Alki Beach is where Seattle says it began. The city's official founding date, November 13, 1851, is the day the schooner Exact put a party of settlers ashore on this sand, and almost everything about the beach as a destination flows from that one fact rather than from the water.

The landing itself. The Exact was not a settlement ship. It was a schooner under a Captain Folger, bound for the gold fields of the Queen Charlotte Islands, that agreed to drop passengers at Puget Sound on the way. It had left Portland on November 5, 1851, touched at Astoria, and rounded into Elliott Bay on November 13 to land the Denny Party: twenty-four people, twelve adults and twelve children, led by Arthur A. Denny. They came ashore in the rain to a cabin that was still missing its roof. David Denny, already on the ground and unwell, is remembered for greeting the boat with "I wish you hadn't come." It is, by any measure, an unglamorous founding, and the beach has never entirely scrubbed that out of the story.

The name is a joke that came true elsewhere. The settlers platted six blocks and called the place New York Alki. "New York" was borrowed ambition; "Alki" is Chinook Jargon for "by and by" or "eventually." So the name promises a New York, someday. The punchline is that the someday city did arrive, but not here. Within a year most of the party crossed Elliott Bay to the deeper harbor at present-day Pioneer Square, and Seattle grew on that far shore. Alki kept the date and lost the town. The beach is therefore the birthplace of a city that is somewhere else, which is exactly the kind of fact that gives the place its slightly wry character.

The monuments do the remembering. Two objects carry the spike. The Birthplace of Seattle Monument, a stone pylon, was raised on the fifty-fourth anniversary, November 13, 1905, and names the founding families. A few hundred meters east stands a Statue of Liberty replica, given by the Boy Scouts in 1952 under the Strengthening the Arm of Liberty campaign; after years of vandalism the original was pulled in July 2006, recast in bronze in Tacoma for about $140,000, and reinstalled on September 11, 2007, on a new pedestal. People come to Alki to stand next to these, photograph the skyline behind them, and read the date.

What the bronze leaves out. The landing was not an arrival in empty country. Alki Point is sbaqʷabqs, "prairie point," in Lushootseed, and the Duwamish had maintained the prairies behind the beach for generations by seasonal burning. Chief Si'ahl, whose name the city took as Seattle, met the newcomers at the water. The 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott ceded Duwamish land; the Duwamish Tribe is still federally unrecognized and has no reservation. So the spike is double. Alki is a genuine founding site and a genuine site of erasure, and the older name of the point is the cleanest reminder that something was here before the Exact.

Why the spike, not the surf. The waves at Alki average under 0.2 meters and the water sits between about 9 and 16 degrees Celsius; nobody travels here for the swimming. They travel for the date on the pylon and the story it compresses: a rain-soaked landing of twenty-four people who named a six-block townsite after a city it would never become, on an inhabited shore, and a century later cast it all as a beginning.