Chimney service in Beacon Hill, Seattle

Much of the brick in this part of Seattle came from the hill. The context statement locates the Hill Brick Company on the eastern slope and the Lohse Brick Company's yard at the bottom of Forest Street. At the north end, the Jackson and Dearborn Street regrades of 1907 to 1910 cut through 125 acres, as deep as 85 feet in one spot, and a good number of houses had to be moved out of the way.

The streetcar had reached Lander Street by 1908 and kept running until buses replaced it in 1941. HistoryLink records the other anchors that shaped the hill: 235 acres bought by the city in 1898 for a reservoir and cemetery, two large reservoirs finished there in 1911, and a golf course begun in 1915 at what became Jefferson Park. Cleveland High School was completed in 1927 and the U.S. Marine Hospital opened at the north end in 1933.

Sanborn maps cited by the city show the northern blocks dotted with modest frame homes by 1904 and mostly filled in by 1916. Between McClellan Street and Jefferson Park, most single-family houses went up from 1910 to 1929. In 1918 the Skinner and Eddy shipyard put up 136 units for its workers during a wartime housing shortage. The 1940s filled much of the ridge south of Spokane Street, including Rainier Vista on the eastern flank with 481 units in 222 buildings, and from 1950 to 1962 the east slope gained houses that the city's survey describes as mostly ranch style.

Census estimates for 2020–2024 put 31.3% of the housing in ZIP area 98144, at the hill's north end, in buildings from 1939 or earlier, well above the 22.8% for Seattle overall. In ZIP area 98108, which covers more of the south, the share is 20.0% and the median year built is 1969. None of these sources describes the chimneys themselves, so we do not assume them. On a house from the first two waves we check for an unlined flue or open tile joints and for old lime mortar; on a wartime or postwar house, for fireplaces altered later and appliances connected to a flue sized for something else.

The Census Bureau's heating question records only the main fuel. In ZIP area 98144 about 55 of some 16,000 occupied homes heat mainly with wood; in ZIP area 98108 the estimate is zero. Utility gas runs at roughly a third of homes in both, and fuel oil at 2.2% and 4.8%. Those numbers do not count the fireplace used on cold evenings, and on Beacon Hill that is the fireplace we see most: lit now and then, often with small, slow fires that leave more deposit per log.

Occasional burners need to know the burn ban rules as well as anyone. Puget Sound Clean Air Agency's bans cover a four-county region that includes King County. Stage one shuts down open hearths and any wood stove or insert without an emissions certificate; at stage two, every wood or pellet appliance in the house has to stay cold, whether certified or not. Under the state's curtailment rule, smoke still visible from a chimney three hours after a ban is called can be treated as evidence of illegal burning.

Seattle has written two permit ceilings for this kind of work, and no source we have reconciles them. The city's chimney rule, numbered 5-2004 and in effect since the first of December that year, lets repairs under $4,000 go ahead without one, while the residential code Seattle adopted in its 2021 edition (section R105.2) does the same for minor repairs worth up to $6,000 per six months. When the brickwork to be replaced extends lower than where the smoke chamber begins, the whole stack must be rebuilt to today's standard under a permit, however modest the budget, and only the top 2 feet of an old unreinforced chimney may be rebuilt as it was. We describe the scope in writing and the permit question goes to SDCI.

The city's own survey of unreinforced masonry counts 6 such buildings in its Beacon Hill reporting area, 8 in North Beacon Hill and Jefferson Park, and 1 in South Beacon Hill and New Holly. That tally covers whole buildings whose bearing walls are unreinforced brick, not the chimneys of wood-frame houses. For a house, the rule that governs the stack is the one the city wrote after the 2001 earthquake, and it is the rule every repair quote of ours on the hill refers to.