It runs from the Pioneer Square shore roughly northwest past Downtown Seattle and Belltown, ending at the Broad Street site of the Olympic Sculpture Park.

[25] After the final departure of the Princess Marguerite, Pier 48 became home to a museum ship, the Soviet-era Foxtrot class submarine Cobra.

[32] The one prominent remaining feature of the crumbling wharf is the Harbor Entrance Pergola, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[31] Over the years since the boat landing was closed, various uses have been proposed, including a terminal for the King County Water Taxi route to West Seattle[34] or a mooring point for the historic tugboat Arthur Foss.

Huntington was also co-architect of the nearby Morrison Hotel (1909) and was responsible for the 1912 repairs to Colman Dock on the site of the present ferry terminal.

On the night of April 25, 1912, the steel-hulled ship Alameda accidentally set its engines "full speed ahead" instead of reversing, and slammed into the dock.

The fire department used to play a particularly critical role on the waterfront: not only were the piers all made of wood; until federal money helped pay for the construction of a seawall in 1934, so was the road along the water (prior to that Railroad Avenue, after that Alaskan Way).

That year, Ivar Haglund rented the northeast corner of the pier shed for a one-room aquarium, which included a small fish and chips stand.

[48] Since 1988, Pier 54 has been home not only to Ivar's Acres of Clams, but also to the current incarnation of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, which has occupied a succession of venues on the Central Waterfront since its founding in 1899.

Besides the usual run of tourist souvenirs, it sells a variety of Northwest Native art; the store prides itself on dealing directly with the artists.

None of these are nearly as unusual as the store's "museum" curiosities, which are not for sale: "Sylvester" the mummy, fetal Conjoined twins calves, a collection of shrunken human heads, a woven cedar bark hat worn by Chief Seattle, whale and walrus oosiks, and a number of items that appeared in Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

Its first tenant, the Arlington Dock Company, was a shipping agent for passenger steamships to several West Coast cities and to Alaska, Asia and Europe.

With the adjacent Pier 4/55, it was one of the two Arlington Docks, but is better known as the base of operations for Frank Waterhouse and Company, a steamship line that rose to prominence during the Klondike Gold Rush.

During the 1962 Century 21 Exposition, the World's Fair at what afterwards became Seattle Center, the pier added curio shops, restaurants, fish houses, etc., and ceased to be a transportation hub.

Ainsworth and Dunn left this pier around the time the present shed was constructed; subsequent tenants were grain dealer Willis Robinson and the Northwestern Steamship Company.

It was designed by architect Max Umbrecht and one of its main tenants in the 1910s was Northwest Fisheries, who canned and distributed Alaskan red salmon.

A pedestrian elevator and overpass at Bell Street connects it to the upland World Trade Center (another Port of Seattle property), as well as to a parking lot and to Belltown in general.

Cleared around 1903 in conjunction with the regrading of Denny Hill,[69] it became home to the Pacific Coast Company's Orient Dock, which ran parallel to the shoreline rather than at the usual northeast–southwest angle.

Triad Development bought the pier in 1995, and in the late 1990s it was remodeled as a headquarters for Go2Net, which was merged into InfoSpace, and fared poorly in the 2000–2001 crash that followed the dot-com bubble.

[64] Southeast from there, across Clay Street, the 2601 Elliott building that is was once the headquarters of Zulily as well as part of the Art Institute of Seattle began life in 1916 as the American Can Company, and in the 1930s was connected to Pier 69 by a skybridge.

[87] The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway (SLS&ER) was the first to run a rail line along the water, in 1887, with a depot near the foot of Columbia Street on Western Avenue.

Constitutional provisions were also made for state-owned harbors with zones along the shore reserved for "landings, wharves and streets and other conveniences of navigation and commerce."

All this was later modified to allow towns and municipalities to gain more control of their own shorelines, setting the stage for coherent plans for development and reclamation.

Thomson and Cotterill's arrangement spared freight trains from needing to make a sharp right angle and prevented piers from potentially running into one another where the shoreline curved.

[91] The waterfront was a focus of the conflicting agendas of big business, radical labor unionists such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Populists, and middle-class Progressive reformers such as the Municipal Ownership League led by George Cotterill.

Former livery stables continued to be converted to garages, the Black Ball Line brought a striking Art Deco motif to Colman Dock, and Gorst Air Transport operated seaplanes.

In 1946, E. H. Savage, president of the Port Commission, proposed demolishing the "Gold Rush period" piers and put forth the first of several schemes for "modern reinforced concrete structures, providing longitudinal mooring parallel to Alaskan Way", suitable for "large ocean-going vessels".

Proposed to take their place were such things as a sea circus, an aquarium, hotels and motels, a park, a marina, a heliport, a convention center, shops, restaurants, office buildings, and high rise apartments.

The planning process behind this document began in 2003 and centered on a 300-person Visioning Charrette in February 2004, the largest event of its kind in the city's history.

Aside from the city's process, plans are under consideration for major work at the Washington State Ferry terminal and the Seattle Aquarium; the Olympic Sculpture Park has already transformed the northern end of the Central Waterfront.