On a relief map, Madrona slopes upward east of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, plateaus at 34th Avenue and then tumbles, stairstep mode, into Lake Washington. But outsiders identify my neighborhood by two tragedies: In 1985, the brutal murder of the Goldmark family shattered the calm of this quiet hill. And in 1994, a couple of years after Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, moved into a rhododendron-screened house here, the grunge singer committed suicide above his garage.

After Cobain’s death, grieving fans and the morbidly curious tracked police cars and photographers to his home. The wandering streets and rolling terrain turned the pilgrimage into something of a trek, but crowds and candles overcame geography.

For most visitors, however, my neighborhood demands a high tolerance for tipsily looping roads, abrupt cul-de-sacs and constantly changing street names. On the lakeward side of the hill, navigating by car is foolish at best and frustrating at worst, since not a single street actually plows straight down from crest to shore. Instead, at James, Columbia, Marion, Spring, Union and Pine, footpaths and staircases traverse the hill in pleasantly bucolic fashion, giving short, startling glimpses of the lake and the Cascades. The unprepossessing southern ends of 34th and 35th Avenues look out over a sheer dropoff into the Leschi ravines. The regulated gridwork of the western slope still slows wandering drivers with its unexpected views of the University District, standing like a toy city on the northern horizon. With little in the way of grand places, Madrona compensates with a remarkably intimate sense of public space.

Named for a waxy-leafed evergreen, the area was considered wild and jungly by turn-of-the-century Seattleites. Patches of the peeling-barked, red-berried madroño, or strawberry tree, still cling to its steeper slopes. But efficient salesmanship by lawyer Elbert Blaine and landowner Charles Denny (son of Seattle pioneer Arthur Denny) rapidly transformed the woodsy region into a residential neighborhood. At Madrona Drive and East Denny Way, a strategic corner on the East Union trolley line, the pair set up a realty office. As public display (epitomized by the proud mansions of First Hill) waned in favor of private seclusion, demand for property on the pristine fringes of town soared. Picnickers taking the trolley to and from Madrona Beach found the combination of pleasant lakefront, sweeping views and convenient realtor too attractive to resist.

Most of the boxy clapboard houses in the neighborhood date from this early 1900s building boom. Still, from wide waterfront to shadowy niche to flat hillcrest to sunny western slope, the architecture follows the terrain. Swank, gated enclaves hug the shore, while solid, view-embracing homes dot the top of the hill. In between flourishes a smorgasbord of popular Seattle styles: Craftsman bungalow, mock Tudor estate, Colonial Revival, postwar bungalow, minimalist modern, funky remodel, even ramshackle cottage.

Madrona is a place where the confusion of steep topography seems to have inspired a profusion of creativity. From the corner of one home carved out of a storefront on East Denny dangles a mobile of two metal fish with forks for fins and an old wading boot. Above a garage on 37th Avenue stands a white full-size fiberglass horse, casting its perpetually placid gaze across the street. Eclectic, but not obvious. The appeal of Madrona is usually discovered hiding in plain sight.

Following the pattern of Phinney Ridge and Queen Anne, the neighborhood business district stretches along the ridge of the hill, centering on 34th Avenue and East Union Street. Glance idly, and only the brightly painted restaurants and green awning of the grocery store spring to view. But the intersection’s unassuming, even nondescript storefronts and houses mask such diverse endeavors as a guitar-repair shop, a haberdasher, a caterer, even a branch of the California-based teaching school Pacific Oaks College. A liberal sprinkling of barbershops, art galleries and studios fill in the gaps. Even a former Exxon station, Madrona Auto, is now an art haven; the gravelled parking lot shimmers blue in the sunlight from thousands of pieces of tumbled glass, culled from a cleanout at Dale Chihuly’s Lake Union boathouse.

Amid all these private gifts to the neighborhood, one piece is actually a public donation. At 32nd and East Denny, on a green sign proclaiming, “MADRONA WELCOMES YOU,” is a parade of four dancing animals labeled “The Peaceable Kingdom.” The wolf, sheep, pig and panther are, in fact, based on a large statue located in front of the local library. Lounging amicably on a granite boulder, they are the neighborhood mascots.

The tiny library behind the statue originally housed Seattle Fire Station No. 12. When the firefighters rolled out and the books moved in, the library was named Station House. In 1985, at the age of 78, well-known Madrona resident and longtime library supporter Sally Goldmark passed away, and a suggestion was made to rename the library in her honor. The library board approved the idea, and today a large wooden sign out front identifies this as the Madrona-Sally Goldmark Library.

Just a few months after the change, however, the Goldmark name reappeared in the news. On Christmas Eve, 1985, an intruder entered the Madrona home of Sally Goldmark’s son Charles, his wife, Annie, and their two sons, Colin and Derek. Friends arriving for a holiday party found the family upstairs, badly beaten. None survived. After his arrest, David Rice confessed to a lawyer that he believed Charles was a Communist. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Tragically, the paranoid accusation was a garbled understanding of events in the Goldmark family from a generation earlier. In the 1950s, the Washington state version of the House Un-American Activities Committee levied charges of Communism against Charles’ father. State Representative John Goldmark, along with his wife, Sally, successfully sued the Canwell committee for libel.

As the library became a silent memorial to the Goldmarks, another piece of public land acquired an unintended elegiac use. The suicide of Kurt Cobain at his home on 39th Avenue East inspired conspiracy theories and transformed the thumbprint Viretta Park next door into a shrine. In the park, which is too steep for anything but a pause on a neighborhood walk, two benches attract graffiti, carvings and offerings. One day it was white roses, another an empty Corona bottle with a daisy stuck in its neck. One afternoon I found a slowly smoldering 4-foot-square piece of canvas, adorned with an image of the fallen idol himself. The day was too wet for the smoking portrait to consume itself any faster.

When the rain clears, this eastern side of Madrona usually glimpses a rainbow or two, especially at the end of the day, when the horizontal light of the setting sun breaks through the drizzle and drapes a six-color arch over the lake. With evening light illuminating cloud banks into roses and Bellevue buildings into torches, sunsets here occur only as reflections. But over on the western slope the sunset is in full blaze, with the long horizon of Capitol Hill truncating the towers of downtown, and a trinity of red-lit radio spires blinking slowly.