What the Map Shows
Editor’s Note: Originally published December 21, 2016. Updated November 5, 2020.
“When I strut down the street I could feel its heartbeat.”
Colby, Hewitt, Pine, Marine View—street names we casually mention on the reg. But a closer look at the Everett map yields a narrative worth considering. Do the common words we use for our roads and neighborhoods contain nuggets of info about our city’s past and character?
Let’s take a closer look.
Nature City
Marine View Drive, Bayside Neighborhood, Pine Street, Summit Avenue: Everett is where poetry meets civic structure.
The streets on the east side of Broadway read like a lumberjack’s dream: Walnut, Chestnut, Larch, Poplar, Maple, Fir, Hemlock, and Cedar. Like so many towns in the PNW, the city that became Everett was once a densely wooded place, described by one early settler as having trees, “with their long strings of moss hanging from branches, which nearly shut out the sunlight" (Dilgard and Riddle).
Tree city. Clark Park in days of yore.
Many native trees still remain on the peninsula, filling residential skylines with towering cedars, broad leafed maples, and crooked blue spruces. There are also imported species brought in for eating (cherries, apples, pears, and plums) as well as ornamental varieties for looking at (monkey puzzle, palm, and flowering magnolias).
That’s to say Everett isn’t the worst place for an amateur arborist to live. For a wide variety of tree species, be sure to check out the Evergreen Arboretum in the summer.
The Wild West Coast
Streets like Pacific, California, and Grand hint at an expansive, go-west-young-man, wild frontier scene.
Indeed, early Everett was by all accounts a rough and tumble place full of big dreams, big drinking, and gambling a‘plenty—the sort of place where folks walked in muddy streets past a railroad built with Rockefeller money.
This larger-than-life ethos is reflected in the folk iconography of the American West: pioneers, gold miners, and lumberjacks—rugged types tough and crazy enough to move to the end of the continent and rough it.
Is this spirit of wild Everett still upon us? I invite you to find a nearby city that has more eccentric individualists. Or check out our dive bar scene on a Saturday night. Yes, Everett is still rough around the edges, but I see this as a civic strength and in keeping with the spirit of our forefathers. Damned if we aren’t ourselves.
Company Town
If you live on Hewitt, Colby, Rockefeller, Bond, Oakes, McDougall, or Hoyt your street was named for an East Coast investor looking to capitalize on abundant natural resources. These street names remind us that we are a city built by people intent on making money out of nothing, a little history lesson posted on the corner of your block.
Our city’s north-south/east-west grid system also testifies to the fact that city planners had a structured urban environment in mind from the get-go. We have since built ourselves up in our forefather’s image of an ideal city.
What the Map Shows
Put the above street names together and a pattern emerges.
A look at a street map reveals that we were a resource-rich area settled by investors in the hopes of capitalizing on the bounty of the Wild West. Our city offers views of the Baker and Rainier mountains, and we have a killer tree scene.
As far as the propaganda of urban nomenclature goes, Everett gets a ten out of ten.
So next time you’re at a party, go ahead and drop the fact that you live near where Summit meets Marine View.
Sounds like a mighty fine place to live, don’t it?
“Where The Grass Is Green And The Sea Is Blue And The Trees And Men Grow Tall and True! Out In The Great Northwest Where There Is Room For A Man To Be As Big And Important As He Feels It Is In Him To Be!” –recruitment pamphlet, 1800s.
Source: David Dilgard and Margaret Riddle, Shoreline Historical Survey Report (Everett: Shoreline Master Plan Committee for City of Everett, 1973)
Richard Porter is a writer and musician. He lives in North Everett and enjoys running on Marine View Drive, bicycling down tree-lined streets, and trying to coax vegetables out of his yard.
