Alki Beach

Alki Beach Park runs about 2.5 miles from Alki Point to Duwamish Head at the mouth of the Duwamish River. Seattle Parks says the first white settlers landed on a cold, stormy day in November 1851. A monument at the Alki Point end of the beach marks that landing on November 13, 1851. Parks writes that Chief Seattle and his tribe greeted them and helped them build a cabin for the winter.

Parks says “Duwamish” comes from a Chinook word, duwampsh, meaning “many-colored river,” and that it was one of the first names proposed for the city now called Seattle. By 1902 an electric street railway ran “all the way from Seattle” to the beach. Charles Looff’s Luna Park opened on pilings at Duwamish Head in 1907, with saltwater pools, a carousel, a Ferris wheel, and a roller coaster. Fire destroyed it in 1931.

In 1910 this stretch became the first municipal saltwater beach on the West Coast. The Alki Bathhouse, built in 1911, was the first of its kind. A small replica of the Statue of Liberty, a 1952 gift from Reginald H. Parsons and the Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America, still stands on the beach. The sources below are Seattle Parks pages.