Seattle's street designations make sense once you understand them but, if you don't understand them, you can end up many miles away from your destination.
North-South streets are labeled "Avenues" (or occasionally "Boulevards" and "Ways") while East-West streets are labeled "Streets". The city is roughly divided into a 3 by 3 grid with 7 directional sectors (E, SW, W, S, N, NE, & NW) Street addresses are written with the sector before the name, e.g. NE 45th Street or NE 45th. Avenue addresses are written with the sector after the name, e.g. 45th Avenue NE or 45th NE.
There are four major exceptions:
Downtown streets and avenues have no directional designation.
There is no SE section. Instead, the S section is extra wide.
East of downtown, avenues have no directional designation (streets are preceded by 'E').
North of downtown (between Denny Way and the ship canal), streets have no directional designation, but avenues are followed by 'N'.
The twelve streets in the central business district are named as six first-letter pairs (south to north): Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, Pine. One way to remember the order of the street pairs is with the mnemonic "Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest."
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Seattle
Where To Stay & Best Hotels in Seattle - updated May 2024
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Seattle Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
