Two water towers rise over a stretch of open lawn at the corner of 35th Avenue SW and SW Myrtle Street. Most days there's a dog walker circling the path, a couple of kids on the playground, someone parked at the round viewpoint just taking in the skyline. The ground here sits 520 feet above sea level, which happens to be the same distance separating the sidewalk from the observation deck of the Space Needle. Stand at that water tank and, as the Seattle Times once put it, you are "literally on top of Seattle."
Every Gatewood guide, real estate blog, and neighborhood roundup repeats a version of the same claim: this is Gatewood's high ground, the reason the neighborhood sits above the fog while the rest of West Seattle looks up. It's a good story. It's also not quite where the map draws the line.
The Neighborhood Named for the Record
Myrtle Reservoir Park didn't earn its 520-foot bragging rights by accident, and neither did the neighborhood next to it. Officially, the ground beneath those water towers belongs to High Point, the neighborhood directly northeast of Gatewood. It's named High Point for exactly this reason: it's the neighborhood that contains the actual highest point in the city of Seattle.
That single fact undercuts a lot of casual branding. One popular Gatewood real estate guide places Myrtle Reservoir Park at the neighborhood's "eastern border," not squarely inside it, which is a polite way of saying the line runs close enough to matter. The neighborhood that carries the name High Point is the one that holds the record, which leaves Gatewood's "highest hill" language closer to local shorthand than to a surveyed boundary.
The record itself isn't in dispute. Where you're standing when you claim it is.
Seven Hills, One Number That Wins
Seattle keeps an informal tally of its named hills, and the park's concrete seating actually functions as an interpretive display listing them out, ring by ring, like a low, blocky sundial built for reading elevation instead of time. Here's how the hills stack up, in feet above sea level:
- Denny Hill: 143 feet, down from 212 before the early-1900s regrade
- Beacon Hill: 364 feet
- First Hill: 367 feet
- Magnolia Hill: 392 feet
- Capitol Hill: 464 feet
- Queen Anne Hill: 470 feet
- West Seattle Hill: 520 feet
Every other hill in the city tops out somewhere in the 300s or 400s. West Seattle Hill clears them by 50 feet or more, and the summit of that hill sits under the water towers at 35th and Myrtle, inside High Point's boundary. A few older surveys put the number a foot or two lower, since the city's benchmark sits slightly below the federal geodetic standard, but every measurement agrees on the same hill.
Two Water Towers and a Housing Story
The towers aren't decoration. They sit over the Southwest Myrtle Street Reservoir, which the city lidded, or covered over, in 2010 and topped with the park and playground that's there today. The blocks around it carry their own history: the area was originally built in 1942 as housing for World War II defense workers, and it's undergone redevelopment more recently under the Seattle Housing Authority and local community groups. Longtime residents wayfind by more than the towers alone, using Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church on the adjacent corner and a row of parked semitruck cabs along the slope as informal landmarks of their own.
That history is part of why "High Point" reads as an official place name on city maps, not a description Gatewood adopted for its own hill. None of it changes what the park offers day to day. It's tagged on review sites as an off-leash-friendly, dog-walking loop, and it's one of the few spots in West Seattle where you get a clear skyline view without a power line cutting across it, a detail one hiker specifically noted as rare after making the climb. It's just not, technically, Gatewood's.
What's Actually Gatewood, a Few Blocks Down
Gatewood's real claim to distinct green space sits closer to sea level, at Orchard Street Ravine, a 2.2-acre site tucked between 38th Avenue SW and Orchard Street. City vegetation surveys describe it as a madrone-Douglas fir forest, a forest type that's genuinely rare inside city limits. Out of roughly 2,700 acres of forest across all of Seattle, only about 52 acres carry that same composition, according to the city's own vegetation management plan for the site. Add the blackberry thickets that take over the flatter, sunnier stretches by late summer, and the ravine is one of the few places in West Seattle where the terrain itself, not just the view, sets the block apart.
The two spots connect on foot. A walking route documented by the pedestrian advocacy group Feet First runs from Lincoln Park up through Orchard Street Ravine and finishes at the reservoir. The ravine climbs about 32 feet to reach 452 feet of elevation, and the final stretch from there to the water towers adds another 68 feet to hit the full 520. That last leg crosses out of Gatewood and into High Point before you reach the top, which is a fairly literal way of confirming where the boundary actually falls.
The Stops After the Climb
Gatewood doesn't have a business strip of its own, so the payoff for that walk tends to happen a few blocks away, on the streets bordering the neighborhood. Cafe Ostia is the coffee stop people point newcomers toward. Westy's Sports Bar and Spirits covers the game-on-Sunday crowd, with pub food that leans on a few unexpected twists. Locol Barley & Vine keeps a rotating calendar of live music in a room small enough to still feel like a neighborhood spot rather than a venue. And for out-of-town guests who want to stay close to the water towers overnight, Gatewood Bed and Breakfast sits surrounded by garden beds that do a good job of making the block feel quieter than its elevation suggests.
None of that requires settling the boundary argument first. But the next time someone insists Gatewood owns the highest point in the city, the answer has an address attached to it: 35th Avenue SW and SW Myrtle Street, officially inside High Point, a short walk from Orchard Street Ravine, and worth the climb regardless of which side of the line it falls on.
If you've made that walk yourself, from Lincoln Park through the ravine to the water towers, and have an opinion on where Gatewood actually ends, Kelly Zuger would like to hear it. Let's Connect.