History
In 1861, landowner Harvey Pike cut the first ditch connecting Lake Washington's Union Bay and Lake Union's Portage Bay, but gave up and deeded his land to the Lake Washington Ship Canal Company, which built a transiting rail line for portaging goods between the lakes. This rail line continued use until 1878. In 1883, David Denny and Thomas Burke had a canal built for floating logs.
Cheshiahud lived and carved canoes on the shores of Portage Bay for many years from 1885. In 1909, the Pay Streak, a vaudeville and sideshows section of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition, ended in a gondola ramp and esplanade on the north shores of Portage Bay.
For 14 years following World War II, the SV Fantome was stranded in Portage Bay pending payment to King County of back taxes.
Read more about this topic: Portage Bay
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)