hudson" as a Soviet emigre, feeling alienated in a new world and bemoaning the loss of his oppression, working at McDonald's: "Please, if you will just wait a McMinute..."

I agree with many of the comments here - in bastions of progressive thought and liberal mentality there simply isn't a need for gay neighborhoods. And combine that with a general gentrification of urban areas across the United States and you're going to have many of these traditionally gay hoods fading away with a mix of all people - which is the way it should be. Now as far as Seattle goes, you've got South Seattle, where many fear to tread due to the [GASP] prominence of people of color. South Beacon Hill, White Center and even Georgetown are the only areas in this city where one can live for a reasonable sum of money, actually afford to buy property and still be just a few minutes from downtown. 98118 - I hear it's the most diverse ZIP in the country. Check it out.

@12:

Mainland China, mostly.

The creative class gave capitol hill its charm?

What was so creative about the cliched, derivative identity for pretty much every ALT community in every city in the world? You read some Brit pop 'zines and copied what they were doing.

That's copying. Not creativity.

>> When out gay men and lesbians moved into rundown urban neighborhoods in the late '60s and early '70s, they rented apartments no one else wanted, started businesses on blocks where no one else thought businesses could thrive,

Oh bullshit. Seriously -- Capitol Hill was never that cheap. It was cheap compared to California -- but that is still true. But cheaper than Rainier Valley? When was that? When was there a time when someone in Rainier Valley said "I don't want to live in Capitol Hill -- no one wants to live there -- I think I'll live here, an area that is less convenient, farther away from downtown and has just a little bit more crime". Sorry, that never happened.

Oh, oh, I know what you mean. You mean well to do white folks didn't want to live there. Yeah, OK, I got you. Yes, well to do gay white people "discovered" Capitol Hill (and other parts of Seattle) before well to do straight people from other parts of the country did. Congratulations. Consider yourselves modern day Columbuses (except without the tyranny). But don't pretend that there was nothing there before, or that it had no character. It did. It just had a lot less people and thus was a lot cheaper (like all of Seattle).

@13 -- I have to think that at some point in the not so distant future almost all gay neighborhoods are going to vanish except in a few places, and in those places it will be a sign of lingering hostility more than anything, forcing gay people to huddle for protection surrounded by the last vestiges of anti-gay territory.

That sounds about right, and I think the same thing can be said for every ethnic or culturally distinctive area. If you think Capitol Hill has changed in the last 20 years (or last 40) check out Ballard. Almost all of the shops on Market used to be Scandinavian. Now there is maybe one or two. The International District is still mostly Asian, but a lot more Southeast Asian than Chinese, the way it used to be. Greater Lake City is becoming very African, but not enough to look like a "Little Italy" the way some cities look.

Overall, I would say this is a good thing. The more diverse the better. If an area is not diverse (an area like East Saint Louis, for example or the gay part of town) it could easily be a sign of what you mentioned -- oppression.

@15 Amazombies. Brogrammers. The kind of people who can afford a 3-4 times daily extra large starfucks sugar snack.

@8 Maybe it's different for gay males, but I'm a relatively newly out trans person (1 year) and I feel like living in Capitol Hill does have a positive effect on me being less anxious about acceptance and seeing rainbow flags in the windows of most of the businesses you frequent is quite welcoming. I definitely prefer living in a gayborhood than not.

@25 You know what's up. However much the mid-30s financially secure whitebread homosexual--what we might call the landed gayntree--might believe that the gayborhood is a worn-out novelty, there is still shame in its passing. Gayborhoods are needed community centers, if for no other reason than to be LGBT (especially T) is to be inherently isolated from most of the world around you. While in a community like Seattle it might be easy to come to the conclusion that gays can make it anywhere where people are liberal, aka anywhere where people shrug their shoulders at the whole "gay" thing, it's still a mistake. Statistically Seattle has a higher LGBT density but on the whole, LGBT people still make up quite the minority of people (usually it averages out to about 3 to 5% for the total population--people promoting the 10% number are being extremely generous, it's less than 1 in 10 people). It may be that the internet makes it easier to see that you aren't technically alone, but if you're looking for more community than a message board or a hookup app, there's really only one place to do that: a gayborhood.

The bottom line is that the LGBT population in Seattle helps to lend Seattle the color and character that other Seattleites piggyback on and boast about. That's fine, they can boast all they want so long as when push comes to shove they actually bother to keep that character alive, but as we're now seeing, that just isn't happening. Either the LGBT population is "fine wherever" (bullshit), or, more recently, they are suddenly the bullies for the blasphemous crime of wanting to keep their community together and alive in the face of powerful and aggressive development. You want to stay in your home? How entitled! You don't particularly care for the new breed of "Cap Hill" douchebag? What a backwards-thinking bully you are! Why, we should all be so lucky to get to witness the natural beauty that is the migration of bachelorette parties from gay bar to gay bar. How beautiful, to marvel at the natural instincts of the wild douche, who, without batting an eye, can unironically call people fags in a place specifically designed for gay men, all as he manages to miraculously ignore every sign that the girl he's hitting on is a lesbian. Truly inspiring.

Gentrification happens. It's natural, it's happened before, it's inevitable. Dan is right that people have been screaming bloody murder about Capitol Hill for decades; what we're seeing right now has been in the works for a while. But there's no rule saying that anyone has to like it. As for the gay community moving, it would indeed be a shame if it were to disperse nebulously and become more isolated from itself--a fatal development for a group which by nature needs communication with itself (it's in the very definition of same-sex attraction). Good luck to LGBT people searching for a new neighborhood where they can interact with one another.