Ghosts of Transit Past Haunt Seattle Streets
Image: Jordan Kay
Don’t listen to Grandpa: He didn’t have to walk miles through the snow, uphill both ways, to get to school. Seattle once had a robust mass transit system that brought riders to the farthest reaches of the still-growing city.
Evidence of how the city was shaped by these streetcars, trolleys, trains, and passenger boats still dot the landscape, for those who know where to look.
1) Greenwood Park
A train sculpture commemorates the Interurban trains that stopped around here from 1910 to 1939. Cement arrows point visitors north to Everett and south to Seattle, but the tracks end just a few feet away.
2) Fremont Trolley Barn
Before running with chocolate as Theo or beer as Redhook, trolleys flowed through 3400 Phinney. It served as a trolley car barn from 1905 until the city’s final streetcar parked there in 1941.
3) Ghost Tracks
The streetcar tracks are gone, but streets still show their paths, like where the #16 turned around as NE 55th Street approaches 35th Avenue NE. A swath of mismatched cement now curves into a phantom driveway.
4) Waiting for the Interurban Statue
Fremont’s famous cast-aluminum passengers would have waited a long time, since the trolley stopped across the canal, where the original shelter still sits at Westlake and Dexter.
5) Counterbalance Park
To get cable cars safely up and down Queen Anne’s 19 percent grade in 1901, 16-ton counterbalances ran opposite the cars, hidden underground. The park’s creation in 2008 covered an entrance to the disused tunnels.
6) Madison Park Ferry Dock
Where Madison Street dead-ends, passengers once boarded ferries across the lake to Kirkland, part of a larger ferry system mostly made obsolete by floating bridges.
7) Yesler Trolley Viaduct
The city’s first cable car line ran from 1889 until 1940, up Yesler from Lake Washington to Downtown, crossing a bridge that still arches over Lake Washington Boulevard in Leschi Park.
8) Interurban Building
This stunning Pioneer Square example of Romanesque Revival architecture from 1890 once served as a station for the Interurban Railway, which ran to Tacoma and Everett. Today, it holds Tat’s Delicatessen, among other businesses.
9) Endolyne Joe’s
West Seattle’s Endolyne area took its name from its position at the end of the (streetcar) line; the restaurant took its name from an apocryphal conductor on said trolley.
10) Georgetown Steam Plant
Built in 1906 to power the city’s electric streetcars, this decommissioned industrial building now powers the community as an arts incubator, education center, and event space.
11) Wildwood Shelter
The Seattle and Rainier Valley Railway stopped running in 1937, but the bus passengers still enjoy the shade of the historic shelter at the stop on Rainier Avenue S near S Holden Street.
