Originally published Saturday, November 1, 1997

By MARK HIGGINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Steep slopes in the area have always set the neighborhood apart from the rest of the city and slowed development. Fifty years after the Denny Party landed at Alki in November 1851, small farms and nurseries dotted the neighborhood.

By 1888, the wagons that ran up Yesler Way were replaced by electric streetcars, and that attracted builders and speculators.

From the earliest days, ethnic groups have gravitated to the Central Area. Jews settled along Yesler Way starting about 1890. Germans and Italians moved in to the south. By World War I, a thriving Japanese American community had settled in.

Blacks, too, came to work in Seattle's ship and rail yards. One of the city's earliest black entrepreneurs, William Grose, came from Washington, D.C., in 1859 and opened Our House Hotel, one of the city's finest.

Seattle's small black community doubled in size during World War II. Following the war, a second surge of blacks came into the Central Area. By 1960, six census tracts in the Central Area had black populations totaling at least 40 percent.

Charles McDade has witnessed the ebb and flow of events in the Central Area for many years. He's lived in the same house on 31st Avenue East since 1964. As a retiree, McDade spends his days puttering in his garden, where he grows garlic, onions, mustard, turnip and collard greens, celery, tomatoes, cucumbers and peas.

The worst problems in the Central Area have been licked by neighbors working together and communicating, McDade says. The fluctuations in race and gender have never been a problem.

"We are a diverse neighborhood," McDade says, "but we're able to work together because we know we all want to be here."