People lucky enough to live here count their blessings

By DON CARTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Broadview is an almost hidden neighborhood. There have been no notorious crimes or big civic squabbles to put Broadview in the headlines, and the average Seattleite most likely confuses it with Broadmoor -- the gated golf course community near the Arboretum.

Commuters whizzing along Aurora Avenue see a big cemetery, a variety of car lots and retail complexes, and no hint of the wooded residential area to the west. Some Broadview residents discovered their neighborhood almost by accident.

Tiffany McVeety, who moved to Broadview eight months ago and is newly elected president of the Broadview Community Council, says she and her husband had been renting on Queen Anne and wanted to buy a home there or on Magnolia.

"It was really frustrating," she says. "There was an incredible price war, so you'd go to look at a home and find it was sold before you got there. One day we just took off driving north."

She and her husband saw a "for sale" sign directing them to turn west from Aurora on Northwest 125th Street, "and we found a home that we bought that evening," McVeety says.

"We were living on Capitol Hill, and had been looking for houses in the Ravenna and Wedgwood areas and weren't finding the style of '50s house we wanted," says Kathy Bischak, office manager for the E.B. Dunn Historic Garden Trust.

A Realtor suggested looking in the Broadview area, where Bischak says "the feeling of trees and woodlands" was the main attraction.

She spends an hour a day walking her dog around the neighborhood, and after five years in Broadview is convinced "that the people here are really wonderful. Every now and then I ask myself, 'Did God send us here?' "

"nice" is the word Broadview residents use most frequently to describe each other, and Broadview librarian Bob Hageman says he's convinced that the neighbors are, indeed, among the most mannerly in Seattle.

"Whenever the other librarians come to this library to work, they always tell me how surprised and pleased they are, that the people who use this library are so considerate and polite and nice," Hageman says.

"I suppose maybe it's because the people here are relatively successful in their lives. Maybe they're happy."

Hageman is quick to add that not all of Broadview's residents are comfortably prosperous. In a mobile home park and older motels along Aurora, many families are crammed into too-small dwelling units. "A lot of kids are here (at the library) because they say there are too many people at home," Hageman says.

At the new Bitter Lake Community Center, coordinator Jeff Skinner says he also sees teens who are literally squeezed out of their homes. "This community center is a second home for them."

But the teens who hang out in a recreation room there tend to be pretty well behaved, Skinner says.

"They police themselves," he points out. "They don't rat on each other, but if somebody's getting out of line, one of them will come out and say, 'You might want to look at what's happening in there.' "

Continued:

• Quiet life is a nice change from area's frolicking past
• Folks of all stripes call it home