Brick apartment buildings and tudor style courtyards line the streets around Broadway, where MTV housed the cast of Real World Seattle.
What Capitol Hill looks like
is Capitol Hill's main commercial street, lined for blocks with brick buildings two to four storeys tall, shops and restaurants below and apartments in the floors above. The runs west from Broadway in the same pattern, storefronts under old brick facades with awnings out over the sidewalk and signs stacked above the doors.
Away from the two corridors, the side streets carry a mix of wood frame houses and brick apartment buildings. Several of the pre-Depression apartment blocks have tudor style stucco fronts with rounded turret stairways at the corner, a shape that repeats down more than one block on the hill.
occupies a former Ford truck service building at 1521 10th Avenue, its industrial sash windows and exposed timber trusses still intact behind the brick front. , three storeys of plain brick a few blocks north on Roy Street, dates from 1910 and holds fourteen units behind a street level entrance with no storefront.
At 11th Avenue and Pike Street, a rainbow crosswalk covers the intersection in front of the corridor's bars and clubs. Capitol Hill's streets drop steeply toward the freeway on the west side of the neighborhood, among the steepest grades in Seattle.
Shot in Capitol Hill
MTV's Real World Seattle crew lived inside the on 12th Avenue for the show's Bad Blood season, broadcast in 2016. Cameron Crowe's Singles used , a courtyard building at 19th Avenue East and Thomas Street, as the film's central apartment complex in 1992.
The Real World Seattle (Bad Blood), 2016
The Ballou Wright Building
The cast lived on the building's upper floor, an open plan space with heavy timber beams and fir floors above a ground floor storefront. A former walk-in safe on the lower level was fitted out as a bar for the season.
Courtyard apartment buildings with tudor and Spanish revival details went up across Los Feliz in the same years as Capitol Hill's Anhalt buildings, with the same turret stairways and stucco fronts around a central garden. Vermont Avenue still has several intact examples. Palm trees and flat rooflines in wider shots give Los Angeles away, so tighter courtyard frames hold the match best. Try searching tudor courtyard apartment building now.
Brick buildings with retail below and apartments above line Milwaukee Avenue the same way they line Broadway, most of them going up in the same two decades. Division Street has the same scale a block over. Chicago's greystones and rear alleys are different from Capitol Hill, so keep the frame on the storefront strip rather than the side streets. Try searching retail below apartments above now.
Castro in San Francisco, California
Steep cross streets and a rainbow crosswalk at the center of a bar and restaurant strip give the Castro a similar present day identity to the Pike-Pine corridor. Both climb a hill above a larger downtown. San Francisco's Victorian cornices and bay windows read differently on camera, so keep the storefronts and the crosswalk itself in frame rather than the buildings above. Try searching rainbow crosswalk on a hill now.
