page_title: Central Waterfront, Seattle
section_title: 19th-century development
hierarchical_section_title: Central Waterfront, Seattle / History / 19th-century development
caption_attribution_description: English: PH Coll 34.6a Also in PH Coll 277.BBS20 Subjects (LCTGM): Canoes--Washington (State)--Seattle Subjects (LCSH): Indians of North America--Washington (State)--Seattle; Washington Street (Seattle, Wash.) Given the locations of Providence Hospital, the Central School, etc. the view is looking to the northeast.
context_page_description: The Central Waterfront of Seattle, in the state of Washington, US, is the most urbanized portion of the Elliott Bay shore. It runs from the Pioneer Square shore roughly northwest past Downtown Seattle and Belltown, ending at the Broad Street site of the Olympic Sculpture Park.
  The Central Waterfront was once the hub of Seattle's maritime activity. Since the construction of a container port to its south in the 1960s, the area has increasingly been converted to recreational and retail uses. As of 2008, several century-old piers are devoted to shops and restaurants. There are several parks, a Ferris wheel, an aquarium, and one over-water hotel.
  Some docks remain on the Central Waterfront, under the authority of the Port of Seattle, including a cruise ship dock, ferry terminals, and a fireboat dock. There are many architectural vestiges of the area's past status as the heart of a port, and a handful of businesses have remained in operation since that time.
context_section_description: Henry Yesler established his steam-powered sawmill at the foot of Mill Road (now Yesler Way) in October 1852. That mill and its wharf were, for several decades, the most important structures on the waterfront. The wharf became a transportation hub.
  The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway (SLS&ER) was the first to run a rail line along the water, in 1887, with a depot near the foot of Columbia Street on Western Avenue. The SLS&ER was eventually purchased by the Northern Pacific Railway. James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway eventually laid track even farther to the water side. Railroad Avenue, the route of both railways, was 120 feet (37 m) wide and built mainly on pilings over tideflats. The rail lines came from the south and, until 1893, went no farther north than Smith Cove, a short distance north of the Central Waterfront.
  The Great Seattle Fire (June 6, 1889) obliterated Yesler's Wharf and all other waterfront structures south of Union Street. The one major wharf remaining after the fire was the Schwabacher Dock (also known as Schwabacher Wharf or Schwabacher's Wharf), just north of the "burnt district". Within four years after the fire, there was enormous redevelopment west of Front Street (now First Avenue), with an 1893 Sanborn insurance map showing West Street, now Western Avenue, running the entire length of the present Central Waterfront (and then some, continuing northwest into what is now Myrtle Edwards Park), and Water Street (now Elliott Avenue) running more or less along what was then the shore from Bell Street to Broad Street; filling has subsequently moved that shore west. There were numerous docks, mostly perpendicular to the shore. The Sanborn map indicates the nature of the businesses along the waterfront, and suggests that fishing had not yet become an important industry at this time. More typical waterfront uses were warehouses for grain and feed. Just inland from the water were many hotels, ranging from workingmen's hotels to a "Grand Hotel" on Front Street between Madison and Marion Streets.
  Prior to Washington statehood in 1889, the question of title to the tidelands was entirely unclear. Yesler and others had built onto the tidelands regardless of this legal limbo. The number of these "tideland jumpers" increased up as statehood approached. Officially, the federal government held the tidelands in trust for the future state, and all such activities—which included the construction of railways—were technically illegal. The new state constitution fashioned a compromise measure: the state generally affirmed its own ownership of tidelands, but provided for case-by-case exceptions to be adjudicated by the courts. In many cases, adjudication had to be made between upland owners and those who had built on pilings on the tidelands. Constitutional provisions were also made for state-owned harbors with zones along the shore reserved for "landings, wharves and streets and other conveniences of navigation and commerce." All this was later modified to allow towns and municipalities to gain more control of their own shorelines, setting the stage for coherent plans for development and reclamation.
  The arrangement of the "finger" piers on the Central Waterfront, each more or less a parallelogram, dates from an 1897 plan. Their uniform northeast-southwest direction was prescribed by city engineer Reginald H. Thomson and his assistant George F. Cotterill. Most earlier piers, none of which survive, formed a perfect right angle to the shore; the present piers do not. Thomson and Cotterill's arrangement spared freight trains from needing to make a sharp right angle and prevented piers from potentially running into one another where the shoreline curved.
caption: Native American dugout canoes at the foot of S. Washington Street in the early 1890s.
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