, built 1889–1890 as the Kirkland Investment Company Building. Now Kirkland Arts Center. Several Indigenous peoples have lived on the Eastside for thousands of years prior to American colonization. The various subgroups of the Hachuamish, as well as the
Sammamish, had many villages along the eastern coast of Lake Washington and the
Sammamish River. Although they were more contained to the southernmost reaches of the Eastside, the modern-day site of
Renton was the center of
Duwamish society. Farther out in the Snoqualmie Valley, the
Snoqualmie were historically one of the most populous tribes in the Puget Sound region. The cities on the Eastside mostly began as centers of logging or mining in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Once logged, the land was eventually cleared (supplemented by some Japanese immigrant labor) to support farming. In the years prior to World War II they became centers of dairy and berry farming. During the post-war boom, they became
bedroom communities for Seattle. This was made possible by the 1940 construction of the
Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge across Lake Washington, as well as the later construction of the
Evergreen Point Floating Bridge in 1963; additional traffic later led to the construction of an additional bridge paralleling the Murrow bridge,
Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge, as well as the
replacement of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. Currently, the area is growing several
edge cities. ==Economy==