Chimney service in Columbia City, Seattle

The district's National Register file traces a steady swap along the avenue: frame buildings of the 1890s were pulled down or hauled away so brick ones could go up. Credit for the town's first brick building goes to Joseph Hellenthal, a German-born mason who arrived in 1880. A two-story brick block went up at Rainier and Edmunds Street in 1903 and gained a third floor in 1914. Property owners paid for brick paving on the avenue starting in 1912, laid on five inches of concrete once the filled ground had been given two years to settle, and a newspaper annual of 1915 bragged that Columbia had more brick buildings than nearly any other Seattle suburb.

The Carnegie-funded Columbia Branch Library followed in 1914 and 1915 at the edge of the Columbia Green. In the 1920s a run of one-story brick storefronts replaced more of the early frame buildings, and in 1957 to 1959 one stretch was remade again, when three hilltop houses were torn down, the hill graded flat and three modern commercial buildings put up in their place.

Off the avenue the picture changes. Away from the storefronts, the Register nomination finds plain vernacular homes lining the cross streets and the Columbia Green, put up for the shopkeepers and laborers of the town, and it closes the district's period of significance in 1937, the year the streetcar stopped and its tracks came out. Roughly 80 percent of the buildings in the district were put up between 1891 to 1937. By 1920, a city survey of the north valley adds, houses for single families covered most of the area.

No public source we have read says what kind of chimney those houses carry, how many still have one, or how many were refitted. We do not guess from the street. What the age tells us is where to look: the flue lining, the mortar above the roofline, the crown that has seen a century of winters, and whatever an earlier owner changed.

The census reports housing by ZIP code, and 98118 lumps Columbia City together with five neighbors to the south and east. Its 20,459 homes have a median year built of 1968; the 2020 to 2024 survey puts 18.1 percent before 1940, then 8.0 percent in the forties, 13.8 in the fifties and 12.5 in the sixties. Detached houses make up 59.2 percent of the units, well above the 36.8 percent for Seattle as a whole.

Heating is mostly electric or piped gas. Wood is the primary fuel for roughly 29 households across the ZIP code. Because the census only records primary heat, a fireplace used on chilly weekends never appears in it, and that occasional use is what most of our calls here involve.

According to Seattle's emergency managers, the Seattle Fault crosses the city from east to west, and deep quakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater recur roughly every 30 to 50 years. Its page on unreinforced masonry names Columbia City among the neighborhoods where such buildings cluster, and the city's list validation report counts 27 of them in the Columbia City reporting area, 2 rated critical risk, 2 high and 23 medium, at addresses running along Rainier Avenue South as far as the 5600 block.

Those are commercial and civic buildings, not houses, and the city's voluntary retrofit standard of fall 2024 is aimed at them. For a homeowner the lesson is narrower: a chimney is the part of a wood-frame house most likely to suffer in strong shaking, so its condition above the roof is worth knowing before the next one.