Wallingford, Birthplace of “The Stranger”

This week, The Stranger (aka “Seattle’s Only Newspaper”) is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its first issue. I moved to Seattle in 1992 and, like many Seattleites, I have had a love/hate relationship (mostly love) with the publication ever since. The Stranger is so closely identified with Capitol Hill, that it was much to my surprise to read in this week’s An Oral History of the First Year of The Stranger that the newspaper’s birthplace wasn’t on Broadway or Pine, but at 4039 Latona Avenue.

From 1991 to 1993, The Stranger operated somewhat surreptitiously out of an upstairs apartment in a Wallingford duplex. Many staffers both worked and lived there, surrounded by “nasty carpets and ugly walls”. Tim Keck, founder of the newspaper describes it as “a flophouse and a newspaper all in one.”

Until this week I hadn’t picked up a print edition of The Stranger in well over a year—I read it exclusively online now. But the 25th anniversary issue is a fascinating time capsule of what Seattle was like in the 1990s, and its evolution thereafter. Love it or hate it, The Stranger has been an integral and influential part of Seattle’s social and political landscape for the past 25 years. And it all started in a rat-infested flophouse in our very own Wallingford