North Seattle Street Ends: Introduction

Dear Diary,

A few days later than planned, at last I'm starting to tell you about the street ends of North Seattle.

It turns out the legal explanation I gave in "Lake Union's North Shore" isn't particularly reliable.  Let me go into some detail here.  It appears that the basic claim is that when the city acquires a right of way to build a road, but the road doesn't fill that right of way, the city continues to own the unused land.  In the 1990s and probably earlier, people were saying that Seattle had forgotten this ownership.

This led to the creation of a list of 149 shoreline sites for which city ownership seemed especially desirable.  In 1993 the City Council then passed Resolution 29370, which declared the city's ownership of those 149 sites; the PDF version has a map.

In most cases, the sites in North Seattle clearly fit the theory I described last time, according to which the street end is the land between the end of the street and the waterline.  But it often isn't all the land between.  For example, at NE 135th Street that would be a pretty gigantic park:

People are probably still alive who can correct this, but I suspect the compilers of the map negotiated with at least some of the property owners to clarify what land was wanted, and there are many clues that the top priority was boat access.  In essence, I think the street end project originated in a desire for more waterways, of the kind "Lake Union's North Shore" also discussed, places to put boats into, and bring them out of, the water.

In any event, I thought it would take usually three photographs to summarise each street end:

1. A photo depicting my best guess as to the street ending that justified the land claim, usually from a short block away.
2. A photo showing the land area the city apparently is claiming.
3. A photo showing the sea view, one of the things non-boaters are most likely to want from a street end.

So the series that follows presents 3 or 4 street ends per page, of the 28 known to me in North Seattle.  I'll probably have a story or two to tell, but certainly not many.  And as warned before, there are no restrooms or water fountains in any of them.  This series simply documents that fact.

All street ends are claimed by the Seattle Department of Transportation, except a few that have been transferred to Parks and Recreation.

All are on the waterfront, meaning that when a visitor leaves, possibly in a hurry to find a restroom, the direction will normally be uphill.

I hope these photos will be fun for you, dear Diary; taking them was sometimes fun for me.