Water and Water: The Lake Washington Ship Canal

Dear Diary,

I'd started to feel guilty about greeting possible new readers of you with first the street ends series, whose geographical subtitles named bodies of water whose names I hadn't been clear on until, um, planning that series, in October.  And then the geographic series organised by watershed.  Anyone who reads more than a few of your pages, dear Diary, is likely to know the name "Thornton Creek" and maybe even realise that it's in the north of northeast Seattle.  But a few pages after that will come "Yesler Creek" !  Can I be any more obscure?

It's probably a good thing that I couldn't make this page your Christmas present, dear Diary, as I'd originally intended.  An apology shouldn't also be used as a gift.  But anyway this page is my apology to anyone who found the street ends subtitles obscure but for some reason sees this anyway.  People more nautically informed than I - which is pretty much anyone who knows anything on the topic - may find nothing new here.

Or maybe there will be something new, because I had to get a not very famous recent book to write this.  So nautically informed people may wish to read and/or buy Waterway:  The Story of Seattle's Locks and Ship Canal by David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and the staff of HistoryLink, Seattle:  HistoryLink and Documentary Media (but distributed by the University of Washington Press), copyright 2017, ISBN 978-1-933245-43-0.  The Seattle Public Library has several copies.

For each body of water I list bridges with ends in North Seattle, often referring to additional relevant or helpful pages but primarily based on pages 99-100 of Waterway.  I also list parks at the shore.  This page's whole point being to elucidate the street ends series of December 20-21, I don't provide detailed references to those pages but do name street ends I think worth mentioning or necessary to mention.  Same with Lake Union's waterways.

Dear Diary, at one level you've been an exercise in geography all along, certainly not history like Waterway.  Something else I've done lately is really rub in my focus on the eastern half of North Seattle, starting both those obscure series in Lake City.  So let's, just once, start elsewhere.

Shilshole Bay

So the premise here is that I'm trying to explain things, to worry less about being condescending.  So four of the places under discussion are "bays" and it occurred to me that since I didn't know the term's formal definition, I shouldn't assume, dear Diary, that your readers know any definition.

So according to Wikipedia, there is an official definition, but it requires hydrological knowledge few people have, so I'll just have to settle for mine, which is that a bay is any body of water that looks, on a map, like it's partly separated from some larger body of water, by land.  Now, by this standard, Shilshole Bay, supposedly enclosed from Puget Sound by Magnolia and, um, Golden Gardens Park, is not much of a bay in my book.  Be that as it may, everyone calls the saltwater side of the canal Shilshole Bay, so I will too.  Shilshole Bay is the water west of Loyal Heights, and of Ballard north of about NW Market and 55th Streets; its bit of the canal is the water south of Ballard west of 32nd Ave NW.

The Lake Washington Ship Canal consists of four bays plus two lakes, that have existed for thousands of years since glacier time, a ditch first dug out of an older river channel in the 1880s, and a ditch first dug in the 20th century to replace a nearby one dug in the 1880s.  The new thing, the thing that means the canal opened in 1917, was the Ballard Locks.

Shilshole Bay changed less than most of these bodies of water.  Notably, it both started and stayed salt water, and its relationship with sea level stayed the same.  But the Locks, specifically, in 1916 before they opened to traffic, did one thing to Shilshole Bay:  they cut it off from its own bay, Salmon Bay.

North Seattle's parks on Shilshole Bay - Golden Gardens Park, the Eddie Vine Boat Ramp, the NW 60th St Viewpoint - and its street ends - are introduced in "The Ballard Seacoast", part I, June 30, with more photos of the street ends (34th and 36th Avenues NW, NW 57th and 60th Streets) in the street ends post.

The only bridge that crosses Shilshole Bay does so only technically, being quite close to the Locks.  This is Bridge #4, a railroad bridge owned by Burlington Northern but still called by an older corporate name, the Great Northern Bridge, opened in 1914.

The Narrows (?)

This is the strait that made Salmon Bay a bay even before the Locks were built there.  Not that much of Salmon Bay is all that much wider; it's the next best thing to a fjord, that bay.  But anyway, the Locks were built there; I'm not sure to what extent they can be used, when not closed to visitors, as a bridge.

I'm also not sure the name "the Narrows" is actually used by anyone other than the authors of Waterway.  Google reacts with guileless shock when, asked for information about a Seattle Narrows, information about ones in Tacoma, Bremerton, Utah and various other places won't do.

Nevertheless, the strait exists, and if it isn't called the Narrows, I don't know of another name.

Salmon Bay

Salmon Bay is a long, narrow body of water bounded by the even narrower Narrows and Fremont Cut.  It's the water south of most of Ballard, from 32nd to 3rd Avenues NW; it's also, technically, the water west of southern Ballard, south of NW Market and 55th Streets.  Its widest points, east and especially west of 15th Ave NW, have suspiciously straight edges, suggesting that to at least some extent they're man-made, but the 1897 and 1908 maps I'm using in "Land and Water" show that those were its widest points then too.

Salmon Bay changed probably most drastically, of the bodies of water in the canal.  According to Waterway, it used to be a "brackish" place that varied in depth from inches at low tide to eleven feet at high tide; now they say most of it is thirty feet deep, with little tidal variation, and fresh water.  One of the few things the unreferenced Wikipedia article says is that the water isn't all fresh, but still, this is a ton of change.  Salmon Bay was flooded with fresh water in 1916, before the Locks opened.

In North Seattle, Salmon Bay has plenty of street ends, three pages' worth, but the only ones I recommend are at 11th and 20th Avenues NW; the only official park on Salmon Bay's north coast, the 14th Ave NW Boat Ramp, is identified as a street end too, but was also introduced June 25 in "History and Parks", part I.

Being so narrow, Salmon Bay has been bridged a lot.

1. A bridge opened in 1889 at 14th Ave NW, and torn down in 1910 in preparation for #3.
2. A railroad bridge opened in 1890 just west of #1, torn down in 1910.
3. The 14th Ave NW Bridge, opened in 1910, raised in 1916, torn down in 1918.
4. The Northern Pacific railroad bridge, opened in 1914, torn down in 1976.  Ballard terminus at the equivalent of 8th Ave NW.
5. The Ballard Bridge, opened in 1917.

Sources, besides Waterway, both by Priscilla Long and both published 2017:  "Ballard Bridge (Seattle)" and "Fourteenth Avenue NW Bridge / Salmon Bay Drawbridge (Seattle)".

The Fremont Cut

The Fremont Cut is the western of the two man-made parts of the Canal; I understand it as running roughly northwest from the equivalent of Fremont Lane N to that of 3rd Ave NW.  It is the water south of the relevant parts of Ballard and Fremont, and west of southwestern Fremont, between, say, N 36th St, Aurora Ave N, and the water.  It has much more history than the eastern man-made part, but historians have written much less about that history; the Fremont Cut is the main reason I needed Waterway.

It originated as a creek's valley.  The Outlet, later called Ross Creek, was how Lake Union drained into Salmon Bay before canal-building began there.  In 1885, a canal opened in that valley.  Waterway says another canal opened in 1902.  Valley, creek and both canals were then drowned by the much bigger canal of today, completed in 1916.

Because essentially all the Cut's width is reserved for navigation, which bars piers, boaters don't show it much love, and its only North Seattle street end is the uninteresting one under the Fremont Bridge, with opportunities for more passed up at Phinney Ave N and 2nd Ave NW, at least.  But the Fremont Cut is, of course, the Canal of Fremont Canal Park, which must make up for a lot.

Being narrow, it's been bridged plenty:

1. Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad Bridge, opened in 1888, shown on a 1912 map but presumably torn down soon after.  Its Fremont terminus was south of N 34th St, probably near the Burke-Gilman Trail.
2. The first Fremont Bridge was primarily for streetcars, opened in 1892, torn down in 1911.
3. A Ross Bridge or Ross Wagon Bridge is attested in 1903 and 1912, according to Waterway; nobody seems to mention it online.  Its northern terminus seems to have been near 2nd Ave NW.
4. A temporary Fremont Bridge opened in 1912, but was torn down in 1915.
5. The present Fremont Bridge opened in 1917.

Sources, besides Waterway:  "Fremont Bridge (Seattle)" by Glenn Drosendahl, 2017, and too many others to list here.

I hadn't realised, dear Diary, how much of a unit the Burke-Gilman Trail actually is.  The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad Company was founded by twelve Seattle investors (including Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman) who were tired of Seattle being bypassed by the major railroad companies.  They made ambitious plans, many of which they failed to carry out; but they carried out enough to achieve their purpose, because when the company went bankrupt its lines were bought, not piecemeal by farmers, but by one of those major railroad companies.  The SLSE went everywhere the Burke-Gilman Trail now goes, and I'd bet the whole trail is on former SLSE land, but I haven't yet found convincing evidence that this is true west of Fremont.  Sources:  various respectable ones like Wikipedia (which does assign the Ballard BGT to SLSE), the Seattle Department of Transportation, and HistoryLink, but actually most usefully "Wedgwood's Trailmakers: the Burke-Gilman Trail" by Valarie, 2013.

Lake Union

Lake Union is the lake shaped rather like a human uterus, more or less at the centre of Seattle.  It was named before the Civil War, by the canal's first promoter, who hoped it would be the means of union between the fresh water and the salt.  As I'm defining it here, its North Seattle coast runs from the equivalent of Fremont Lane N to I-5, which is there the equivalent of 6th Ave NE.  It's the water south of all of Wallingford, the eastern half of Fremont, and arguably a bit of the University District; thanks to the peninsula on which Gas Works Park sits, it's east of many parts of those neighbourhoods, west of some, and both east and west of a few.  It's easily the largest body of water along the course of the canal, though much smaller than Shilshole Bay and Lake Washington at either end.

Waterway doesn't say much about the canal's ecological effects on Lake Union, but they must have been considerable.  Before the canal, it was essentially a sleepy lake fed by a small hinterland, drained by one little creek and the occasional flood.  Now it's rather shallower and smaller, it's fed by the entire Lake Washington watershed, it's drained by the Fremont Cut, and it never, ever floods.  It's turned from a parking lot for water into a highway for it.  Seems to me that's a pretty dramatic change.

"Lake Union's North Shore:  Waterways and Street Ends", October 8, provides references for the two parks - Gas Works Park and Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp - and photos of, plus directions to, the waterways, of which I recommend 15, 17, 18, 21 and 23, and 19 for people who like short hikes.  In "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal" January 1, I noted that several waterways turn out to be missing.  They still are - more on this below - but the system by which they're numbered makes me sure that none of the missing ones could be on Lake Union's north shore.

Bridges over Lake Union cross it at its narrow northwestern and northeastern ends.  I've defined the Fremont Bridge into the Fremont Cut, and the bridges to the east elsewhere as well, but there are two bridges left:

1. The Stone Way Bridge, opened in 1911, torn down in 1917.  It appears to have bent mid-span.  Although originally intended as a temporary substitute for the Fremont Bridge, it had a lot of support for more permanent status, and its demolition, necessary in canal terms, seems to have left many in eastern Fremont angry.  One generation later, they more or less got revenge:
2. The George Washington Memorial Bridge, opened in 1932, on Aurora Ave N.

See, besides Waterway, "Looking back: Stone Way Bridge, Once the Route to North Seattle" by Peg Nielsen, 2013, and "Seattle's George Washington Memorial Bridge (Aurora Bridge) is dedicated February 22, 1932" by Patricia Long, 2003.

Passage Point (???)

I must emphasise that this is strictly my name for the strait between Lake Union and Portage Bay, which near as I can tell has no real name.  On a map of Seattle it looks big and sloppy compared to the Cuts, or even the Narrows, maybe unworthy of a name.  But it's actually only 1/8th of a mile wide, about 220 yards; I think by any reasonable standard that's a strait, and deserves a name.

(By contrast, the Fremont Cut is 90 yards wide, the Narrows about 150.)

The name comes, of course, from the parks the city built at its north and south ends.  I introduced the northern park May 13 in "Down by the Canal" and showed you, dear Diary, more photos of it in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal" January 1.

The parks are in the shadow of the latest of three bridges to cross this strait:

1. The Latona Bridge, opened in 1891, torn down in 1919.  Originally for streetcars, but converted to general use when #2 opened.  Seems to have required repairs a lot more often than most of these bridges, but survived the canal's opening as many others did not.
2. The Latona Bridge, opened in 1901, torn down in 1919.  Designed as a drawbridge in expectation of the canal; designed for bigger streetcars than #1 could handle.
3. The Ship Canal Bridge, opened in 1962 as part of I-5.

See, besides Waterway, "Latona Bridge and University Bridge (Seattle)" by John Caldbick, 2017.

Portage Bay

This appears to be as neglected among the natural water bodies as the Fremont Cut is among the man-made ones.  A popular restaurant and a trendy neighbourhood are both named after this bay, so it's possible that there are thousands of fascinating web pages out there about Portage Bay that I just can't find, but actually I doubt it.

The smallest of the four bays in the ship canal is the water south of the University District, if one takes the latter as having a border at I-5, and of much of the UW's Seattle campus.  It's also the water west of many of these areas.

Presumably it got smaller and shallower as its neighbours did, and presumably much of it is now, as in Lake Union, basically a water highway.  But despite its relative neglect, I wonder whether Portage Bay might have something its bigger neighbours lack.  Water enters it about halfway north on the bay's eastern coast, and leaves it basically at the bay's northwestern corner.  So what I wonder is whether the southern part of Portage Bay might be more or less shielded from the rush, and might in this respect, at least, resemble southern Portage Bay of before.  Mind, dear Diary, you know I'm no hydrologist.  But I wonder.

Portage Bay's north coast includes two city parks - Northlake and Fritz Hedges Waterway Parks.  Both of these are in the same two pages as North Passage Point, but for the latter "Fritz Hedges Waterway Park", October 20, is also relevant.  Portage Bay's good street end, Sakuma Viewpoint, is next to Fritz Hedges.  The only bridge across the bay with a terminus in North Seattle, the University Bridge, opened in 1919; see the same reference as for the Latona Bridge it replaced.  (State Route 520 crosses Portage Bay entirely south of North Seattle, and not on the famous floating bridge.)

I don't know whether Portage Bay, as here defined, has one, two or three of Lake Union's waterways.  As described in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal", waterway 14 overlaps with Northlake Park, at the Lake Union edge of Portage Bay.  Waterway 11 is at Fairview Park in the Eastlake neighbourhood.  I have no clue where waterways 12 and 13 might be.  They're rather more likely to be further north in Eastlake, but it's just possible that one or both is or are instead on the shores of Portage Bay, barely possibly the north shore.  I think they're pretty unlikely to be in parks, which would brag about them as Northlake Park does about 14.

The Montlake Cuts

Two canals have linked Union Bay, still ahead, with Portage Bay.  The first was much smaller, had a built-in dam, and operated in a less ecologically aware period, so as far as we know, only the second had most of the effects I've been describing and have still to describe.

The Portage Canal

The first canal was a few blocks south of the present one.  It was near the present state route 520, as David B. Williams of Waterway says in "Lake Washington Ship Canal (Seattle)", 2017; it was sixteen feet wide.  It opened in 1887; when the Ship Canal lowered Lake Washington in 1916, it became useless as a canal, but wasn't filled in quickly.  (Useful on this, though old, is Don Sherwood's typescript on the history of West Montlake Park, a PDF.)

Near as I can tell, it has to have gone through what is now Washington Park; since that park is no longer in North Seattle, and has no sentimental importance to me, I haven't visited it for you nor described or photographed it for you, dear Diary.

I would think there must have been some sort of bridging arrangement, but don't know how to find out more about that.  (This early canal is much worse documented than the ones in Fremont, though that seems to attract, rather than repel, historians.)

The Montlake Cut proper

Although, or perhaps because, this was a brand-new excavation (unlike the Fremont Cut), it progressed fast, and was pretty much done by 1914 (versus 1915).  It had to wait, dammed, until the planned bridges were funded and their pilings could be sunk; like the Fremont Cut, it was opened in 1916.

Its northern shore is entirely within the UW's main Seattle campus; there are no city parks or street ends there.  It's wider than the Fremont Cut, nearly 120 yards, so perhaps piers are allowed; at any rate, boaters give it some love because of its use by the UW's rowers, as memorialised in the book and movie The Boys in the Boat.  I saw the rowers (though of current teams, not the 1936 one in Boys) several times in recent trips to that part of campus.

Only one bridge has spanned this Cut, the Montlake Bridge, opened in 1925.  For five years before that, the city set up pontoon bridges for events at Husky Stadium, per "Montlake Bridge (Seattle)" by John Caldbick, 2013.

HistoryLink has conferred on this Cut, as on no other body of water this page covers, a "feature" page of its own, "Montlake Cut (Seattle)" by Jennifer Ott of Waterway, 2012.

Union Bay

Union Bay is an example of a bay whose mouth nobody could seriously call a strait, but which nevertheless is clearly defined.  It's essentially a big squarish, circlish blob subtracted from the land, facing Lake Washington to the east.  As it is now, it's the water south of Laurelhurst and most of UW's east campus, east of the rest of campus, and west of some very expensive homes on Webster Point.  I don't know whether its name commemorates the Civil War's winners, or, like Lake Union's, the dream of the canal; or maybe both.

Its northern and western coasts, in North Seattle, are home to one city park, Belvoir Place, introduced May 13 in "Back East, Where the Gardens Are Pretty" and not much mentioned since, and one good street end, the western one for NE 31st St.  The Union Bay Boglands, introduced in the same page but also discussed January 1 in "Canalwards, Foolish Mortal", are nearby but I think don't directly abut the bay.

Union Bay used to be much, much bigger.  If you've wondered, dear Diary, why the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern tracks didn't give users of the Burke-Gilman Trail today views of Union Bay and Lake Washington comparable to the trail's views further west, well, that's because the rails were laid in the late 1880s, nearly thirty years before Union Bay shrank.  Imagine the Trail as coastal, and that's a pretty good start.  But it gets even worse.  Union Bay has marshes and bogs today, but it used to have really big marshes and bogs.  Picardo Farm, at 25th Ave NE and NE 80th St, was at the northern edge of the wetlands.  On the 1908 topographical map, that's shown to be due to a tributary of Ravenna Creek, most of the wetlands ending around 53rd St - but the water itself came to 45th.

Another ecological effect I infer is a bit harder to describe.  Union Bay in the 19th century wasn't a backwater.  Ravenna Creek, which then had probably the largest watershed in what is now North Seattle, flowed into it, as did Yesler Creek and others.  But the main flow in Lake Washington was from the Sammamish River mouth in the northeast to the Black River in the southeast; Union Bay had little to do with that.  Now, however, Lake Washington is fed by both the Sammamish and, in the southeast, the Cedar River, and it all flows out, rather faster than before, through Union Bay.

The only bridge across Union Bay is the 520 one, hopping islands until it starts floating from the last.

I've shown you, dear Diary, views across each of these bodies of water, except the Narrows.  But the only new photo I happen to have handy is one I took from a shore of Union Bay, trying to catch Mount Rainier, but getting mostly bay instead.

Lake Washington

The canal begins or ends in, um, the second largest lake in Washington, but certainly much the largest near the major population centre of western Washington.  Of course, like Lake Union, Portage Bay, and Union Bay, it used to be bigger, but not enough bigger to have been #1.

The effects of lowering Lake Washington, which of course made it smaller, shallower, and faster-moving, were profound, and exacerbated by the following half-century's hostility to the wetlands that remained.  The swamps now in Magnuson Park aren't those shown there on the 1908 topographical map, but new ones, built in the 1970s after the park expanded with the military's withdrawal.  Waterway's sixth chapter, "Environmental Change", pages 112-127, is primarily about what happened to Lake Washington.  That chapter also covers the mess of rivers at the lake's south end and the changes those endured, though a map or three really would've helped.

Meanwhile in North Seattle, Lake Washington is the water to most places' east, and occasionally to the north, south or even west of some.  The city has three parks along its shores, Magnuson Park, Matthews Beach, and the NE 130th St Street End, and an overlapping four street ends, at NE 130th St, 51st Ave NE, NE 43rd St, and NE 31st St (the eastern one).  The recent Hike 2B page has the references on Magnuson Park.  For Matthews Beach "Go North, Aging Man!" May 6 did the minimum, but see mainly "To the Beaches!" December 1, and the street ends page has more photos.  The NE 130th St Street End, similarly, first appeared May 28 in "Top of the City", part I, but all my photos of it are in the street end page.

We can thank our bridgelessness for Magnuson Park.  According to Wikipedia on the 1963 floating bridge, back around 1960 when the state was deciding where to put the second bridge across Lake Washington, the city advocated the obvious short route from Sand Point to Kirkland.  But the Navy said no, and as a result 520 is south of the canal and we have a gigantic, annoying park instead.  The lake is just as narrow further north, but up there the land route is close enough that it isn't worth the trouble of a bridge.

Anyway, at the north end of Lake Washington we're clearly away from the canal, though not from its effects.  I hope, dear Diary, you've had some fun along the way.