The
piers of Seattle's Central Waterfront are numbered from Pier 46, at the south end of the area, to Pier 70 at the northern end.
Piers 46–48 Pier 46, and
land filled, is the southernmost pier on the Central Waterfront and the northernmost pier of the Port of Seattle's container port. For two years in the early 2000s part of it was operated by the Church Council as a
homeless shelter.
South Korean container shipping company
Hanjin Shipping has a lease at the pier through 2015 with a 10-year renewal option. Nonetheless, there has been much discussion about the future of Pier 46. Proposals have included a sports arena, mixed-income or low-income housing, condos and a shopping center, or continued use as part of the port. at Pier 48 in 1975
Pier 48, at the foot of Main Street, also incorporates the former Pier 47.
Nirvana,
Cypress Hill and
the Breeders performed a concert at Pier 48 on December 13, 1993, which was recorded for
MTV. Until 1999, the pier was the Seattle terminal for a ferry service to
Victoria, British Columbia using the ship
Princess Marguerite. After the final departure of the
Princess Marguerite, Pier 48 became home to a museum ship, the Soviet-era
Foxtrot class submarine Cobra. The
Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) purchased the pier from the Port of Seattle in 2008. Citing safety and the expense of maintaining the buildings on the worm-eaten pier, WSDOT demolished the warehouse on the pier in July 2010 in order to use the space as a staging area for the coming demolition of the nearby Alaskan Way Viaduct. Piers 46–48 are roughly in the area once occupied by
Ballast Island. Pier 48 began life in 1901 as Pier B of the Pacific Coast Company's Ocean Dock, which also had two other piers (A and C, the latter also known as City Dock). In the early 20th century, there was a terminal here for the
Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad.
Harbor Entrance Pergola As of 2008 there is no Pier 49 as such; the site used to be the Washington Street Boat Landing, but is closed off and unused. This was roughly the site of both the pre-fire and post-fire Yesler's Wharf and of Piers 1 and 2, built by the Northern Pacific some time between 1901 (when the post-fire Yesler's Wharf was demolished) and 1904. The one prominent remaining feature of the crumbling wharf is the Harbor Entrance Pergola, which is listed on the
National Register of Historic Places. Originally it functioned as a landing point for boats bringing passengers from ships. or a mooring point for the historic tugboat
Arthur Foss. On September 26, 2010, a water taxi carrying 78 passengers failed to reverse its engines and slammed into the pier. 7 were injured. As of 2013, the site hosts the maintenance and moorage barge for the King County Metro water taxi. The Harbor Entrance Pergola was the last-constructed of the historic structures associated with Seattle's Pioneer Square district, and is the district's only important landmark on the west side of Alaskan Way. It was designed by Seattle City Architect Daniel Riggs Huntington and built in 1920. 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. Huntington also designed the
Lake Union Steam Plant, built in 1914. The pergola was restored in the 1970s by the Committee of 33, a local Seattle philanthropic organization. Pier 52 was historically known as
Colman Dock. The original Colman Dock was built by Scottish engineer James Colman in 1882. It burned with most of the rest of the city in the
Great Seattle Fire of 1889, but was quickly rebuilt. In 1908, Colman extended the dock to a total length of and added a domed waiting room and a clocktower. Calamity hit four years later. 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 dock tower fell into the bay and the sternwheeler
Telegraph was sunk. The clock was salvaged, as was the
Telegraph, and the dock was reconstructed with a new tower. at Washington State Ferry Terminal / Colman Dock (2024). In 1912,
Puget Sound was still served by the "
Mosquito Fleet", an assortment of boats plying a variety of routes. The following year,
Joshua Green founded the
Puget Sound Navigation Company (PSNC or Black Ball Line). Within about a decade, they had consolidated control of regional ferries. In the mid-1930s they modernized Colman Dock, using an
Art Deco style that matched their
streamlined signature ferry
MV Kalakala. rammed the terminal February 21, 1966. Though dramatic, the damage proved not to be severe. The ferry needed only minor repairs and was back in service the next day. Repairs to the slip cost $80,000 and took two months to complete. The clock from the old Colman Dock tower, dunked into the bay in the 1912
Alameda accident and removed in the 1936 renovation, was rediscovered (lying in pieces) in 1976, purchased by the Port of Seattle in 1985, restored, given as a gift to the
Washington State Department of Transportation, and reinstalled on the present Colman Dock May 18, 1985. The present 1963 building is the third fire station at this address and the fourth to serve the Central Waterfront. 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). The
Great Seattle Fire of 1889 had consumed the piers as far north as Union Street along with the rest of the heart of the city. After the Great Fire, a small one-story wood frame firehouse was erected near the foot of Madison Street, but not quite at the present site. It opened January 3, 1891 with a crew of nine, the new fireboat
Snoqualmie and a small hose wagon. In 1902, a larger two-story wood-frame building was constructed on the present site and in 1910, the new fireboat
Duwamish replaced the
Snoqualmie. The wood-frame building was demolished in 1916 and replaced by an elegant brick building in 1917, incorporating
Craftsman and
Tudor Revival details. An additional fireboat
Alki came into service in 1928. By 1938, the Kitsap Transportation Company was out of business. 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. The aquarium closed around 1945, at which time the restaurant moved to the southeastern corner and was redesigned in
Streamline Moderne style. In 1966, Haglund purchased the pier, and Washington Fish and Oyster Company became his tenant. The restaurant was repeatedly redesigned and expanded over the years, achieving more or less its present configuration before Haglund's death in 1985. at Pier 55 in 2007.
Pier 55, at the foot of Spring Street, was originally named Pier 4. The first Pier 4, built in 1900, collapsed in September 1901, causing the loss of at least 1700 tons of freight. No one was killed in the accident, and the following year the Northern Pacific Railroad completed a new Pier 4, this time with better bracing, which survives today as the renamed Pier 55. 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. The pier was used for passenger service until around World War I. The Fisheries Supply Company became the principal tenant from at least 1938 to the 1980s. In 1945, the pier was remodeled. Structural improvements were made at that time by Melvin O. Sylliaasen and in the 1960s by the engineering firm Harvey Dodd and Associates. Further improvements were made in the late 1990s, along with some alterations to the exterior of the pier shed. Between Piers 55 and 56, and utilizing parts of both piers as of 2008,
Argosy Cruises moor the tour boats
Royal Argosy,
Spirit of Seattle,
Lady Mary,
Goodtime II, and
Sightseer. From 2009 to 2021, one of its routes included the boat to
Tillicum Village on
Blake Island.
Pier 56 (originally Pier 5), the third of the Northern Pacific Railroad wharves, was constructed in 1900. President
Theodore Roosevelt landed there on the steamer
Spokane on May 23, 1903. 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. They provided transportation to the Yukon and Alaska, including the
Bering Sea, and transported American soldiers to
Manila in the
Philippines during the
Spanish–American War of 1898–1899. Eventually, they serviced
Hawaii, the
Mediterranean and
Russia, but went bankrupt in 1920. After the Waterhouse company, the pier housed a succession of firms: the Hayden Dock Company,
Shepard Line Intercoastal Service, and the Northland Transportation Company, as well as the Arlington Dock Company. 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. Trident Imports, opened on the pier around that time, had a decades-long run of importing everything from
rattan furniture from Southeast Asia to
chocolate from
Belgium. Ted Griffin's Seattle Marine Aquarium was located at the west end of the pier. Its star attraction,
Namu the
killer whale, died in 1966. after cargo shipping at the piers was relocated years earlier to the container port to the south. In 1989, the city traded Pier 57 for Piers 62 and 63. In June 2012 a 175-foot
Ferris wheel, the
Seattle Great Wheel, opened. The wheel has 42 climate-controlled gondolas, each holding up to six passengers. Pier 57 is now privately owned after the city traded it for Piers 62 and 63. In the 1890s, it was the site of two prominent events in the city's history. The freighter
Miike Maru opened Seattle's Japan trade by docking there August 31, 1896. Less than a year later, July 17, 1897, the steamship
Portland arrived from Alaska bearing a "ton of gold", from the
Klondike, Yukon. The ensuing
Yukon Gold Rush formed strong bonds between Seattle and Alaska, and brought enormous wealth to Seattle as the "Gateway to Alaska". In 1896 fish and grain dealers Ainsworth and Dunn (
see below) built a pier at the location of today's designated
city landmark Pier 59, originally Pier 8, also known as the Pike Street Pier. In the 1950s through early 60s, Pier 59 was the home of Puget Sound Tug & Barge. Crowley moved the operations to the Duwamish Waterway in the 1960s. The two "stubby" piers known as the Fish and Salt Docks (later Piers 60 and 61) were purchased by the Port of Seattle in the mid-1940s, and were removed in 1975 to make room for the Seattle Aquarium. In 2006, the city began plans to replace these piers. In addition, a floating dock was added alongside the pier.
Bell Street Pier, Edgewater hotel, and Port headquarters Pier 66 is the official designation for the Port of Seattle's
Bell Street Pier and Bell Harbor complex, which replaced historic Piers 64, 65, and 66 in the mid-1990s. Facilities at the Bell Street facility include a marina, a cruise ship terminal, a conference center, the Odyssey Maritime Discovery Center, restaurants, and marine services. 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. The area once was a shantytown. Cleared around 1903 in conjunction with the
regrading of
Denny Hill, These Lenora Street Piers (Piers 64 and 65) were used by the "Princess Ships" of the
Canadian Pacific Railway and the
Leslie Salt Co. The Port of Seattle's original Bell Street Pier, the previous Pier 66, was built here in 1914 on dirt from the Denny Regrade. Despite the Thomson/Cotterill plan, the Orient Dock and both the old and new Bell Street Pier were built parallel to the shore. There was a bridge on the site of the present-day pedestrian overpass.
Pier 70 toward the northern end of the Central Waterfront. A small portion of the Bell Harbor complex can be seen at left, then the Port headquarters, Pier 70, and a footbridge in the sculpture park incorporating Teresita Fernandez's piece
Seattle Cloud Cover. At slightly lower left, Broad Street crosses the
BNSF tracks and curves into Alaskan Way.
Pier 70, at the foot of Clay and Broad Streets, now marks the northern end of the Central Waterfront. Beyond that are the
Olympic Sculpture Park and
Myrtle Edwards Park. Although the pier shed retains its historic shape, it was remodeled after a fire in 1915, remodeled again in the 1970s, and so heavily altered in the late 1990s—reclad with metal siding, all windows and doors modernized and many reconfigured—that (unlike the old Northern Pacific piers) it retains only traces of its historic character. The pier was built as Pier 14 by Ainsworth and Dunn and completed in 1902 along with a warehouse across Railroad Avenue (today's Alaskan Way) that later, from 1970 until 2016, housed the Old Spaghetti Factory. Ainsworth and Dunn's Seattle Fish Company dated from 1889 and occupied a succession of Central Waterfront locations. Beginning with a retail operation on higher ground at Second Avenue and Pike Street, they established themselves on the waterfront at the foot of Seneca Street by 1893, expanded their business to include grain and feed, and built Pier 8 / Pier 59 (though not its current pier shed) in 1896. By that time they had canning operations in Seattle and at
Blaine, Washington. Eventually they moved their entire operation to Blaine, but they owned of Pier 14 until at least 1920, taking on a succession of tenants. In 1905, the main tenant was the Puget Sound Wharf and Warehouse Company, in 1912, the American and Hawaiian Steamship Company and in 1920, the Dodwell Dock and Warehouse Company, operating it as a terminal for the
Northland Steamship Company and the
Blue Funnel Line. The
Washington State Liquor Control Board used the pier as a warehouse during World War II, after which The
Coast Guard used the pier as its Seattle base from 1946 to 1955, and visiting naval vessels moored on its north side. Immediately before that remodel, in 1998
The Real World: Seattle was filmed there. Because the Central Waterfront piers are not
zoned residential, the building was officially a 24-hour-a-day film set for the shoot. Continuing south across Vine Street is the former Booth Fisheries Building. Even farther inland, across Elliott Way from the Booth Fisheries Building, three former cannery worker cottages survive. Another example is the Agen Warehouse, also known as Olympic Cold Storage Warehouse, at the corner of Western Avenue and Seneca Street near the downtown piers. Designed by architect John Graham and built in 1910, it is listed on the
National Register of Historic Places. It originally housed John Agen's Alaska Butter and Cream Company, which moved from Pier 6 (now Pier 57). Immediately north of that is another Graham building, built in 1918 as a warehouse for the Pacific Net and Twine Company. That company merged with the Marine Supply Company to form the Pacific Marine Supply Company, which continued to use the warehouse in conjunction with its operations on the old Pier 1 at the foot of Yesler Way. More recently, the building has been associated with
genetic engineering company
Immunex. ==History==