Wood trestle spans canal and connects Seattle's Fremont neighborhood with the foot of Queen Anne in 1892.

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In 1892, a wood trestle is built from Fremont to the foot of Queen Anne Hill across a narrow canal dug in the 1880s to connect Lake Union with Salmon Bay (now part of the Lake Washington Ship Canal). This trestle has a walkway for pedestrians and a roadway for streetcars and horse drawn vehicles.

Located approximately where the Fremont Bridge now (2001) crosses the Lake Washington Ship Canal, it enabled greater access to Fremont and spurred the community's development.

Myra Phelps, in her history of Seattle's Engineering Department, describes this bridge as follows:

"A rickety wooden structure of antediluvian ancestry originally spanned the narrow and sluggish stream that separated the community of Fremont from Seattle; most of its patrons were small boys who snared salmon from the waters below with bent pins fastened to broomsticks. In 1901 the Seattle Electric Co. build electric railway tracks across this relic to serve the Fremont and Ballard areas; and street cars, pedestrians, wagons and an occasional horseless carriage continued to pass over the decaying structure until 1911 when it was razed to make way for the new ship canal" (Phelps).

The Stone Way bridge, five blocks to the east, replaced this old Fremont Bridge. The Stone Way Bridge opened in May 1911. The following year a second temporary bridge opened to replace the Old Fremont Bridge. This was demolished in 1915 when work began on the Fremont bascule bridge still (2005) in use.

Sources:
Patricia C. Erigero, Seattle Public Schools: Historic Building Survey (Seattle: Seattle Public Schools and Historic Seattle Preservation and Development Authority, 1989), 60; Paul Dorpat, "The Electric Bridge to Fremont," Seattle Now & Then 2nd Edition (Seattle: Tartu Publications, 1984), Story 64; Myra L. Phelps, Public Works in Seattle: A Narrative History: the Engineering Department, 1875-1975 (Seattle: Seattle Engineering Department, 1978), 43.

By Priscilla Long, May 25, 2001

This file made possible by:
The SCHOONER Project:
The Hon. Jan Drago
Seattle City Council
Seattle Department of Neighborhoods

Westlake Trestle and promenade approaching Fremont along Lake Union, Seattle, ca. 1895

Old Fremont bridge, 1903
Courtesy Lawton Gowey