I've always been very impressed with Seattle's relative rigor when it comes to the grid. True, the grid has one very strange aspect that's hard for newcomers t

I've always been very impressed with Seattle's relative rigor when it comes to the grid. True, the grid has one very strange aspect that's hard for newcomers to understand: it's actually nine separate grids[1], eight of which have directional qualifiers (NW, N, NE, etc) with the unqualified one covering downtown as the origin of the whole system. But most of the city and surrounding areas are pretty well committed to this grid, to the point that entire other cities are built off this "downtown seattle is the grid origin" concept (e.g. the city of Shoreline to the north starts at 145th and goes up from there). And further to the north, there's a repeat of this grid system centered on the city of Everett and extending into its surrounding cities. One other aspect I find fascinating about Seattle's system is that there's some redundancy built into the address specification: whether the street is oriented north-south or east-west is not only indicated by whether it's an Ave (N-S) or a Street (E-W), but whether the grid qualifier is specified as a prefix or a suffix. So when you find a partial address on some album art [2], for example, you can deduce that "4718 38NE" is talking about 4718 38th Ave NE and not 4718 NE 38th St. [1] theoretically nine grids, anyway. As an example, I'm not sure if there's actually an "E" grid. The central grid goes all the way to the water on the east, and when continued on the other side of the lake in Bellevue, the NE and SE grids touch each other. [2] https://musicbrainz.org/release/36fab830-fc17-48d7-9d7e-194f5f162847 https://musicbrainz.org/release/36fab830-fc17-48d7-9d7e-194f...