Washington

This property was originally developed in 1912 as a fashionable dining and entertainment venue by Leota O. Hartley (1882–1937). At the time, the property was essentially suburban in nature, a characteristic that it has maintained due to the three-quarter-acre size of the tract and generous landscaping. For 25 years, the Boulevard Inn was a destination for parties hosted by local university fraternities and sororities, as well as local society luminaries.

Located on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, a 30-minute ferry ride from Seattle, Bloedel Reserve is a unique and ambitious garden. Its design reflects the vision of the estate’s former owners, Prentice and Virginia Bloedel, as well as that of their primary landscape architect, Richard Haag. The 150-acre estate, formerly known as Collinswood, was a hunting lodge and summer home for the Collins family. In 1932 the Collins family built the house that currently stands on the site, an eighteenth-century Classical Revival villa designed by well-known Seattle architect J. Lister Holmes.

The area around Pioneer Place (now Pioneer Square) was the city’s first site for civic gatherings. Informally, the location was first known as Occidental Place, in recognition of the former Occidental Hotel that long occupied the site of the current parking garage at Second Avenue and James Street. This was the intersection of Mill (now Yesler Way), James, and Front (now First Avenue) streets, which was perhaps the most spacious intersection in Seattle prior to 1889.

Perched upon the crest of Phinney Ridge in Seattle’s Phinney Ridge neighborhood, the 92-acre Woodland Park Zoo offers visitors the opportunity to experience more than 1,000 animals of nearly 300 unique species.

On the northern shore of Lake Union formerly known as Brown’s Point, Gas Works Park stands as a re-imagining of a former gasification plant into an iconic park for the city of Seattle. This unique project is perhaps one of the first examples of the conversion of a post-industrial landscape into a public park.

Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks is a pioneering stormwater management design overlaid on a public park just east of downtown Kent. Herbert Bayer’s artful landforms shape the floodplain ravine into a stormwater detention facility while revealing the site’s hydrological forces. The two-and-a-half-acre site sits in the northeast corner of the larger 107-acre Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks Park and functions as the park’s entrance. The park was dedicated on September 4, 1982.

The Prairie Line was the name given to the section of the Northern Pacific Railroad that ran from Tenino, Washington, to the terminal city of Tacoma. Laid in 1873, this section of tracks brought the northern transcontinental railroad to its western terminus. While the name refers to the direct, expedient route of the line across the “burnt prairie” east of the Nisqually River Delta, it is most commonly associated with original railroad line through downtown Tacoma.

The Pioneer Square Historic District has the distinction of being the first designated historic district in Seattle. It contains the city’s largest collection of late-nineteenth-century buildings, and is one of the largest such collections in Washington state.

Built astride the Upper Columbia River between flood-carved cliffs of volcanic basalt, the Grand Coulee Dam is the largest producer of hydroelectric power in the United States. The American Society of Civil Engineers named the dam one of the country’s seven modern engineering wonders in honor of the project’s innovations, but its greatest achievement lay in its size. One of the world’s heaviest concrete structures, Grand Coulee Dam supports the Columbia Basin Project, the most extensive water reclamation project ever executed in the United States. Managed by the U.S.

Seattle’s Freeway Park was the first park in the United States to be built atop a highway to reconnect the neighborhoods the highway had torn asunder. In 1966, I-5 was cut through the edge of Seattle; running north-south, it divided downtown from neighborhoods to the east. When Freeway Park opened in 1976, it became a model for other cities seeking to heal the divisions that postwar highway construction had caused.