Portage Bay is an arm of Seattle, Washington's Lake Union and is part of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. Its western limit can be said to be the Ship Canal Bridge, which carries Interstate 5 over the water; North Passage Point Park and South Passage Point Park sit on opposite shores between the freeway's pillars. Its eastern limit is the entrance to the Montlake Cut.
Portage Bay was named in 1913 because of the portage across the Montlake Isthmus that used to be necessary to move logs from Union Bay to Lake Union before the construction of the Ship Canal. The bay is home to two yacht clubs, the Seattle and the Queen City, and many houseboats, as well as the Northwest Fisheries Science Center of the National Marine Fisheries Service and the University of Washington's College of Ocean and Fishery Science. It is spanned by the University Bridge, which carries Eastlake Avenue from Eastlake to the University District, and by the Portage Bay Viaduct, which carries State Route 520 from Montlake to Capitol Hill.
Read more about Portage Bay: History, Neighborhood
Famous quotes containing the word bay:
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)