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Aloha Street

I haven’t posted in two weeks because I recently had the good fortune to visit, and the sad duty to return from, Maui, “the Valley Isle,” second largest of the Hawaiian Islands. That made me think, as I posted about S Spokane Street after traveling there last December, it would be appropriate to post about Aloha Street today.

Napili Bay, Maui, Hawaii
One of my favorite places on Maui is the Napili Kai Beach Resort, located in Napili-Honokowai, on Napili Bay. Photograph taken August 2018 by Flickr user dronepicr, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
Keawakapu Beach, Maui, Hawaii
A new favorite from this most recent trip to Maui is Keawakapu Beach in south Kihei. Photograph taken January 2018 by Flickr user Jim Mullhaupt, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.

Four and a half years ago, local historian Valarie Bunn wrote a post on her Wedgwood in Seattle History blog called “Searching for the Origin of Seattle Street Names.” It begins “There is no resource list of the meanings of Seattle’s street names or how the street names were derived,” and that was certainly true at the time. (One reason I started Writes of Way the next year was to eventually provide such a list — and now I rate a mention at the end of her article!) She continues:

Some street names are apparent in their derivation when honoring an early settler, such as Denny Way for the original homestead claim property of David Denny (Arthur’s younger brother) and Mercer Street for Thomas Mercer, an early, influential settler of Seattle. But for some other street names, such as Aloha Street, we may feel bewildered as we wonder, what is “Aloha” for?

She goes on to give a tutorial in trying to determine street name origins. She first notes that the street name was extended beyond Lower Queen Anne as part of the Great Renaming of 1895, and that its first appearance was as part of the 1875 plat of D.T. Denny’s Second Addition to North Seattle (as this part of South Lake Union then was). David Thomas Denny (1832–1903) and Louisa Boren Denny (1827–1916) were members of the Denny Party, who landed at Alki Point in 1851 and are considered the founders of modern Seattle. Here, though, the trail ends, as

The Dennys’ plat map of 1875 does not tell us why David and Louisa Denny chose the street names that they did, including “Aloha.”

But, she continues,

From earliest days, the Dennys knew that lumber was being shipped out from Seattle to San Francisco and as far as Hawaii, so our best guess is that they chose the word “Aloha” as a reference to Seattle’s trade connections.

Not as definitive an answer as the one she goes on to give for Cleopatra Place NW, but a pretty good one nevertheless, and one I can’t improve upon.

Note: On September 5, my friend, local historian Rob Ketcherside, did a bit of a dive into the matter. He began thus —

Tweet from Rob Ketcherside reading "Curious, I went to Chronicling America and searched for Seattle in Hawaiian papers. First hit was May 27, 1854! There are a handful of mentions that year of the ships NILE and LUIKA from the port of Rose traveling to Seattle and Puget Sound. Oct 21 mentions NILE with lumber."

— and came to this conclusion:

Tweets by Rob Ketcherside reading "I'm done exploring the early Seattle and Hawaii trade, and now looking at the naming by D T Denny. In your article you link to the 1889 supplemental plat. Here's the original 1875 plat. I wanted the exact day: July 31, 1875" and "My guess: Due to King Kalakaua's visit to SF+DC in early 1875. US-Hawaii treaty Jan 1875 created the sugar trade and allowed US Navy to use Pearl Harbor. Kalakaua 2nd king elected after death of Kamehameha V. Slogan "Hawaii for Hawaiians" (4/10/75 Wa Standard here)"

I had come across the Reciprocity Treaty when trying to find any connection between Seattle and Hawaii in 1875, but…

Tweet by me reading "I’d seen that… but wasn’t sure it would have notable enough to the Dennys to inspire a street naming. But perhaps it was! Any idea why Aloha instead of Hawaii?" followed by tweet by Rob Ketcherside reading "Maybe we if we consider the other streets in the 1st and 2nd add we can understand D T Denny's influences? Fountain Street became Ward in 1903. Filbert and Morse became Valley in 1895. Together we have Filbert, Morse, Fountain, and Aloha."

So there, for now, the matter lies.

Note added August 13, 2023: The devastating Lāhainā wildfire made me want to re-read this article, and I realized I neglected to discuss the route Aloha Street takes through Seattle. It begins at 1st Avenue W as W Aloha Street, and becomes Aloha Street a block to the east as it crosses Queen Anne Avenue N. From there, it goes ¾ of a mile east to Westlake Avenue N, where it is interrupted by Lake Union. It resumes at Fairview Avenue N and goes ⅙ of a mile east through the Fred Hutch Cancer Center campus to Eastlake Avenue E. On the other side of Interstate 5, it picks up again at Boylston Avenue E and goes an uninterrupted 1⅓ miles east to its end at the intersection of 29th Avenue E and E Ward Street at the west end of the Washington Park Playfield.

Note: On August 20, 2024, I finished converting embedded tweets on this website to screenshots because of issues with how they were integrating with WordPress, which began not too long after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and changed its name to X. 

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Dexter Avenue N

This street is named for Dexter Horton (1825–1904). Born in Seneca Lake, New York, he was living in Princeton, Illinois before he came west in 1852 with, among others, Thomas Mercer and Daniel and Clarence Bagley. He and Mercer came to Seattle in 1853. In 1870, he founded the city’s first bank, the Dexter Horton Bank. (It later merged with Seattle National Bank and First National Bank to form the First Seattle Dexter Horton National Bank, which unwieldy name became First National Bank of Seattle, then Seattle-First National Bank, and eventually Seafirst, the name it used from 1974 until the brand was retired in favor of Bank of America in 1999. (Bank of America had bought Seafirst in 1983.)

Dexter Horton
Dexter Horton

Dexter Avenue begins just south of Denny Way at 7th Avenue and becomes Dexter Avenue N north of Denny. From there it goes 2 miles north, then northwest, to the intersection of Westlake Avenue N, 4th Avenue N, and Nickerson Street, just south of the Fremont Bridge.

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Blaine Street

This street is named for Catharine V. Paine Blaine (1829–1908) and her husband, David Edwards Blaine (1824–1900). Methodist missionaries from Seneca Falls, New York, where, in 1848, Catharine signed the Declaration of Sentiments at the first women’s rights convention, the Blaines came to Seattle in 1853 but left in 1856, not to return until their retirement from missionary work 26 years later. During their short initial stay in Seattle, however, they managed to build Seattle’s first church (the Little White Church, predecessor of today’s First United Methodist Church of Seattle), and Catharine became Seattle’s first schoolteacher, making $65 a month. Catharine Blaine School in Magnolia is named in her honor.

Catharine and David Blaine
Catharine and David Blaine at their 1853 wedding

Unfortunately, though the Blaines may have been feminists, they, according to HistoryLink.org, had no love for Native Americans (or, for that matter, the Irish). Their departure in 1856 was prompted by the Battle of Seattle. Junius Rochester writes:

On January 20, 1856, a son John, was born to Catharine and David Blaine. Six days later the Battle of Seattle erupted. David had duty at one of the blockhouses, but managed to get Catharine and their babe aboard the Decatur in Elliott Bay. David had described the Indians as a “poor degraded race,” which would “soon disappear.” Catharine compared their “stupidity and awkwardness” to that of the Irish. The Indian uprising confirmed their worst fears and prejudices.

Today, W Blaine Street begins in Magnolia at 36th Avenue W and goes a semicircular ⅕ of a mile to 34th Avenue W and W Howe Street. It resumes at 31st Avenue W and goes almost ⅓ of a mile to Thorndyke Avenue W. There is a stub of W Blaine east of 15th Avenue W that is quickly stopped by the Southwest Queen Anne Greenbelt. The street resumes at 12th Avenue W and goes just over a mile to 4th Avenue N, having briefly become a stairway at 9th Avenue W. After a series of short stretches serving as driveways and parking, the Blaine Street right-of-way resurfaces east of Westlake Avenue N and heads into Lake Union. Here, too, it serves as a driveway and offers no access to the water. East of Lake Union, E Blaine Street begins at Fairview Avenue E and goes ⅛ of a mile to Franklin Avenue E, where it becomes part of the I-5 Colonnade park underneath the freeway. From Lakeview Boulevard E to just west of 10th Avenue E it is a stairway, and then two blocks of roadway ending at 12th Avenue E and Lake View Cemetery. There is then a diagonal ¼-mile stretch from 19th Avenue E to E Howe Street in Montlake. E Blaine finishes up as a ⅕-mile stretch from 37th Avenue E to McGilvra Boulevard E and a final two-block run from E Madison Street to 43rd Avenue E, both in Madison Park.

Sign for E Blaine Street, April 22, 2010
Sign for E Blaine Street at Broadway E, April 22, 2010. Blaine is a stairway on both sides of Broadway, hence the double 🚶 icon. Photograph by Benjamin Lukoff. Copyright © 2010 Benjamin Lukoff. All rights reserved.
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Newton Street

This street originates in the 1882 plat of Bigelow’s Addition to the City of Seattle, filed by Jesse W. George (1835–1895) and Cassandra Eckler George (1840–1920) at the request of Isaac Newton Bigelow (1838–1922). As the Queen Anne Historic Context Statement explains,

In the early 1870s, the Denny and Mercer families gradually began to systematically subdivide their large land holdings on the south and east slopes of Queen Anne Hill. When a severe windstorm blew down thousands of trees in the north district in 1875, views opened up and land seekers turned their attentions beyond Belltown. Real estate speculators new to the territory arrived and began to buy up property on the crest of Queen Anne Hill. Some of these speculators also became developers, such as George Kinnear, or builder-developers, such as Isaac Bigelow.

Though its proximity to Boston and Lynn Streets suggest a tribute to Newton, Massachusetts, neither the Georges nor the Bigelows appear to have a connection to the state, so it seems this one should be chalked up to Isaac Bigelow’s middle name.

Today, Newton Street begins in Magnolia as W Newton Street at 30th Avenue W, and goes nearly half a mile east to 23rd Avenue W. There is then a two-block stretch from 15th Avenue W to 13th Avenue W in Interbay, and then the “original” Newton Street, which stretches almost a half mile from 1st Avenue N to Taylor Avenue N, followed by another two-block stretch from Dexter Avenue N to just past 8th Avenue N. On the east side of Lake Union, E Newton Street picks up again at Terry Pettus Park, just west of Fairview Avenue E, and goes ¼ mile to Boylston Avenue E and Lakeview Boulevard E. There follows another ¼-mile stretch from Broadway E to Everett Avenue E. East of there, Newton exists in a number of short segments through Montlake, and then enjoys a run of ⅓ of a mile from 37th Place E to 43rd Avenue E in Madison Park. 

  • Sign reading “E Newton N St”, corner of E Newton Street and 24th Avenue E, August 2009
  • Sign reading “E Newton S St”, corner of E Newton Street and 24th Avenue E, August 2009
The fact that 24th Avenue E meets E Newton Street coming from the west 300 feet south of where it meets Newton coming from the east makes for these odd signs reading “E Newton N St” and “E Newton S St.” I’ve tried (and succeeded) to get the Seattle Department of Transportation to fix these, but they keep coming back! Oran Viriyincy notes that the N and S are used to “differentiate the streets for internal asset management purposes, among other things (like fire department dispatch and navigation),” but they never should have made it onto public street signs. Photographs by Benjamin Lukoff, Copyright © 2009 Benjamin Lukoff. All rights reserved.
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Westlake Avenue

Forming a trio with Eastlake Avenue and Northlake Way, Westlake Avenue is so named for running along the western shore of Lake Union. Beginning today at Stewart Street between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue, just north of McGraw Square, it runs 2½ miles north to 4th Avenue N between Nickerson Street and Florentia Street — the south end of the Fremont Bridge.

Westlake neighborhood and Mount Rainier from the Aurora Bridge, June 23, 2006
Westlake neighborhood and Mount Rainier from the Aurora Bridge, June 23, 2006. Photograph by Flickr user Steve Voght, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Westlake Avenue once started a couple of blocks to the south, at 4th Avenue and Pike Street, and based on the quarter section map, it appears that its former route through Westlake Park between Pike Street and Pine Street is still public right-of-way as opposed to park land. (The portion between Pine Street and Olive Way was vacated in 1986 to make way for the Westlake Center mall, which opened in 1988, and the portion between Olive Way and Stewart Street was closed in 2010 to allow for the expansion of McGraw Square.)

Monorail and streetcar, corner of Westlake Avenue and Olive Way, in 2008
Monorail and streetcar, corner of Westlake Avenue and Olive Way, in 2008. Photograph by Flickr user Oran Viriyincy, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Westlake was extended south to 4th and Pike from Denny Way in 1902 (one former mayor has called for that extension to be closed to cars); the original Westlake Avenue (now, properly, Westlake Avenue N) was created in 1895 as part of the Great Renaming ordinance, Section 5 of which reads

That the names of Rollin Street, Lake Union Boulevard and Lake Avenue from Depot Street [changed by the same ordinance to Denny Way] to Florentia Street, be and the same are hereby changed to Westlake Avenue.

Rollin Street, the southernmost portion, was named for Rolland Herschel Denny (1851–1939), the youngest member of the Denny Party at just six weeks old. In its honor, an apartment complex that opened at the corner of Westlake and Denny in 2008 is named Rollin Street Flats.

Rollin Street Flats, northeast corner of Westlake Avenue N and Denny Way, South Lake Union
Rollin Street Flats, northeast corner of Westlake Avenue N and Denny Way, South Lake Union, October 22, 2017. Photograph by Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Northlake, Eastlake, Westlake… why no Southlake?

Having covered Northlake, Eastlake, and Westlake so far, one might ask: why is there no Southlake?

There does appear to have been a Southlake Avenue for a time — 1909 to 1924 or so, based on the last mention of it I could find in Seattle newspapers, an article in the August 8, 1924, edition of The Seattle Times on a car crash that had taken place a number of weeks earlier. Now the northern section of Fairview Avenue N, it extended from the intersection of Valley Street northwest to E Galer Street and Eastlake Avenue E, “thus eliminating the present grade on Eastlake for University traffic” in the words of a real estate advertisement in the August 23, 1914, edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. But why the Southlake name disappeared seems clear: once it was decided to extend the Fairview name along the shore lands, there was no other appropriate road to carry it. The northern and eastern shores of Lake Union are just shy of 2 miles long each, but since the lake is shaped like a ? (and, surprisingly, like a uterus if Portage Bay is included) there is hardly any southern shore to speak of — only about ¼ mile.

As for the neighborhood name, I’m not sure why South Lake Union came to be used instead of Southlake. Perhaps it’s as simple as the lack of a similarly named street to “anchor” the neighborhood.

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Aurora Avenue N

What is now Aurora Avenue N began in 1888 as Aurora Street in Denny & Hoyt’s Addition to the City of Seattle, Washington Territory, previously discussed in our post on Dravus Street. Edward Blewett and his wife, Carrie, of Fremont, Nebraska, were the landowners, and Edward Corliss Kilbourne (1856–1959) filed the plat as attorney-in-fact for the Blewetts. Dr. Kilbourne (a dentist), was from Aurora, Illinois, and it seems to be generally accepted (The Fremocentrist, Wedgwood in Seattle History, Fremont Neighborhood Council, Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle) that he named the street after his hometown.

(I have seen elsewhere [HistoryLink, Washington’s Pacific Highway], that Aurora was given its name sometime in the early 20th century by George F. Cotterill, mayor of Seattle from 1912–1914, because it was “the highway to the north, toward the aurora borealis,” but they have the century wrong, and Aurora Street was no highway in 1888. In addition, those two pages call him “city engineer, later mayor,” but he was never city engineer — although he was assistant city engineer from 1892–1900. The Licton Springs Community Council mentions both theories.)

At any rate, Ordinance 6947, filed on June 6, 1901, refers to the street as Aurora Street, and Ordinance 7942, filed on November 5 of that year, refers to it as Aurora Avenue. I can find no specific record of the name change, but Ordinance 6864, filed on May 8, has to do with “altering, defining and establishing the names of streets in the City of Seattle in the portion thereof lying north of Lake Union, Salmon Bay and the route of the Lake Washington Canal,” and is likely responsible. (No text is available online for the ordinance, and the drafters of Ordinance 6947 must have neglected to take the change into account.)

Aurora Avenue N might have remained just another North Seattle street were it not for the decision to route the Pacific Highway, U.S. Route 99, across the Lake Washington Ship Canal there instead of Stone Way N, Albion Place N, Whitman Avenue N, or Linden Avenue N. As it happened, Aurora was chosen as the location for the crossing (known today as the Aurora Bridge), and the name was officially extended through Queen Anne to Downtown Seattle in 1930 in preparation for the bridge’s opening in 1932.

Added July 14, 2023: I spoke to Feliks Banel of KIRO Newsradio for one of his All Over the Map segments, this one on how the Aurora Bridge got its name. I didn’t appear on air, but was mentioned in both the audio and web versions of the story.

Lake Union, Lake Washington Ship Canal, the Fremont Bridge, and the George Washington Memorial Bridge (Aurora Bridge), Seattle, Washington, circa 1932, from https://flickr.com/photos/uw_digital_images/4860576629/
Postcard of Lake Union, Lake Washington Ship Canal, the Fremont Bridge, and the George Washington Memorial Bridge (Aurora Bridge), circa 1932. View looks southeast, with Fremont in foreground. Public domain image from University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections.
Aurora Bridge, 2011, from https://flickr.com/photos/mlinksva/5996553637/, public domain
Aurora Bridge, 2011. View looks east, with Gas Works Park and Wallingford neighborhood at center, Lake Union and Capitol Hill at right. Public domain photo by Flickr user Mike Linksvayer.

Today, Aurora Avenue N begins at 7th Avenue N and Harrison Street by the north portal of the State Route 99 Tunnel and goes 7⅘ miles north to the city limits; the name continues 3 further miles to the King–Snohomish county line, and the highway another 12 miles beyond that to Broadway in Everett. A block-long segment from 6th Avenue and Battery Street to Denny Way has been renamed Borealis Avenue, and Aurora between Denny Way and Harrison Street is once again 7th Avenue N. A two-block-long segment underneath the north approach to the Aurora Bridge has also been changed to Troll Avenue N.