Washington, US

Alki Beach

Alki Beach: The Landing That Named Seattle

Alki Beach carries Seattle's official founding date, November 13, 1851, the day the schooner Exact landed the Denny Party on this sand. The beach is a working urban shoreline today, but its claim on visitors is historical: this is where the city says it began, on an inhabited shore the settlers named after a city it would never become.

Alki Beach,

The schooner Exact, November 1851

The Exact was not a colonists' 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 north. It 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 arrived in the rain. The cabin that John Low and Lee Terry had started was still roofless. David Denny, already on the ground and ill, is remembered for greeting the boat with, "I wish you hadn't come." It is an unheroic founding, and the line has survived precisely because it punctures the myth.

"New York Alki"

The party platted six blocks and named the settlement New York Alki. "New York" was an ambition borrowed from settlers' home state; "Alki" is Chinook Jargon, the regional trade language, for "by and by" or "eventually." The name reads as a promise: New York, someday.

The someday city arrived, but not here. Within a year most of the party crossed Elliott Bay to the deeper, more sheltered harbor at what is now Pioneer Square, and Seattle grew on that far shore. Alki kept the founding date and lost the town. The beach is, by the strict logic of the name, the birthplace of a city that is somewhere else.

The Duwamish and the older name

The landing was not an arrival in empty country. Alki Point is sbaqʷabqs, "prairie point," in Lushootseed. The Duwamish people had used and maintained the prairies behind the beach for generations, keeping them open by seasonal burning for gathering. In the mid-1850s the Duwamish occupied at least seventeen villages and dozens of longhouses along the lower Duwamish River, Elliott Bay, and the lakes.

Chief Si'ahl, the dxʷdəwʔabš leader whose anglicized name the city took as Seattle, was among those who met the newcomers at the water. The 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott ceded Duwamish land. The Duwamish Tribe remains federally unrecognized today, without a reservation, operating a longhouse and cultural center across the river from this beach. The Birthplace of Seattle Monument names the settler families; it does not name the people who were already here.

The monuments

Two objects carry the memory of the landing.

The Birthplace of Seattle Monument, a stone pylon, was erected on November 13, 1905, the fifty-fourth anniversary of the landing, by the Washington University State Historical Society and presented by Lenora Denny. It names eight founding families: Arthur Denny and wife, John Low and wife, Carson Boren and wife, David Denny, and Charles Terry.

A few hundred meters east stands a roughly two-meter Statue of Liberty replica, donated by Reginald H. Parsons and the Seattle Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America in 1952, part of the national Strengthening the Arm of Liberty campaign. After years of vandalism the original was removed in July 2006, recast in bronze in Tacoma for about $140,000, and reinstalled on September 11, 2007, on a new 4.5-foot pedestal in a redesigned plaza.

The lighthouse and the park

The Alki Point Lighthouse at the southwest tip was completed in 1913, succeeding an 1887 post light and a private lantern that Hans Martin Hanson had hung in the 1870s. The surrounding Alki Beach Park, created in 1907 and now 135.9 acres with about half a mile of beachfront, is described as the first public salt-water bathing beach on the West Coast of the United States. Together, the pylon, the replica, the lighthouse, and the park make Alki a beach visited less for its cold, calm water than for the date stamped on its founding.

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