20 Seattle Landmarks You Can See by Kayak from Agua Verde

Opened in fall 2020, the park was created after a seven-year effort to transform the former University of Washington Police Station and recycling center into an environmentally focused waterfront park.

The park is named for Frederick “Fritz” Hedges, a longtime Seattle Parks and Recreation employee who devoted his career to the belief that parks and recreation are essential parts of urban life.

Visitors will find shoreline restoration, lawn space, interpretive features and water access for hand-carried boats. The site also reflects Portage Bay’s long history as a Native American portage route and, later, as part of one of Seattle’s busiest working waterways.

From 1920 to 1938, the property operated as a lumber mill. It later became Bryant’s Marina. In the 1960s, KING-TV owner Stimson Bullitt considered building a Mies van der Rohe-designed headquarters here, but the project never advanced beyond the planning stage. The University of Washington purchased the property in 1969 and eventually converted it into its police station.

The building was originally constructed on the University of Washington campus to welcome visitors to the 1909 exposition. After the fair, it was placed on a raft, floated across Portage Bay and converted into a floating home.

It remained one of Seattle’s oldest houseboats until it was demolished in 2021 after falling into serious disrepair.

The old flotation logs remain historically significant. Submerged wood is also associated with the scent cues migrating salmon use as they return toward their natal waters, which is one reason old houseboat flotation structures are often treated carefully.

University of Washington professor Philip Thiel wanted the park to have a sculptural feature that reflected its maritime setting. After years of searching, he located a large tugboat propeller at Bering Marine of Seattle and persuaded the company to donate it.

Before the propeller could be installed, it was stolen from Thiel’s backyard, apparently by thieves hoping to sell it as scrap metal. The theft drew widespread news coverage, and the propeller was found abandoned along a road in South Seattle about a day later.

It was finally installed in 2012 and remains the centerpiece of this quiet Portage Bay pocket park.

George Pocock, the legendary racing-shell builder associated with the 1936 U.S. Olympic rowing team celebrated in The Boys in the Boat, built and launched crew shells here during the later part of his career.

Today, the building serves as a studio and hotshop for internationally known Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly.

It is considered one of the world’s largest glass hotshops and is used by Chihuly and his team to create works for exhibitions and installations around the world.

Seattle folk singer and restaurateur Ivar Haglund began his business career with a private aquarium and fish-and-chips counter at what is now Pier 54 on the downtown waterfront.

He opened the Lake Union Salmon House in 1969. The building was designed inside and out in the style of a Tlingit longhouse.

One of its most memorable features for kayakers and boaters is the dock: visitors can paddle or boat directly to the restaurant.

Built in 1929, the Skansonia carried cars and passengers across the Tacoma Narrows between Gig Harbor and Point Defiance, including during the years surrounding the 1940 collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

After the replacement bridge opened in 1950, the vessel joined the Washington State Ferries system and operated on the Tahlequah–Point Defiance route until its retirement in 1967.

Seattle developer Norm Volotin purchased the ferry in 1971. It eventually found a permanent home at the foot of Latona Avenue Northeast on Lake Union.

Today, the restored ferry is used as a private event facility with interior spaces and decks overlooking Lake Union, downtown Seattle and the Space Needle.

The movie used the actual houseboat for exterior scenes, while the interior scenes were filmed on a studio set. As a result, the inside of the real home does not match the movie.

The houseboat sits at the end of a picturesque dock reached from Westlake Avenue North.

Built in 1978, the floating home sold in 1993 for $550,000 and again in 2014 for more than $2 million.

At more than 2,200 square feet, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, it is among the larger floating homes on Lake Union.

The plant operated from 1906 until 1956, producing manufactured gas for Seattle.

The City of Seattle later acquired the property and transformed it into a public park rather than removing every industrial structure.

The park opened in 1975 following an influential redesign by Seattle landscape architect Richard Haag.

From the water, paddlers get one of the best views of the park’s preserved towers, grassy hill and downtown skyline beyond.

It was the first of Seattle’s four major bascule bridges. The others are the University, Ballard and Montlake bridges.

A bascule bridge uses one or two movable leaves that rotate from horizontal to near vertical. Massive counterweights—steel boxes filled with concrete beneath the roadway—help lift the bridge.

The Fremont Bridge’s opening system is powered by large electric motors, allowing vessels with virtually unlimited height clearance to pass beneath when the bridge is raised.

Hundreds of wrecks and countless discarded objects are believed to rest on the lake bottom.

The easy access and relatively protected water make some of these wrecks popular with experienced divers.

One of the best-known submerged vessels is the Gypsy Queen, a World War II-era minesweeper that reportedly remains largely intact on the bottom of Lake Union.

The company purchased property here and began building and maintaining vessels in 1919.

More than a century later, it remains one of the West Coast’s prominent ship-repair facilities.

Its dry docks can lift multiple vessels and thousands of tons, while the Lake Washington Ship Canal and Ballard Locks provide access between freshwater Lake Union and Puget Sound.

Boeing’s first airplane—a seaplane fitted with pontoons made by Pocock Racing Shells—made its maiden flight from Lake Union in 1916.

Early aviation experiments here were not always graceful. One overpowered and under-engineered aircraft reportedly climbed abruptly, fell back toward the lake and forced its pilot into the water. Boeing later completed successful mail flights to Bellingham and Vancouver, British Columbia.

The original Boeing hangar is gone. A later building on the site became headquarters for the Duwamish Tribe.

The neighboring Roanoke Reef floating-home development is also associated with the tribe, with individual homes held through long-term lease arrangements. Because of changing shoreline and zoning rules, it may represent one of the last floating-home communities developed on Seattle’s inland waterways.

Early houseboats were crude structures built on rafts for logging workers who followed timber downstream. By the 1920s, some floating homes were used as summer retreats around Lake Washington, while Lake Union houseboats provided year-round housing for fishermen, boatbuilders, bootleggers and working families.

The community expanded dramatically during the Great Depression, when people used salvaged cedar logs and floating debris to build inexpensive temporary homes. By the late 1930s, Seattle had more than 2,000 houseboats.

After World War II, students, artists and other bohemian residents moved in. During the 1950s, urban-renewal campaigns targeted floating-home communities for removal and replacement by over-water apartments and commercial development.

By the early 1960s, the number of Seattle houseboats had been cut roughly in half. In 1962, residents formed the Floating Homes Association to protect their homes and way of life.

Today, roughly 500 floating homes remain, making them a rare and highly visible part of Seattle’s maritime identity.

Founded in the 1970s at the south end of Lake Union, the center documents regional boatbuilding, sailing and small-craft history.

Public programs include boat rentals, sailing instruction, hands-on workshops and volunteer opportunities.

Its collection includes more than 170 vessels, primarily small sailboats and rowboats.

One signature craft is the Blanchard Junior Knockabout, designed and built by the historic Blanchard Boat Company on Lake Union and still used in the center’s rental fleet.

MOHAI’s collection includes approximately four million objects, although only a small portion can be displayed at one time.

The museum occupies the historic Naval Reserve Armory in Lake Union Park.

It moved to this waterfront location in 2012 after operating for decades in its original Montlake-area building.

For paddlers, the museum and armory form one of the most recognizable landmarks at the south end of Lake Union.

The building was used to host visitors and foreign dignitaries during the exposition on the University of Washington campus.

After the fair, it was moved onto the water and became part of Portage Bay’s floating-home community.

Although the house itself is gone, old flotation logs and structural remains are still associated with the site.

Such submerged wood is historically important and may also provide scent cues used by migrating salmon as they navigate toward their natal streams.

The Duwamish portage connected the coast with an inland network of lakes and rivers extending toward present-day Issaquah and beyond.

In 1917, engineers breached a dam here as part of the Lake Washington Ship Canal project, creating a navigable route for ships and cargo between Lake Washington and Puget Sound.

The project lowered Lake Washington by approximately nine feet.

The concrete walls of the Cut are decorated by rowing teams, especially around the Windermere Cup, the annual University of Washington crew race held on the first Saturday in May as part of Seattle’s Opening Day boating celebration.

Haida chief John Dewey Wallace carved the pole in 1937 for the Waterfall Cannery in Southeast Alaska, where it stood near the general store for many years.

After disappearing, the pole later resurfaced in Seattle in two pieces.

Private benefactors funded an extensive restoration and donated it to the city for permanent installation near the east end of the Cut.

The carving depicts an old woman left alone in her village, with the woman’s head at the top, a Haida man at the base, a young boy between a bear’s feet and an eagle holding a fish in its talons.

Birds and beavers use the marsh extensively, making it one of the best nearby places to slow down and watch for wildlife from a kayak.

A wooden boardwalk reaches the island from a trail beginning near the East Montlake Park parking area.

Great blue herons often stalk the shallows or rest on logs and spits. Bald eagles also pass overhead, drawn to the productive waters of Union Bay.

Water access routes can change during construction projects around State Route 520, so paddlers should follow current closures and posted directions.

The island can be reached on foot by a bridge from the Arboretum and explored from the surrounding waterways by kayak.

Near the mouth of Arboretum Creek stood a Duwamish village with a large cedar longhouse. Foster Island itself is identified in Duwamish oral history as an ancestral burial place.

Early non-Native settlers also reported seeing burial boxes suspended in trees along the island’s shoreline. These accounts became central to later controversy over plans to place State Route 520 bridge structures in and around the island.

Water routes into Duck Bay can be narrow or obstructed by fallen trees and construction. Paddlers should use caution and follow current access conditions.