Lake Union Park

This guide to Lake Union Park in Seattle traces the Center for Wooden Boats back to a chance favor on the Fremont Bridge in nineteen fifty-seven, when Dick Wagner helped a stranger step a mast into a boat and got hooked. You'll hear how he and his wife Colleen turned a houseboat rental habit into a hands-on museum in nineteen seventy-six, built on the idea that you learn a boat by using it, not by reading a placard. The guide follows the model boat pond, the Thursday race series, and Wagner's own description of the place as living history. Stand by the pond's edge to watch it still doing exactly what he built it for.