Maybe it is testament to the area’s nightlife bonafides. Maybe it is a momentary glitch in massive scale tech. But for some reason, large stretches of Capitol Hill are being rendered in fuzzy, overexposed nighttime scenes in the Google Street View system.

It’s not an April Fools’ Day prank. The murky scenes appeared in December following an update to the neighborhood’s imagery. A Google spokesperson initially responded to our inquiry about the issue weeks ago but we haven’t heard back from her since.

In the December update, the system appears to be using a batch of photography shot at night — an unusual update for the popular Google feature. The result is a dark and fuzzy and sometimes unintentionally artful look at certain areas of Pike/Pine and the rest of the Hill.

Click to move through the streets and you will eventually be delivered to the relatively blinding brightness of November 2021’s grey skies or, more typically for the Google system, bright sunny June or July days past.

CHS is old enough that we actually reported on the arrival of the technology in the neighborhood as Google unveiled local street imagery for Capitol Hill in 2008. People automatically started finding interesting Capitol Hill scenes captured for posterity by a mostly automated mapping system.

Google says it collects Street View imagery by “driving, pedaling, sailing and walking around and capturing imagery with special cameras that simultaneously collect images in multiple directions.”  The images are overlapped and stitched together into a single 360-degree image by the mapping system. Meanwhile, the flow of vehicles photographing and mapping Seattle’s streets will never end with increasing demand for the data from a wave of autonomous vehicle and delivery systems.

As for Capitol Hill’s new nocturnal look in Street View, it might not be replaced any time soon.

With two recent waves of updated imagery in the area with a few months this winter, it is possible we won’t see brighter, crisper updates for Capitol Hill for another year or two given Google’s usual update schedule.

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