Sights in Seattle
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Seattle Museum Of The Mysteries
Now in its new location at 10th and Union, the Museum of the Mysteries is more a cache of obscure and alternative knowledge than a museum in the traditional sense. Odd but fascinating, this den in Capitol Hill has a number of treasures that reveal themselves to those with the patience to explore. It’s kitschy, but it’s fun. There’s also an oxygen bar ($5 for a five-minute treatment) and tarot readings.
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University of Washington
Seattle's university (founded 1861) is almost as old as the city itself and is highly ranked worldwide. The beautiful 700-acre campus sits at the edge of Lake Union about 3 miles northeast of downtown and affords views of Mt Rainier. The main streets are University Way, known as 'the Ave,' and NE 45th St, both lined with coffee shops, restaurants and bars. The core of the campus is Central Plaza, known as Red Sq because of its brick base. Get information and a campus map at the visitor center.
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Washington State Convention & Trade Center
It’s hard to miss this gigantic complex decked out with ballrooms, meeting rooms, space for exhibitions and the Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau. An arched-glass bridge spans Pike St between 7th and 8th Aves, with what looks like a giant eye in the middle of it. Strewn across the various decks and patios, Freeway Park provides a leafy, fountain-laden downtown oasis.
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Children’s Museum
In the basement of Center House near the monorail stop, the Children’s Museum is an anachronistic learning center that offers activities and displays seemingly imported from an earlier time; it’s a museum that might itself belong in a museum. But it’s all very charming, if lacking in modern-day bells and whistles. The play area includes a child-size neighborhood and an area dedicated to blowing soap bubbles. Also nearby is the Seattle Children’s Theater, a separate entity with summer performances in the Charlotte Martin and Eve Alvord Theaters.
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Arctic Building
The Arctic Building, completed in 1917, is unique for its intricate terra-cotta ornamentation and 25 walrus heads peeking off the building’s exterior. Though the walruses’ tusks were originally authentic ivory, an earthquake in the 1940s managed to shake a few of them loose to the ground. To protect passersby from the unusual urban hazard of being skewered by falling tusks, the ivory was replaced with epoxy.
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Wallingford Center
This boutique and restaurant mall, inhabiting the nearly condemned, refurbished old Wallingford grade school, is the hub of the area. Out front, the Wallingford Animal Storm sculpture, created by artist Ronald Petty, depicts wildlife found in and around the neighborhood. It’s not a destination, particularly, but it makes a good landmark or a handy place to park yourself on a bench and relax for a moment.
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Queen Anne Counterbalance
The streetcar that chugged up and down the steep grade along Queen Anne Ave started operating on overhead-wire electricity in 1900, but it still needed some help to manage the hill. So engineers designed a system of counterweights – a 16-ton train that ran in a tunnel beneath the street would go up when the cable car went down and vice versa. The cable cars were retired in 1943, but the underground tunnels are still there.
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Golden Gardens Park
Golden Gardens Park, established in 1904 by Harry W Treat, is a lovely 95-acre beach park with sandy beaches north of Shilshole Bay Marina. There are picnic facilities, restrooms, basketball hoops, volleyball nets, gangs of Canadian geese, lots of parking and plenty of space to get away from all the activity. Rising above Golden Gardens is Sunset Hill Park, a prime perch for dramatic sunsets and long views.
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Viet Hoa
The Viet Hoa market (look for the ‘Chinatown Market-Seafood & Meat’ sign) has a greengrocer in one building and a fish and meat market in the other. Both display foods and cuts of meat you may have never seen before. The big tank of live turtles at the door and the buckets of fish that look like they’re one splash away from coming back to life assure you that this market carries only the freshest ingredients.
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Roq La Rue
This Belltown gallery has secured its reputation by taking risks: the work on view here skates along the edge of urban pop-culture. Since opening in 1998, the gallery, which is owned and curated by Kirsten Anderson, has been a significant force in the pop surrealism field, and is frequently featured in Juxtapoz magazine. It also has an entertaining blog about the undercurrents of Northwest art (http://roqlaruenews.blogspot.com).
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Seattle Asian Art Museum
In stately Volunteer Park, the museum houses the extensive art collection of Dr Richard Fuller, who donated this severe art-moderne-style gallery to the city in 1932.
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Danny Woo International District Community Gardens
The Danny Woo International District Community Gardens is a 1.5-acre plot reserved for about 120 older and low-income International District residents, who grow a profusion of vegetables and fruit trees. Visitors can wander along the gravel paths and admire both the tidy gardens and the Seattle skyline, as well as good views of Elliott Bay. Unfortunately, while you take in the view you’ll have about 17 lanes of I-5 traffic right at your back.
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Seattle Aquarium
Probably the most interesting site in the Waterfront area, this well-designed aquarium offers a view into the underwater world of Puget Sound and the Pacific Northwest coast. ‘Window on Washington Waters’ is a look at the sea floor of the Neah Bay area, where rockfish, salmon, sea anemones and more than 100 other fish and invertebrate species live. ‘Crashing Waves’ uses a wave tank to show how marine plants and animals cope with the forceful tides near shore.
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Burke Museum
The best museum of natural history in the Northwest is situated near the junction of NE 45th St and 16th Ave. The main collections are of fossils, plus artifacts from 19 different Native American cultures.
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St Mark’s Cathedral
Go north on Broadway (as the chaos turns to well-maintained houses with manicured lawns) until it turns into 10th Ave E and you’re within a block of Volunteer Park. At the neo-Byzantine St Mark’s Cathedral, various choirs perform on Sundays, accompanied by a 3944-pipe Flentrop organ. The performances are free and open to the public. There’s also a concert series held in the cathedral, for which tickets can be purchased at the cathedral shop or by phone at 206-323-1040.
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Grand Central Arcade
This lovely meeting point was originally Squire’s Opera House, erected in 1879 by Watson Squire, who became one of Washington’s first senators after it achieved statehood. When the Opera House burned down, it was rebuilt as the Squire-Latimer Building and later became the Grand Central Hotel. The hotel died during the Depression, but it underwent a major restoration in the 1970s and now contains two floors of shops, including the excellent Grand Central Baking Co.
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Central Plaza (Red Square)
The center of campus is more commonly referred to as because of its base of red brick. It’s not the coziest, but it fills up with students cheerfully sunning themselves on nice days and it looks impressive at night. Broken Obelisk, the 26ft-high stainless-steel sculpture in the square, was made by noted color-field painter Barnett Newman. Just below Red Square is a wide promenade leading to lovely Rainier Vista, with spectacular views across Lake Washington to Mt Rainier.
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Alki Beach Park
Alki Beach has an entirely different feel from the rest of Seattle: this 2-mile stretch of sandy beach could almost fool you into thinking it’s California, at least on a sunny day. There’s a bike path, volleyball courts on the sand, and rings for beach fires. Look for the miniature Statue of Liberty, donated by the Boy Scouts (currently removed for repair and replaced by a copy). There’s also a pylon marking Arthur Denny’s landing party’s first stop in 1851, which for some reason has a chip of Massachusetts’ Plymouth Rock embedded in its base.
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Statue Of Lenin
This is the latest and most controversial addition to Fremont’s collection of public art. This bronze, 16ft statue of former communist leader Vladimir Lenin weighs 7 tons. It was brought to the USA from Slovakia by an American, Lewis Carpenter, who found the statue in a scrap pile after the 1989 revolution. Carpenter spent a fortune to bring it over, sure that some crazy American would want to buy it. No one did, so here it stands biding its time in Fremont, allegedly still on sale for $250,000.
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Museum Of History & Industry
Generally near the top on any list of the city’s best attractions, this museum at the northwest corner of Washington Park Arboretum documents the history of Seattle and the Puget Sound in regard to its lumber, fishing and shipping industries. There’s also a big Boeing presence, including a 1920s mail plane. Usually called by its acronym, Mohai has an entertaining collection of historical photos, old planes, memorabilia from the Great Fire, and artifacts and lore from Seattle’s great seafaring era.
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Woodland Park Zoo
In Woodland Park, up the hill from Green Lake Park, the Woodland Park Zoo is one of Seattle’s greatest tourist attractions, consistently rated as one of the top 10 zoos in the country. It was one of the first in the nation to free animals from their restrictive cages in favor of ecosystem enclosures, where animals from similar environments share large spaces designed to replicate their natural surroundings. Feature exhibits include a tropical rain forest, two gorilla exhibits, an African savanna and an Asian elephant forest.
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Corner & Sanitary Market Buildings
Across Pike Place from the Main Arcade are the 1912 Corner Market Building and the Sanitary Market Building, so named because they were the first of the market buildings in which live animals were prohibited. It’s now a maze of ethnic groceries and great little eateries, including the Three Girls Bakery, which has a sit-down area (it’s always packed) and a take-out window with some of the best breads and sandwiches around. This is also the home of Left Bank Books, an excellent source for all your radical reading needs.
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Frye Art Museum
This small museum on First Hill preserves the collection of Charles and Emma Frye. The Fryes collected more than 1000 paintings, mostly 19th- and early-20th-century European and American pieces, and a few Alaskan and Russian artworks. If this inspires a stifled yawn, think again. Since its 1997 expansion, the Frye has gained a hipness that it once lacked; fresh ways of presenting its artwork, music performances, poetry readings and interesting rotating exhibits from traveling painters to local printmakers make the museum a worthwhile stop.
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Stimson-Green Mansion
One of the first homes on First Hill, the baronial Stimson-Green Mansion is an English Tudor-style mansion completed in 1901 by lumber and real-estate developer CD Stimson. Built from brick, stucco and wood, this stately home is now owned by Stimson’s granddaughter and used for private catered events such as weddings and themed dinners. The interior rooms are decorated to reflect the different design styles popular at the turn of the 20th century. To register for a tour, call the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation.
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Hiram M Chittenden Locks
Here, the waters of Lake Washington and Lake Union flow through the 8-mile-long Lake Washington Ship Canal and into Puget Sound. Construction of the canal began in 1911; today 100,000 boats a year pass through the locks, about a half-mile west of Ballard, off NW Market St. Take bus 17 from downtown at 4th Ave and Union St. On the southern side of the locks you can watch from underwater glass tanks or from above as salmon navigate a fish ladder on their way to spawning grounds in the Cascade headwaters of the Sammamish River, which feeds Lake Washington.
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