The Elliott Bay Fishing Pier

In 2019 Expedia Group moved into the old Amgen campus at Smith Cove, a forty-acre site on Elliott Bay just north of downtown, and did something Seattle almost never sees on its industrial waterfront. It opened the shoreline. The campus put a public promenade along the water, cleaned up the beach, and connected the whole thing to the Elliott Bay Trail that runs from Myrtle Edwards Park up to the cruise terminal at Pier 91. On a clear evening it is one of the few places in the city where the public can stand on a real beach, downtown, and look straight west at the Olympics across open salt water.

It is genuinely good. It is also unfinished, and the missing piece is obvious the moment you stand there. There is nowhere to go out over the water.

The One Good Place

Seattle's central waterfront is a wall of piers owned by the port, the cruise lines, and the freight terminals. Public access to the actual water, the kind where you can put your feet near it and cast a line, is close to nonexistent between Alki and Golden Gardens. The Smith Cove shoreline is the exception, and half a mile south of it sits the proof of what people do with that kind of access when they get it.

The Elliott Bay Fishing Pier at Centennial Park, built by the Port of Seattle at Terminal 86 in the 1970s, is a public pier that reaches out into the bay for the sole purpose of letting people fish and stand over deep water. It has an artificial reef built beneath it to draw fish. It has been in continuous public use for half a century. It is one of the most-used pieces of public waterfront the city owns, and it exists because someone decided the public deserved a way out onto Elliott Bay that was not a boat.

That pier is aging, it is small for the demand, and it sits at the far end of a parking lot. The new center of gravity on this stretch of waterfront is Smith Cove, where a Fortune 500 company just spent years landscaping the shoreline and inviting the public onto it. The pier belongs there.

The Project

Burnham Civic proposes a public fishing and gathering pier on Elliott Bay at the Smith Cove shoreline, next to the Expedia campus and the existing public beach. Not a dock and not a boardwalk. A real pier, wide enough to hold people three ways at once: those who came to fish, those who came to walk out over the water at sunset, and those who came to sit. A covered pavilion at the head of it for shade and weather. Rod holders, cleaning stations, and a bench line along both rails. An artificial reef beneath it, the way the Terminal 86 pier has one, so that it fishes as well as it looks.

It should be built to last a century and detailed like it matters. The rail and decking are stone, heavy timber and cast metal, where a maintenance dock would get galvanized pipe. The pier is the western terminus of the Elliott Bay Trail and the front porch of the whole Smith Cove shoreline. It should read, from a ferry deck or a passing cruise ship, as a civic object, the way the great municipal piers of the early twentieth century did before American cities forgot how to build them.

Why It Works

Almost everything hard about a waterfront project is already solved here. The shoreline is stabilized and public. The trail already lands at the site. The parking, the transit, and the sidewalks were built for a corporate campus of thousands. There is a willing private neighbor with an interest in the public realm next door being excellent rather than empty. And there is a fifty-year-old pier down the trail that answers, in advance, every skeptic who asks whether Seattle would actually use a fishing pier. Seattle has been using one, hard, since Nixon was in office.

The Standard

This project is a test case for the principle that runs through everything Burnham Civic publishes: public infrastructure should be built in the style that makes people want to keep it. See The Standard Seattle Forgot. A city that can restore forty acres of contaminated waterfront to a public beach can build a pier worthy of standing on it. It will get built to the standard of a civic monument or the standard of a bus shelter.

What TBC Is Doing

We are developing the concept brief, assembling the ownership and jurisdiction map for the Smith Cove tidelands, and building the case for the coalition that takes it to the Port of Seattle, the city, and the private neighbor. The working file below is for members.