WRITTEN BY PAUL DORPAT

COURTESY OF LAWTON GOWEY

The West Seattle Ferry Terminal was a fixture on Harbor Avenue between 1889 and the discontinuation of regular service in the late teens. A small steamer that Jim Taylor ran back and forth to Seattle during the summer of 1877, when the sawmill on the west shore of Elliott Bay was booming, may have been the first scheduled service to West Seattle. The walk below is part of Seacrest Marine Park.

	PAUL DORPAT

The ferry City of Seattle — here smoking in its slip — began its first 10-minute commute from the central waterfront on Christmas Eve, 1888. The fare was a cheap 5 cents, and that included a trip to the home lots on the plateau above Harbor Avenue once the cable railway began climbing the hill in September 1890. Weeks earlier, the Northern Pacific completed a curving trestle across the tideflats to a new grain elevator on Harbor Avenue. Soon the tracks were extended north along the West Seattle waterfront, crossing as they do here in front of the ferry terminal.

With its multiple connections to Seattle, Harbor Avenue developed into a commercial and manufacturing strip. It was home not only to the terminal but also to two small shipbuilders, two yacht clubs, a boathouse with rental skiffs, fish processors and a "bone yard" for retired vessels of the Puget Sound Navigation Co. Attached to the grain elevator was a flour mill that continued to grind and sack flour until 1956.

West Seattle as a whole developed into an official neighborhood by 1907. It was incorporated into Seattle that year. And the trolley first reached the Seattle side of the bay that summer — on the same day that Luna Park, a grand amusement center, opened on pilings at Duwamish Head. A larger ferry, the West Seattle, replaced the City of Seattle.