Pioneer Square - Where Seattle Began

Photo: Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)

A stop on Seattle Pike Place and Downtown, a free self-guided tour.

You're standing in Pioneer Square, where Seattle got its start - twice. Long before settlers arrived, this shoreline was home to the Duwamish people, whose villages lined the bay and rivers for thousands of years. The town that grew here in the 1850s took its name from Si'ahl, a Duwamish and Suquamish leader better known as Chief Seattle. His bronze bust stands in this little triangle of a park.

The iron-and-glass pergola above you went up in 1909 as an elegant shelter over an underground restroom. A truck knocked it flat in 2001, and the city rebuilt it piece by piece.

Now look at all the brick and stone. On June 6, 1889, a pot of glue boiled over in a cabinet shop a few blocks north, and the Great Seattle Fire burned about 25 blocks of downtown. Seattle rebuilt in masonry and raised its streets, leaving old storefronts below ground. Eight years later the Klondike Gold Rush sent thousands of miners, and a flood of money, through these same streets.

Getting here: Start at the pergola in Pioneer Place, the small triangular park where First Avenue meets Yesler Way. The Pioneer Square light rail station is a few blocks east.

Did you know?: The totem pole in this park is a replacement carved by Tlingit artists and installed in 1940. The first one was taken from a Tlingit village in Alaska by a party of Seattle boosters in 1899, and an arsonist badly burned it in 1938.

Photo op: Stand at the south end of the park and frame the pergola with the red stone Pioneer Building rising behind it.

More on Wikipedia: Pioneer Square, Seattle · Chief Seattle · Great Seattle Fire · Klondike Gold Rush

Pioneer Square - Where Seattle Began

Stops on this tour