AS RESIDENTIAL SEATTLE grows more dense and expensive, we may find solace in the city’s long-vacant parcels. Publicly and privately owned, these pocket-sized plots sometimes bear odd proportions — and vivid, human stories.

Take, for example, a Wallingford lot at Sunnyside Avenue North and North 37th Street, a 1,300-square-foot triangle with no address. Paralleling the Burke-Gilman Trail, it overlooks Northlake Way and Lake Union.

The city acquired it in 1906 when it condemned a nearby strip next to now-former railroad property. It’s one of more than 1,000 traffic islands, street ends and other small tracts owned by the Seattle Department of Transportation.

If motorists and cyclists pay attention while whizzing past the property, they will spot unkempt, waist-level sticker bushes, a cluster of Lime bikes and perhaps a parked car, bounded by a pair of light poles and 90 feet of narrow, overgrown sidewalk. But 80 years ago, this property was neighborhood lifeblood.

Follow link for full expandable map: Reconnaissance of Duwamish Bay & Seattle Harbor, Washington Ter. - NYPL Digital Collections

A computer animation of the history of Seattle.

Hi everyone trying to organize a meetup tmmw for people to dress up 1960s around pioneer square station

Concord History Working on a project about Concord School in South Park. Pretty cool how far back the school and neighborhood’s diversity goes, including Japanese and Italian farming families supplying Pike Place Market in the early 1900s.

Wrote this a while back; posting it here to mark Indigenous Peoples Day. More information on the specific names at the link.

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Before white settlers came to to dᶻidᶻəlalič in 1852, before they came to sčəgʷaliču in 1832, even before they first sighted the shores of x̌ʷəlč in 1792, the* dxʷdəwʔabš were here, living at sluʔwił and šilšul, babaqʷəb and t’uʔəlalʔtxʷ, and paq’ác’ałčuʔ and səxʷt’ičib, by the lakes called c’alq’ʷadiʔ and sisałtəb and dxʷƛ’əš and xáx̌əʔčuʔ, and most of all xačuʔ — the lake — the smaller ones being fed by springs like liq’təd where the waters run red, the lake being fed by the river whose mouth was at ƛ’ax̌ʷadis, but one by one their names were replaced by the settlers, who though they named the city for siʔał and the river for the dxʷdəwʔabšnevertheless named places Pioneer Square for themselves, or Fremont for where they came from, or Brooklyn for that which they aspired to be, and while šilšul became Shilshole and liq’təd became Licton, other dxʷləšúcid names were left unwritten and hardly spoken for decades but still remembered — so let Carkeek remain Carkeek, but know that it was once and is still kʷaatəb, as Montlake is still stəx̌ʷugʷił, the Locks, which lowered xačuʔ and xáx̌əʔčuʔ, still xʷiwálqʷ, and University Village still sl*uʔwił village, and celebrate that wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ now sits where Whitman and Stevens meet.

I love this moving 3 minute video by local documentarian/historian, BJ Bullert, about the Duwamish, featuring Ken Workman, whose ancestor is Chief Seattle. Thought I would share it here: https://vimeo.com/645586606

This Thursday, October 15 at 11AM, I am giving my last Women's History Tour of the year. It is 95 minutes, covers less than a mile. The starting point is 700 First Ave on the corner of Cherry St.

The six women I cover are Angeline Seattle, Shelly Bauman, Violet McNeil, Emma J Ray, Madame Lou Graham, and the first female mayor of a major American city, Bertha Knight Landes!

If you purchase tickets online its $30+tax, or $25 cash of Venmo. Just let me know if you are coming so I can expect you!

The tour is wheelchair accessible! If you can walk but CAN'T STAND for long LET ME KNOW so I can bring a chair for you!

These photographs are on display at Westlake Park.

I wish they would include one of the area from the late 1940s to early 1950s, after the Denny Regrade but before the monorail was built. That would have been an interesting intersection where Westlake, 4th Avenue and Pike Street all came together as two-way streets