Today (December 9th, 2022), we attended the official opening of a new combined walkway/stairway at Union Street and Western Avenue. It's the final link in a pathway from the Union Street-end at 1st Avenue, across from the Seattle Art Museum, all the way down to the waterfront. There's also an elevator between Western and Alaskan Way, although the initial stretch from the top at 1st Avenue down to Western Avenue is not accessible.

The new stairway is graced with two sculptures by artist Norie Sato, which are visible in the pictures below. These stairs are definitely worth a visit! Here's the Seattle Times story on the stairway opening. 

For us, the most exciting part of the Waterfront Park project is the Overlook Walk, which is still to come. It will take pedestrians from Pike Place Market all the way down to the waterfront without touching foot on Alaskan Way's traffic lanes. You can see a rendering of the future overlook below, from the City's Waterfront Seattle website, along with recent pictures of the ongoing construction. It will be a grand edifice with sweeping stairways and numerous places for walkers to pause and view the waterfront and bay. The Overlook is expected to be completed in 2025.

We're looking forward to 2025!

The polished steel "fence" along the left side of the walkway, and the arching fern-like steel form at the bottom, are sculptures by Norie Sato.

A rendering of the future Overlook Walk.

Construction of the sweeping Overlook Walk across from Pike Place Market.

The pictures below show some highlights and locations, but we leave you the fun of stitching it all together into your own socially distanced stairway walk! All of it takes place within the historic development called the "Mt. Baker Park Addition," with its unusual concentration of architect designed houses built mostly between 1910 and 1920. Mt. Baker Park and Boulevard were added to the National Register of Historic Places in February 2020, along with Colman Park and the Dose Terrace Stairs.

We started our walk from the neighborhood on the southwest side of Mt. Baker Park, taking brand-new city steps down into the park. We walked southeast through the park in the direction of S McClellan St, where the right-of-way to the neighborhood above consists of a switchbacking sidewalk on a heavily wooded hillside. The switchbacks finish at S McClellan St and Mt St Helens Pl S.

From the top of the switchbacks, we headed for an easy-to-overlook stairway leading down to Lake Washington Boulevard. If you're looking at a map app on your phone, these stairs are located on Shoreland Dr S, near the north end of Mt. Claire Park. At the bottom of the stairs, with no cars buzzing along, we found this stairway entry to the Boulevard to be easy and safe. The second picture shows the stairs from the bottom looking up. We went years driving along Lake Washington Boulevard at 35 mph or so without seeing it!

Here's a blissfully quiet weekday scene on Lake Washington Boulevard. It will stay closed to cars through at least September 8, and possibly through the end of September.

From here, our walk meandered for a leisurely six-tenths of a mile along Lake Washington Boulevard. We watched some people lounging along the shore; others tossing sticks into the lake for their dogs to splash after, and always Mercer Island, a constant presence across the water.

At S Horton St we took a slanting lane uphill from the Boulevard. Our goal was the base of the steps at S Hinds St and Sierra Dr S, from where we would turn back toward our starting place. The S Hinds steps quickly give way to a dirt path all the way to the next block, Cascadia Ave S. Looking back from there, you can see how nondescript this public right-of-way is (second picture). How many people would discover it, not knowing it is there?

The next stairway is unusual too, and worth checking out. It's at S Horton St between Cascadia Ave S (at the top) and Sierra Dr S. It's well-hidden, invisible at the base of a long, seemingly private driveway that ends in a low wall. Despite appearances, this driveway is a bona-fide city right-of-way. The first picture below shows where the head of the stairs ducks behind the low wall. The second picture gives a good view of the extended driveway between the street and the top of the stairs. We wonder if the homeowners pay a standard "encroachment fee" for the use of this city right-of-way...

Turning back, we took S Horton St, with another set of stairs running along the Horton Hill Corridor. Our favorite feature of this stairway is the leonine working waterspout, pictured below. 

Our final leg took the broad, winding, tree-lined Mt Baker Boulevard back to Mt. Baker Park. The last picture shows us heading up the new Mt. Baker Park stairway to the neighborhood where we started. The entire loop is about 3.7 miles.

The Horton stairs gargoyle does the gargoyle thing: it drains rainwater from the upper reaches of the staircase, spitting it into a drain just below the bottom border of the picture.

Later, we stopped to admire a nearby yard fence made of unique materials. While I took out my phone for a photo Cathy stage-whispered to me: "somebody's in the yard!" So, I politely obtained permission to take a few pictures of her wonderful fence. It turns out this homeowner is one-half of an architect couple who designed and built their own fence. It's made of smooth, glossy river rocks filling tube-like risers made out of heavy-gauge woven steel wire. The river rocks were run through a sieve to get the ones with the right sizing. Shaping and weaving the thick-gauge steel wire into individual vertical holding tubes, we were told, was the biggest challenge.

Some of us live in walkable neighborhoods like this; unfortunately, our neighbors in South Park aren't so lucky. Their neighborhood is ranked 58th in the Seattle Walk Score database, out of 86 listed neighborhoods. Recently, though, there's been a small but significant improvement around 12th Street S and Trenton Street, and it has to do with stairs.

And, more is coming. But before getting to the "more" part, let the Feet First website bring the story up-to-date as of this September:

"On Friday, September 18, Feet First partnered with the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, the über-talented muralist, Angelina Villalobos, and an incredible volunteer team from Microsoft, to create stunning stairway murals on the 10th and 12th Street stairs, which intersect  S. Trenton and S. Donovan Streets. These stairways are known thoroughfares to Concord Elementary School, SeaMar Community Health Center, the community center, and library...

"With a lot of community support and even more elbow grease this group literally transformed the stairways – shifting from dark, dubious and overgrown trails to bright and welcoming pedestrian passages."

We finally got the chance to see the transformation for ourselves. We also found an announcement, at the bottom of the 12th Street stairs, that the Seattle Department of Transportation has earmarked this important stairway for a complete renovation! That's going to magnify the improvements in accessibility and safety already made to these stairs. We hope, however, that the art will return!

Here's a brief but colorful visual tour of the stairways, just before the planned renovation on the 12th Street S stairs, which is set to begin this January:

We’d appreciate if you'd set aside what you're doing and take a moment to email each of our City Councilmembers asking for the policy to be reinstated in the Comprehensive Plan. Here's suggested text, and below that, a listing of the City Councilmembers' official email addresses:

"As someone who loves Seattle stairways, I'm writing to express my concern about the following proposed change to the city’s Comprehensive Plan, which would delete this existing policy:

"'T32 - Recognize that stairways located within Seattle’s public rights-of-way serve as a unique and valuable pedestrian resource in some areas of the City.  Discourage the vacation of public rights-of-way occupied by stairways, and protect publicly-owned stairways from private encroachment.'

"Deleting this strong policy statement about how the city views stairways is a big concern to myself and many others. It suggests that there will be a lessening of stairway maintenance, rebuilding and even abandonment of stairway right-of-ways. 

"Our stairways provide a unique aspect of livability to the City. It would be a huge loss to abandon them. We ask that you raise this issue, and join us in fighting this change to the Comprehensive Plan."

Here are the Councilmembers' emails:

sally.bagshaw@seattle.gov

tim.burgess@seattle.gov

jean.godden@seattle.gov

bruce.harrell@seattle.gov

nick.licata@seattle.gov

mike.obrien@seattle.gov

john.okamoto@seattle.gov

tom.rasmussen@seattle.gov

kshama.sawant@seattle.gov

Many thanks to all Seattle stairway lovers!

What is the Seattle Stairway Foot Tour? The Foot Tour is a 100 kilometer running route covering most of the major stairways except 2 sets each in the farthest reaches of Southeast, Northeast and Northwest Seattle, plus a few that I excluded for safety. Participants will navigate their own way to different stairways in order to traverse the suggested route at their own pace, and with minimal to zero support.

What Do You Mean by 'Major Stairways?' The Foot Tour adopts Doug Beyerlein's method for counting 'major' public stairways, which are considered the ones with 100 or more steps. (Doug's map of all of Seattle's major stairways can be found along the right banner of this page.)

What Are The Specifics of the Route? The route for 2015 is mapped here. I hope to update the map with turn-by-turn instructions soon. It's about 65 miles, with at most 11,500 feet of up-and-down elevation change. We'll start at the farthest Southwest stairway of the route, at SW 98th Street and 51st Avenue SW. We will gather at the street end and beach access. 

So This is Year Two? That's right. The Foot Tour has a very short history - our first one was summer solstice last year. A small group of us set out complete a 100 kilometer route that promised 11,000 feet of elevation change over 15,000 stairs. It was epic, but everyone fell short of completing the planned route.

The running group (me and Jean-Michel Fouard) stuck to a daylight schedule with a total time on our feet of 15 hours 38 minutes, at a pace of about 17-minute miles. We completed 55 miles with 8,167 feet of elevation gained over 66 stairways.