Green Lake Park

This guide to Green Lake Park in Seattle starts with a fifty-dollar lakefront lot in 1891, when developers Edward Kilbourne and William Wood bought out a homesteader's claim and platted the shoreline for a trolley-line real estate scheme. There was just one problem: not enough shoreline to sell. You'll hear how Seattle's park planners, working from a design by landscape architect John Olmsted, tackled that shortage, and about the newspaper ads promising buyers Seattle's choicest suburb. Look at how far the lawn runs before the water starts on your walk around the lake.