Women block windows to keep peering neighbors out

They waged a fierce battle involving spotlights, construction paper and crude signs, but in the end roommates Sophie Parker and Karen Linebarger bowed to the realities of city living and tinted their windows, lengthened their blinds and stopped strolling around their apartment in underclothes.

But the lesson they learned is one that will resonate throughout Seattle, where the line between privacy and propriety can sometimes blur amid the increasing number of high-rise condos and apartments. You can have a room with a view, they learned, but it doesn't come without cost.

For Linebarger, 25, the lesson began in May when she moved into Parker's Queen Anne Avenue North apartment with views of the city and Elliott Bay. In the more than two years she had been renting the apartment, Parker had been blithely living her life and minding her own business with little concern for the broken blinds and the possible perspective they afforded her neighbors.

She was more interested in her own view of the city than theirs.

"I just figured most people were like me," said the 26-year-old former assistant to a federal appeals-court judge who's taking a break while considering her next career move. "If they saw someone undressing, they'd be like, 'Oh,' and look away."

But Linebarger immediately noticed otherwise.

Within days of moving into the second-story apartment set up on a hill, she saw a man using binoculars to watch her from an apartment across the small parking lot to the south.

She brushed it off initially, but it kept happening.

Then, the man began racing back and forth on his balcony, waving his arms and a flashlight at night.

It appeared he was trying to get her attention, she said.

"That went on for a solid week in June," said Linebarger, who works at a high-end specialty shop in Pacific Place. "Finally, I called the cops." Police wrote in a June 23 incident report that the peeping couple told them they could hardly help looking because "the girls" were always "putting on a show" and "walking around with no clothes on."

The officers told the spying neighbors — a couple the roommates estimated to be in their 60s — to put down the binoculars and told the two women to fix and close their blinds.

They told Parker and Linebarger that many people view an open window as an invitation to peer in and they said the onus to protect privacy is on the people who seek it.

"Their response was correct," said Seattle Police Department spokesman Sean Whitcomb, defending the officers' actions.

"The laws addressing voyeurism are intended for areas — such as a bedroom window inside a fenced backyard — that have a reasonable expectation of privacy," Whitcomb said. "There is no expectation of privacy in a window facing a public street," he said.

King County prosecutors said they do not recall filing charges in connection with any similar sort of case.

"We have to be able to prove sexual motivation," prosecutor spokesman Dan Donohoe said.

After the police suggestion failed to stop their neighbors from looking into their apartment, the roommates posted signs on their windows, including one that read: "Perverts Stop Watching Us!"

The spying neighbors then called police to report that the roommates were harassing them. Police returned to Parker and Linebarger's home once again to suggest removal of the hand-lettered banners.

Parker and Linebarger were outraged. "They made it sound like it was our fault, like we were doing something to entice them," Parker said. "So, it's fine for them to look at us, but we can't insult them."

"Come on, we wear boy shorts," she said in disgust. The boxer-style briefs, she said, "are the least sexy underwear in the world."

Repeated attempts to contact the neighboring couple were unsuccessful, but their landlord of five years defended them.

"Those girls have been prancing around up there harassing all of us," said Lila Anderson last week. "It's ridiculous. The rest of us just don't look anymore."

As density rises, some local developers are building with privacy in mind to prevent issues like this from arising.

According to Megan Hilfer of Parsons Public Relations, the design firm GGLO has incorporated "a series of opaque, multicolored panels to create an artful" privacy buffer in their renovation of the historic Cobb Building on Fourth Avenue.

Until last week, Parker and Linebarger were still fighting to protect what they saw as their right to privacy and a view.

In addition to the signs, they'd tried to stymie their neighbors by letting a friend shine a bright spotlight into the couple's windows and strategically placing pieces of construction paper on the lower third of their windows.

But those didn't work, and they were still sporadically catching the couple, both the man and woman, peering up at them. This week, they gave up and put tinted film on their windows and started drawing their longer blinds.

It's maddening and creepy, they said, to have to shutter the views and block the breezes to "keep sick people from looking," Parker said.

But that's the reality they're resigned to now.

"I guess it's that or wear clothes all the time," Parker said. "It's frustrating."

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com