Lake Union: reflection of a city
It is a mirror of Seattle. Its surface reflects the city's lights. Its mud, a stew of sawdust fill, Denny Regrade silt, industrial chemicals and consumer jetsam, reflects the city's history.
From 1,500 feet up, Paul Carlson can survey it better than anyone. He is at the stick of a 10-passenger DeHavilland Otter on a morning Kenmore-to-Seattle run.
To his left is Lake Washington, lowered nine feet when the Montlake Cut to Lake Union was opened in 1916. Lake Union then winds through Portage Bay and under Interstate 5, on through the concrete sluice of the Ship Canal, past the motley assembly of fishing boats in Salmon Bay and out the Ballard Locks, a technical wonder for humans but one of the most perilous gantlets a fish can make.
But even this perspective can't take it all in. For that, it pays to visit others: a historian, a scuba diver, scientists and sailors.
They describe what may be the most diverse urban lake in the nation and certainly the most altered lake in the state, a former landlocked puddle that now drains thousands of acres.
Lake Union's sediments are among the most polluted in the state but its floating real estate is among the most prized. Its docks are packed with yachts but its waters are publicly owned, accessible to anyone with a few dollars for a boat rental.
And Lake Union has morphed with the city, from a working-class outpost to a national icon thick with new money, an outdoor ethic and struggling salmon.
All Carlson can see is an airstrip that has become more crowded in 33 years of takeoffs and landings.
"There's lots of boats and it's small," Carlson said. "You've got bridges on one end and then on the other end, so it's kind of a pucker factor when you're taking off."
Only once has he aborted a landing, when a fast-moving runabout took an unexpected turn. He had a few hundred feet to spare, a few seconds at 60 miles an hour.
On this morning, Carlson backs off the throttle, noses the plane toward the water and feels the wings dance in the vortex of another Kenmore Air plane landing up ahead.
In less than a minute he is just feet above the water, holding level to eke out a little more high-speed air travel before the floats make a pillow-soft landing, one of more than 10,000 Carlson has made here.
"I'm kind of getting the hang of it now," says Carlson. He retires later this month, having witnessed one-third of a century of change on Lake Union.
From the past
Where now we see buildings, pavement and streams of traffic on Valley Street east of Westlake Avenue, Caroline Tobin sees an old shorefront mill.
"The original shoreline was back quite a ways," said Tobin, a historic-preservation consultant who used to lead kayak tours of the lake's history. "It went back to Mercer Avenue. So this is all fill here. The actual mill site was back where that building is."
She pointed to Lane Hardwood Floors' green and black building, once part of Brace Lumber, which took over the mill first built on David Denny's claim in 1882.
Only a few of the lake's early buildings remain, but the Brace building and a few other choice spots show history layered around the lake, offering glimpses of progression from a pioneer millpond to industrial site to residential real estate "w/ waterfrnt vu."
What's missing is 300 acres of lake, filled by sawdust and trestles on Valley Road and Westlake and Fairview avenues.
Sawmills were the biggest industry in the late 1800s, starting with trees from the lake's shores. The Industrial Age arrived full-blown in the first half of the 20th century and flourished with the Ship Canal and shipbuilding of the world wars. Bill Boeing's first airplane flew here, in 1916.
The Lake Union Drydock Company was built on 12 acres over the water in 1919. Its customers were drawn by accessibility through the Locks, abundant lumber and the fact that fresh water makes destructive saltwater worms drop off wooden hulls. The dry dock looks now much as it did then, its wooden buildings faded gray. "I've been here since 1968," said plant superintendent John Ball, "and it hasn't changed any except there were 60 cats and you had to watch where you walked."
The dry dock, on the southeast end of the lake still keeps a set of man-sized wrenches for removing propellers with what Ball calls "brute force and ignorance" — hard manual labor when nothing else works.
But the dry dock borders on being an anomaly.
In 1920, more than half the lakefront was devoted to manufacturing and industry, according a 1986 report Tobin prepared for the city. More than one-fourth of the lake was residential.
By 1982, manufacturing on the lake accounted for only 7 percent of the shoreline, and housing was half what it had been. Nearly half was moorage and other businesses.
Now the lake is thick with marinas, high-end houseboats and, particularly on South Lake Union, restaurants.
The bulk of the lake's history is squeezed into a street-end park at Fourth Avenue Northeast, near Ivar's Salmon House on the north end.
Between old photos and a lake map cast into a manhole-cover, artist Elizabeth Conner has etched words describing the lake's various uses — foundry, tannery, cooperage — and the first people's beliefs about the lake:
"Young whales were believed to make their way into the lake through a subterranean passage from Elliott Bay. Mysterious spiritual lake."
From the depths
Chuck Murray has dived deep into the mysteries of Lake Union. Mysteries like: Where the hell is my bowling ball?
Murray's the guy lake dwellers call when belongings tumble from porches and walkways.
In the lake's mud, soft as mousse, murky and cold, lies a catalog of almost everything that once sat above it, from the days when sewage-spewing houseboats were the refuge of hookers, Bohemians and laborers to today's era of blue-glazed planters, Tom Hanks and chardonnay.
Murray once found a 10-foot-high pile of bottles — mostly empties — rising in a neat cone beneath the houseboat from which they were dumped.
George Johnston, who often hires Murray for his Floating Home Services, reports that a Volkswagen Beetle went down near his old houseboat.
"They were supposed to be floatable," he said.
As far as 50 feet down, Murray has seen bicycles, motorcycles, radios, batteries, boom boxes and cell phones. At some point, possibly in the '50s, everyone changed toilet systems: Ceramic toilets abound down there.
He's seen prepop-top cans, their painted labels still intact, old computers, saturated old-growth logs, lawn chairs, power tools, silverware, plates, washers, dryers and water heaters. Bowling balls almost have neutral buoyancy. They sink slowly.
An unnatural act
Doug Houck, senior water-quality engineer for Metro/King County wastewater treatment, was out on the Liberty, a King County research vessel, talking about Lake Union, which he says is an unnatural act.
"The one thing you can say is it's got water in it," said Houck, who may have studied the lake's biology more than anyone else. "It just isn't a natural system and it never will be."
Lake Union was more of a lake at one time, pooling water from the surrounding hills after its bottom was gouged out by the Vashon Glacier some 15,000 years ago.
And some of the time it actually meets the state's definition of a lake, a body of water that holds water at least 15 days under normal conditions. Lake Union holds the same water for 17 days in the summer before it's flushed with water from Lake Washington on its way to Puget Sound. The retention time can be just a few days in the wetter months.
It became an entirely different lake in 1916, when the Montlake Cut merged it with Lake Washington, and the Ship Canal merged it with Salmon Bay, an estuary suddenly cut off from Puget Sound by the Locks.
Now we have what scientists call the Lake Union system. And in periods of heavy rain, when the county's system of combined sewers and storm pipes overflows, the lake acts more like a river, said Houck. That's a good thing, as the bacteria in the sewage is flushed out in 24 to 48 hours.
More than one dozen of the lake's three-dozen or so species of fish are non-native, including sunfish, bass, crappie and perch. Even the migrating salmon technically are exotics.
A portion of the sockeye run, while the largest in the Lower 48, was introduced in the '30s and '40s from Baker Lake in Whatcom County. Native salmon in the Lake Washington system migrated down the Green and Duwamish rivers until the Black River, on the south end, dried up when the lake was redirected through the Montlake Cut.
Some of the lake's other unnatural aspects are particularly worrisome. A century or so of industrial activity has left heavy metals, hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in the lake sediments.
"It's a pit," said Kurt Fresh, research scientist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Near Gas Works Park, Environmental Protection Agency scientists in the '80s found elevated concentrations of heavy metals, cyanide and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, byproducts of burning.
The Department of Ecology has also found PAHs, plus high levels of zinc, copper, arsenic, lead and chromium in 23 of 27 sites sampled in Salmon Bay. Nine out of 10 of the samples were toxic when tested on small mud-dwelling creatures.
Some chemical concentrations are the highest in the state, said Houck. But most are bound to compounds in the sediment and incapable of getting into an animal's tissues, he said.
Still, if these were saltwater sediments, the metals and chemical levels would be high enough to trigger consideration of at least a partial cleanup, said Rick Huey, project manager in Ecology's toxics-cleanup program.
As it is, the state has yet to establish standards for freshwater sediments, Huey said.
Meanwhile, the water itself is fine, if you don't swim during the five or 10 times a year the sewer system overflows.
"The water is in pretty good shape for a lake right in the middle of a city," Huey said.
A salmon's ordeal
Over the past few years, Fresh has put 300 cigarillo-sized transmitters into the stomachs of adult chinook salmon bound for the waters above Lake Washington. Then he's watched them shoot one of the toughest runs around: the Lake Union system.
In just a few feet, a chinook must adapt to fresh water and navigate a route with water temperatures so high scientists used to think they would kill a salmon.
"It's a steep environmental gradient," said Fred Goetz, a fish biologist for the Army Corps of Engineers, as he watched Yule log-sized chinook through a window at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks fish ladder last month. "It's like going to Death Valley from Puget Sound in the winter. It's probably one of the most extreme temperature differences a fish experiences on the West Coast."
When they migrated via the Duwamish, salmon had several miles to adjust to fresh water. Now they go from salt water to fresh in just a few pools of the fish ladder.
The fish, however, find the plume of salt water that regularly leaks upstream of the Locks. It's salty and cool but low in oxygen.
"They're in their own conundrum," said Goetz. " 'I want to breathe, but it's too warm.' "
One of Fresh's tagged fish spent 55 days in the plume. "We thought it was dead," he said, "because the tag never moved."
The fish wait for the temperature to drop from a tepid 73 degrees to just below 70. Then they bolt. One transmitter-tagged fish covered the eight miles to the Montlake Cut in three hours.
These days, the chinook, some of which are federally listed as endangered, are staying longer. This adds to the already stressful ordeal of spawning, Fresh said.
In the 1970s, water temperatures were above 68 degrees about 30 days a year. In the last five years, they've been above 68 for 90 days. It's unclear why, but Houck suspects global warming.
A village green
Dick Wagner was perched on the gunwale of one of the 150 wooden boats at his disposal, riding a piece of the past across Lake Union and thinking about the lake's future.
His craft was a poorly ballasted Concordia sloop, a 58-year-old marriage of cedar, pine and oak owned by the Center for Wooden Boats, the living museum Wagner founded in the late '70s.
In 1957, the New Jersey-raised architect paid top dollar — $1,000 — for a Lake Union houseboat off Fairview Avenue. The lake at the time was an anachronism: a working lake with boat-building and repair businesses that had disappeared from much of the East Coast 50 years earlier. The south end, which now houses the boat center, was down and out.
"I saw beauty in the lake," Wagner said. "Other people saw it as a passageway from the Seattle Yacht Club to Shilshole and Puget Sound. It was a big long driveway.
"The lake's been waiting a long time to be identified, and it's just starting to create an identity of its own."
Gone now are most of the boat yards, the flaming stacks of Gas Works Park, the tugs that Wagner's kids would wave to as barges were brought in to the cement plant on South Lake Union.
Now plans are afoot to redevelop about 20 blocks on the lake's southern shore, with a Maritime Heritage Center on city land and private development led by Paul Allen's Vulcan Northwest.
At last the lake might see a version of the Seattle Commons of trees and walkways that voters turned down in the early '90s.
"This is the commons we've always wanted," Wagner said.
For more than 25 years now, devotees of Seattle's urban lake have created their own commons, a group of rafted up sailboats at the close of the Duck Dodge, the notoriously informal race held Tuesday nights from May to September.
The race's coveted duck stickers have been won by the likes of Pyewacket, film producer Roy Disney's 73-foot sloop, but the Dodge is largely an excuse for all types of wind-powered mariners to raise sails, wear pajamas, tuxes and togas and veer perilously close to one another in the city's most light-hearted traffic jam.
"Remember, if you're not having fun, you shouldn't be here," said Bob Pistay, owner of Quantum Sails, after the 40-foot Shoot the Moon drifted to a fifth-place-or-so finish on a recent Tuesday.
The wind died with the sun, and soon everyone was in silent slow motion, staring out at a pink Mount Rainier.
The boats rafted up in the middle of the lake. People were laughing and listening to the Beatles and drinking beer. The moon was high, reflecting and wavering on the water in contrasting riffles of silver and inky black.
The city skyline was shining like a box of aquamarines, a vision best captured from a lake.
Eric Sorensen can be reached at 206- 464-8253 and esorensen@seattletimes.com.
Alan Berner can be reached at 206-464-8133 or aberner@seattletimes.com.