Topic: Recreation
In this People's History account, Issaquah High School graduate and "Native Washingtonian" Mike Atkins relates how he and some pals took advantage of the destruction of Pete Rippe's barn during the Co...
Phyllis Lamphere (1922-2018), a native Seattleite, was deeply involved in the city's civic life for more than 50 years. She served on the city council from 1967 to 1978, where she was instrumental in ...
Pinball machines were introduced nearly a century ago and immediately became wildly popular. Unlike today's versions, though, early pinball games were played for gambling purposes, which proved to be ...
During the first decades of the twentieth century, Pine Lake in Sammamish was a featured attraction for early settlers of the Sammamish Plateau. Until suburban sprawl reached the area in the 1970s, th...
Hailed by its three owners as a place "to banish jaded nerves, nagging thoughts and worries, and to apply instead wholesome recreation and relaxation," Playland, a 12-acre "million dollar pleasure res...
Point Defiance Park, founded in Tacoma in 1888, is a 760-acre urban splendor featuring many natural and recreational amenities including a zoo and aquarium, gardens and lawns, Owen’s Beach and a...
Pritchard Island, a small island on the southwest shore of Lake Washington, was the site of a Duwamish Indian village known as tleelh-chus ("little island") for generations before the first United Sta...
Washington's public ports tend to be associated more with cranes and loading docks than with parks and promenades, but providing public access to the waterfront has been a part of the ports' mission f...
Contests pitting humans against animals appear in cultures throughout recorded history. In the U.S., that tradition is the rodeo, which emerged from tasks cowboys did while working cattle in the 1800s...
The Four Seasons Resort on the southwestern end of Beaver Lake, located on the Sammamish Plateau in east King County, was built about 1936 by Gus and LuLu Bartels. By the late 1930s it had become a po...
The Tanska Auto Camp was an early twentieth-century retreat located on the northwestern shore of Pine Lake on the Sammamish Plateau (King County), operating from about 1918 until 1940. The camp consi...
For several decades in the middle of the twentieth century, San Juan Island was virtually overrun with rabbits. A population of several thousand domestic rabbits released in 1934 from a failed breedin...
Bill Bonham managed hotels in the Northwest in the 1920s through the 1940s, including the Seattle Hotel at 1st Avenue and Yesler Way in Seattle and the Hotel Monticello in Longview. Bonham's daughter,...
This excerpted account of schooling at a Cedar Falls railroad camp was originally recorded on June 15, 1993 as a part of the Cedar River Watershed Oral History Project. Dorothy Graybael Scott moved to...
Seattle's waterfront is a natural location for an aquarium, and proposals to build one go back many years, though it wasn't until a Forward Thrust bond issue was approved in 1968 that funds were alloc...
The 74 acres that comprise Seattle Center have played a pivotal role in the region’s history. The defining moment came in 1962 when the Century 21 Exposition, also known as the Seattle World&rsq...
Coast Salish Indians fished, hunted, and gathered shellfish along Elliott Bay for millennia before May 1792, when European sailors first gazed at the site of present-day Seattle. Sixty years later, U....
The waterfront between Battery and Broad streets, beginning with Pier 69, is graced by the Edgewater Hotel, the Port of Seattle terminal for high-speed Victoria Clipper catamaran ferries, and Myrtle E...
Piers 46 and 47 are located south of Pioneer Square and Pier 48 is located directly west of Pioneer Square. Piers 46 and 47 serve as the Port of Seattle's vast loading apron for containers. Pier 48 is...
The present site of the Seattle Aquarium was once a giant coal pier and the city's first commercial swimming beach (brrrr!). Both had disappeared by the late 1870s. A furniture mill and a succession o...
Piers 64, 65, and 66, including the Bell Street Pier and the Bell Harbor complex, are located south of Virginia Street and east of Belltown. The area was once a shantytown, home to mostly Native Ameri...
Bob Donegan, President of Ivar's, has been a tireless advocate for the interests of businesses along Seattle's waterfront and beyond. In conversation with Dominic Black he recounts his activism around...
Gerry Johnson has been a central figure in the planning and redevelopment of Seattle's central waterfront as a board member with Friends of Waterfront Seattle. According to its website, the "Friends,"...
In the winter of 1934, Seattle made national news when its Board of Park Commissioners opened one of the first municipal ski areas in the country at the old Milwaukee Railroad stop of Laconia at Snoqu...