Seattle

The Emerald City

Seattle has always faced the water.

Long before there was a skyline, the shores of Elliott Bay were part of the homeland of Coast Salish peoples, particularly the Duwamish. When Seattle developed into a city in the nineteenth century, the waterfront became its front door. Ships carried timber, fish, passengers and eventually goods from around the world through Elliott Bay, while piers, railroads and warehouses crowded the shoreline below the growing downtown.

The steep hill rising from the bay helped create one of Seattle’s most distinctive neighborhoods. Pike Place Market sits on that bluff, overlooking a waterfront that was essential to the Market from the beginning.

In the early 1900s, Seattle residents were frustrated by rising food prices while local farmers complained that wholesalers and middlemen were taking too much of what consumers paid. The city responded by creating a place where farmers could sell directly to the public. On August 17, 1907, Pike Place Market opened. Only a handful of farmers arrived that first morning, but thousands of shoppers descended on them and their produce quickly disappeared. Within months, more than a hundred farmers were selling along Pike Place.

The location was no accident. Farms surrounded Seattle and dotted the islands of Puget Sound, and boats and ferries brought people and goods into the waterfront below the Market. Over time, the collection of outdoor stalls expanded into the wonderfully irregular maze that exists today—ramps, stairways, arcades, storefronts and lower levels seemingly stacked down the hillside toward Elliott Bay. Rather than being designed all at once, the Market grew organically around the geography of the bluff.

By the 1960s, however, Pike Place Market was considered outdated by some city planners. Proposals called for demolishing much of it and replacing the old buildings with offices, apartments and parking structures. Seattle residents fought back. In 1971, voters chose to preserve the Market and created the historic district that protects its character today.

That decision preserved a piece of Seattle at walking scale.

Today you can start among the flower stalls, fishmongers and food counters of Pike Place, wander through Post Alley and then work your way downhill toward the waterfront. From there, Elliott Bay opens in front of you, with ferries crossing the Sound and the Olympic Mountains appearing beyond the water on clear days.

The waterfront itself is changing again. For decades, the elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct separated much of downtown from Elliott Bay. Its removal opened the possibility of reconnecting the city with the shoreline, creating a much more inviting pedestrian link between Pike Place Market and the water.

For Urban Wine Walkers, this is the Seattle we find most interesting. Not the entire city, but the surprisingly compact stretch between Pike Place Market and Elliott Bay. Coffee is never difficult to find. Neither are restaurants, wine bars and places to stop along the way. But the best part may simply be wandering downhill, following whichever staircase or alley looks interesting, and eventually finding the water.

Seattle became a city because of Elliott Bay. More than a century after Pike Place Market opened above it, the Market and waterfront still tell that story better than almost anywhere else in town.