Alki Beach
Sandy shoreline where a shipload of settlers staked a doomed real-estate scheme in eighteen fifty-one.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Alki Beach in Seattle opens in the rain on November thirteenth, eighteen fifty-one, when twenty-four settlers stepped ashore and began building a townsite they optimistically named New York, betting a grand name could conjure a city on a shallow beach. It traces the mockery that stuck to that ambition and follows shopkeeper Charles Terry as he spent years trying to make the site pay before striking a very different deal with a Seattle doctor. Look for the granite obelisk near the parking lot, close to where the axes first rang out.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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