For more than 50 years, a community center named for Harlem Renaissance luminary Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and housed under the dome of a former synagogue has played a role in the artistic, cultural...
Charles Larrabee wasn't the founder of Fairhaven (which later became part of Bellingham), but in many ways he might as well have been. He was one of a handful of people who made the community's e...
Frances Payne Larrabee was a prominent and influential Bellingham clubwoman. She was instrumental in the founding of the Bellingham Bay Home for Children, a safe haven for homeless children. She becam...
Larrabee State Park was established in 1915, and bears the distinction of being Washington's first state park. Located along and near Chuckanut Drive in Whatcom County south of Bellingham, the 2,683-a...
In November 1942 the United States Army established a training airfield at Moses Lake in central Washington's Grant County. The base became inactive at the end of the war but the airfield, with its lo...
Leo Lassen was a sportswriter and publicist who became a living legend as a baseball radio broadcaster in his hometown of Seattle. He covered the city's Pacific Coast League teams from 1931 to 1960. H...
Beloved for its convenience and breathtaking views but derided as an architectual eyesore, the Alaskan Way Viaduct ferried motorists through downtown Seattle for more than six decades before it was to...
This reminiscence of an old friendship was written by Dorothea (Pfister) Nordstrand (1916-2011). Both she and her friend, Margaret (Bavin) Medley (1915-2006), were graduates of Seattle's Roosevelt Hig...
Mary A. Latham was Spokane's first woman physician -- a heroic and ultimately tragic figure in the city's history. She came to Spokane in 1887 and specialized in the diseases of women and children. Sh...
Latinos, the largest minority in the United States at more than 13 percent of the population as of 2006, have been instrumental to the development of Washington state since the 1774 Spanish exploratio...
The Latona Bridge, built in 1891 for Seattle pioneer and investor David T. Denny (1832-1903), carried the first streetcar line across Lake Union and was the first substantial bridge to cross the lake ...
Dr. Blanche Sellers Lavizzo was the first African American woman pediatrician in the state of Washington. She arrived in Seattle in July 1956 and began her pediatric practice on East Madison Street an...
Ross N. Lavroff served as the "voice" of the historic 1975 Apollo-Soyuz docking among other assignments as an interpreter. The Ukraine-born Russian served numerous U.S. government and international ag...
When humans began creating laws for each other to follow, the legal profession was born. As the number of people increased and life became more complex, the number of both laws and lawyers multiplied....
Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight, two of the country's preeminent visual artists, moved to Seattle in 1971 when he accepted a teaching position in University of Washington's art department. The two...
Sixteen men, all foreign-born, were killed on November 6, 1910, in an explosion at the Lawson Coal Mine in Black Diamond in east King County. The following is excerpted from the "State Inspector of Co...
Walter Vernon Lawson was the first African American police officer in the Seattle Department to be promoted to Sergeant (July 1964). He went on to become Seattle's first African American police Lieute...
The League of Women Voters, a non-partisan organization founded in 1920 and concerned with public policy and citizenship issues, grew out of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). U...
The town of Leavenworth in Chelan County occupies a spectacular location at the confluence of Wenatchee River and Icicle Creek, over which loom peaks of the North Cascade Mountains. The Wenatchee Vall...
In 1908, the Lebanon Home opened in Seattle on 1500 Kilbourne Street, and served as rescue shelter for homeless young women. Over the years it expanded the services it provided and by the early 1920s ...
Former Seattle resident Bruce Lee, martial artist and actor in film and television, starred in many Hong Kong movie productions as a child before he came to worldwide fame with his role as Kato in tel...
Bruce Lee popularized Kung Fu and other Asian martial arts disciplines during a brief but influential career as an instructor and as an actor on television and in feature films. Born in San Francisco ...
Seattle-born Rose Louise Hovick had her first brush with fame at age one, winning a healthy baby contest. As Gypsy Rose Lee, she became famous in burlesque as a classy and witty strip tease artist. Sh...
The Very Reverend John C. Leffler was the dean of St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral on Seattle's Capitol Hill from 1951 to 1971. He took over a "dirty, grimy, dismal church" (The Seattle Times) that had ...