Chimney service in Greenwood, Seattle

Before there were houses there was a burial ground. In 1891 David T. Denny set out the 40-acre Woodland Cemetery close to W 85th Street; it was renamed Greenwood Cemetery in 1903. HistoryLink sums up the area's beginnings as a bog and a graveyard.

The change to housing came in 1907, when former governor Henry McBride purchased the cemetery tract and subdivided it as the Greenwood Park Addition. Transit arrived almost at once: the Phinney Avenue streetcar reached the city limit at N 85th in 1909, and from 1910 the interurban railway bound north from Seattle ran along Greenwood Avenue. Greenwood Elementary School dates from the same moment, 1909.

For Greenwood, N 85th Street was a municipal border until 1954. In the city's commercial-district survey, two areas beyond 85th came in by annexation in 1950 and bigger annexations in 1953 and 1954 moved the boundary to 145th Street. Wikipedia adds a detail residents still notice: many residential streets north of 85th have no sidewalks, though people had expected them after annexation.

Commerce shifted in those years too. The same survey says the opening of Northgate in 1950 gradually drew trade away from older strips such as Aurora Avenue. Greenwood's own main street still has its 1920s buildings: Greenwood State Bank opened in 1925, the Masonic Lodge at N 79th Street dates from 1924, and brick and stone storefronts line the avenue from that period. For a chimney, the lesson of the line is simply not to assume. Age, builder and rules differed on either side, and we establish what a house has by examining it.

For 2020 to 2024, the federal census survey counts 28,631 housing units in ZIP area 98103. More than a third, 34.7%, were built in 1939 or earlier. For the whole of Seattle the share is 22.8%, and King County's is less than half of that again. Few units in the area date from the 1940s or 1950s, 3.2% and 5.9% respectively, and the median year built is 1970 because of the volume of recent construction.

These figures have limits we want to be plain about. They describe a ZIP area, not Greenwood. They exclude the part of the neighborhood north of 85th that lies in other ZIP areas. And the survey has no table for fireplaces or chimneys: it records each home's main heating fuel and nothing about what sits in the living room.

Four counties, King, Snohomish, Pierce and Kitsap, share one air agency, the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, and Greenwood answers to it when an air quality burn ban is declared. Its King County trigger is a forecast. The threshold for fine particles is 35 micrograms in a cubic meter of air, taken as a 24-hour mean, and a ban follows when the next 48 hours are expected to exceed it.

Stage 1 silences the wood fireplace; stoves and inserts without certification fall silent with it. Under Stage 2 the certified ones go quiet too, pellet stoves along with them. A home with an approved exemption may keep burning if it has no other adequate heat, and adequate has a definition: heat enough to keep lived-in rooms at 70°F, the reading taken a yard above floor level. Current status is on the agency's website and at 800-595-4341.