- Peering down from a Cessna floatplane circling for a landing on Seattle’s Lake Union, the airborne person can easily see the wedge shape of the Eastlake neighborhood through the clouds. Bounded on the west and north by the L-shaped Lake Union, on the east by the I-5 freeway and on the south by the Mercer Street corridor, the neighborhood sports neat rows of houseboats nine and 10 deep fingering out into the lake. The houseboats are neighbors to low rise office buildings, trendy restaurants, biotechnology firms, and the remnants of a century old history of lakefront industry. Luxurious upland townhouses rub gutters and garden gates with Victorian houses, the apartment buildings that followed them in the 1920s, and other, modest single-family dwellings. Thirty-six hundred residents currently (2001) live in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood.
- Seattle — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
Seattle is the largest city in Washington state and its economic capital. Settled in 1851, its deep harbor and acquisition of Puget Sound’s first steam-powered sawmill quickly established it as a center of trade and industry. It gained the Territorial University (now University of Washington) in 1861, but was snubbed by the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1874 when it picked Tacoma as its western terminus. Despite this, the town prospered thanks to independent railroad development fueled by local coal deposits…
