Seattle from the steet

Wednesday 28 May 2025 

Our warm, sunny day began with a walk along the Alaskan Way near Elliot Bay to pick up a free walking tour, Seattle 101, via the lovely Anchorhead coffee shop. The tour was with the lively and entertaining Amalia, one of three guides running a small free walking tour company. She packed a lot in after a quick visit to Pike Place Market (more fish and peonies!), highlighting some of the quirky shops (Robot vs Sloth being one of them, featuring all sorts of cute things solely robot or sloth in nature - very niche), so here goes with a bit of history.

Modern Seattle only really came about when settlers were advised by the local Native American chief in the mid-19th century not to build their city on the sand bar to the west. Chief Seattle (English spelling - that's him, above) rightly insisted on payment for use of his name ("my grandchildren cannot eat honour") but his advice was sound. 

The sloping nature of the terrain made the land perfect for logging as timber could be send directly downhill to Elliot Bay to be shipped to California, where apparently there was now a timber shortage. However, a fire which started in June 1989 from a glue pot in a cabinet maker's shop and burned for over 12 hours, destroyed the early city, where everything - houses, water pipes, streets - was built from plentiful wood round about. The great fire is meagrely memorialised outside the Post Office where from the previous buidling the fire originally started - yes, it's the wooden thing on the lampost...

This meant that the only three architects in the city were then hard-pressed to plan new buildings to rebuild the city, and they did so in a fairly uniform Romaneque style, with Pioneer Square at the heart. Eventually the doorways to houses were brought up a level by use of silt to raise the dwellings, leaving an underground network of basements which we visited on a tour the next day.

We learned about Tako, the giant Pacific Octopus (3m across the tentacles) at the aquarium, which some years back by nightime stealth was the culprit behind the mysterious disappearance of a number of smallish endangered sharks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFOEZh1Lbbg

We caught sight of what was once Seattle's tallest building, the Smith Tower, a rather beautiful Art Deco structure completed in 1914 which we visited the following day. 

We finished the tour on the Waterfront, an area created in 2019 by the destruction of a freeway (which is why you've never seen it on Frasier) and is a vastly improved walk and cycleway running alongside the ferry terminal, the aquarium and numerous fish restaurants, one of which we went to for lunch - Ivar's Acres of Clams. 

Ivar Haglund (above) was an eccentric millionaire who inherited lots of money from his parents (Scandinavians who comprised many of the settlers in Seattle's early days) and used it in a variety of ways, including setting up a fish restaurant. Though gay he married conveniently twice and had no heirs, but he did have a sense of humour, including dressing up a small pet seal and taking it to Santa's Grotto at the local department store, and flying a salmon from the flagpole at the top of the Smith Tower. When he died, he left most of his money to the city to be used for good causes in perpetuity.

We'd been told about the bargain ferry price to Bainbridge Island across the bay, so that seemed a good idea and for $15 return between us we took the 35-minute crossing with terrific views

and spent a pleasant few hours on an island that reminded me very much of places like Nantucket off the east coast, with charming chichi little shops and bars and sky-high property prices. After wandering (and purchasing pretty empty Cuban cigar boxes at $5 each!), we ended up at the colourful Isla Bonita Mexican bar and restaurant for robust margaritas which were excellent. 

We then dined very well at Amelia Wynne's wine tasting restaurant (where I had a flight of delicious local wines, and scallops with gnocci), sharing travel stories with a delightful elderly couple on the next table. I managed to squeeze in a very good ice cream from Island Cool before we got back on the ferry and headed for home.