Lower Queen Anne, Seattle, Washington
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lower Queen Anne is a neighborhood in Seattle, Washington, at the base of Queen Anne Hill. While its boundaries are not precise, the toponym usually refers to the shopping, office, and residential districts to the north and west of Seattle Center. The districts to the west of the Center are also known as Uptown. The neighborhood is connected to Upper Queen Anne--the shopping district at the top of the hill--by an extremely steep section of Queen Anne Avenue N. known as the Counterbalance, in memory of the cable cars that once ran up and down it.
While "Lower Queen Anne" and "Uptown" are rarely used to refer to the grounds of Seattle Center itself, many of Seattle Center's leading attractions abut the neighborhood; these include KeyArena (home of the Seattle Supersonics, Seattle Storm, and Seattle Thunderbirds sports teams), the Exhibition Hall, McCaw Hall (home of the Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet), the Intiman Playhouse (home of the Intiman theater company), and the Bagley Wright Theater (home of Seattle Repertory Theater), as well as the Mercer Arena.
Lower Queen Anne also has a three-screen movie theater, the Uptown, and On the Boards, a center for avant-garde theater and music.
Largely because of its proximity to Seattle Center, Lower Queen Anne is home to some 100 restaurants, bars, and fast-food locations. It is also home to numerous small-to-medium-sized high-tech companies, several of them with major investments from Paul Allen. It was the home of Quicksoft, the first company to score commercial success with shareware.
