Sky View Observatory - Columbia Center
Glass-walled observation deck near the top of a downtown skyscraper, with sweeping city views.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Sky View Observatory in Seattle starts seventy-three floors below where you're standing, back in nineteen eighty-four, when ironworkers walked bare steel beams with no harness to raise the tower now known as Columbia Center. It follows one surviving photograph of an unnamed tradesman mid-stride over the drop, developer Martin Selig's original design for the building, and how flight paths near Sea-Tac forced architects to scale it back. Look out at the skyline these workers built floor by floor before the city could finally see over its own downtown.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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