Beacon Hill is a hill and neighborhood in southeast Seattle, Washington. The municipal government subdivides it into North Beacon Hill, Mid-Beacon Hill, Holly Park, and South Beacon Hill , though most people who live there describe their neighborhood as simply "Beacon Hill." Home to the world headquarters of Amazon.com and the Seattle Division of the Department of Veterans Affairs' Puget Sound Health Care System, the hill offers views of downtown, the Industrial District, Elliott Bay, First Hill, Rainier Valley, and, when the weather is good, Mount Rainier. It is bounded on the west by Interstate 5, on the north by Interstate 90, on the east by Rainier Avenue S., Cheasty Boulevard S., and Martin Luther King Jr. Way S., and on the south by the city limits. Homes in the northern part of the hill were mostly built in the early 1900s, and so North Beacon Hill contains many excellent examples of Craftsman bungalows and "Seattle box houses" (a local variant of the Foursquare style).
The hill was originally named Holgate and Hanford Hill after two early settlers, John Holgate and Edward Hanford, who settled in the area in the 1850s and are commemorated to this day by South Holgate and Hanford Streets on North Beacon Hill. A later arrival, M. Harwood Young, named the hill after the Beacon Hill in his hometown, Boston, Massachusetts.
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