At the end of the pedestrian bridge, just before the steps, turn and look south, toward the football stadium. All the flat lands that you can see — south past Lumen Field to Spokane Street and west to the Port...

The shoreline at this point was originally more than 200 feet inland. In about 1880, as more ships began coming to Elliott Bay to load lumber and coal for export, an island-like mound began to appear in the area where...

The Washington Street Boat Landing was built as the Naval Shore Station and opened for use on July 3, 1920. Built for use by small craft that carried sailors to shore from larger ships anchored in Elliott Bay and from...

When Seattle’s first settlers arrived in November 1851 and landed at what they named Alki Point, their first “jobs” were cutting trees. In less than a month, they cut and hauled 256 pilings of wood, each about 50 feet long....

As Seattle grew, port facilities stretched to the north, along the bluff, resting on pilings that elevated the buildings and piers above the beach. To make space for railroads, essential for the movement of natural resources like coal and lumber...

For a place that has only permanent structures on it for less than a century, this parcel of land has quite a story. Before the Great Fire of 1889, the Seattle Lumber and Commercial Company had a sawmill and lumber...

Western Avenue was once Seattle’s warehouse district. Much of the produce and other goods coming into the piers along Railroad Avenue (now Alaskan Way) from around Puget Sound passed through buildings like the Maritime Building on the northwest corner and...

Seattle has had a fireboat since the Snoqualmie was launched in 1891. In addition to fighting fires on vessels or piers that fire engines could not reach, the Seattle Fire Department also expected the new boat could, “with a proper...

One of the challenges of Seattle’s waterfront is the steep hill between the central business district and the shoreline. In the early years, horse-drawn wagons and people on foot used Western Avenue to climb the hill, but that required crossing...

Pier 58 served as the landing point for two significant ships that visited Seattle’s port. In 1896, the NYK Line’s Miike Maru inaugurated the first scheduled service between Asia and the United States from the pier. This trade relationship between...

As shipping and industry grew along the shoreline in the 1890s, it remained home to a small community on the slope below what would become Belltown. Maps of the waterfront from the 1890s show a small enclave of houses north...

Though the early waterfront-on-pilings served its purpose, maintenance of the pilings and the planking on top of them proved difficult. Parts of the trestles sometimes collapsed under the weight of traffic, especially as trucks with more powerful engines could carry...

The Port of Seattle was one of the first public port districts in Washington when it was formed by King County voters in 1911. The port districts had the power to levy property taxes to fund infrastructure development on the...

The Edgewater Hotel is the only hotel on a pier on the central waterfront. There have been vessels converted into temporary hotels and berthed at piers but no other permanent hotels. This is largely due to the fact that the...

Pier 69 has been home to a number of companies. The Roslyn Coal & Coke Company built the pier in 1900. Coal had been one of Seattle’s first industries. Sold from bunkers on the waterfront at Pike Street and later...

Union Oil of California, Unocal, opened a fuel depot at the northern end of the waterfront in 1910. Tanks on the uplands, extending inland to the far side of Elliott Avenue, held oil from California for oil-burning steamships serving the...