Seattle Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

• 
  Lumen Field

  Your ears are about to understand why Lumen Field in SoDo counts among the loudest outdoor venues in professional sports. The stadium opened in August 2002 with an open roof designed to keep crowd noise in, creating one of the loudest outdoor venues in professional sports.

• University of Washington

  Founded in 1861, when Seattle was a town of a few hundred people, the University of Washington now spreads its campus across this plateau above Portage Bay. The university moved to this plateau above Portage Bay in 1895; the campus was then designed for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Seattle's first World's Fair, and the axes of the original fairgrounds still organize the layout.

• 
  Space Needle

  Overhead rises the Space Needle, the 605-foot tower that has defined Seattle's skyline since 1962, built for the Century 21 Exposition that put the city on the global map. The idea began on a cocktail napkin sketched by World's Fair chairman Edward Carlson in 1959: a space-age observation tower embodying America's optimism at the height of the Space Race.

• 
  Pike Place Market

  Picture farmers selling directly from wagons here since August 17, 1907. The market was born from a revolt against middlemen: Seattle housewives complained that grocery prices were too high, the city council agreed, and within a week farmers were selling directly to customers from wagons on this hillside above Elliott Bay.

• 
  Pike Place Fish Throw & Original Starbucks

  Listen for the shout and watch the toss: this fish market has hurled whole salmon across the counter since the tradition began in the 1980s. What started as a practical solution became a performance and eventually a Harvard Business School case study on workplace culture.

All 40 stops

• Pike Place Market (Downtown/Waterfront)

  Picture farmers selling directly from wagons here since August 17, 1907.

• Pike Place Fish Throw & Original Starbucks (Downtown/Waterfront)

  Listen for the shout and watch the toss: this fish market has hurled whole salmon across the counter since the tradition began in the 1980s.

• Seattle Waterfront (Downtown/Waterfront)

  Your view stretches from Elliott Bay out across Puget Sound toward the Olympic Peninsula.

• Seattle Great Wheel (Downtown/Waterfront)

  Look up at the Seattle Great Wheel, a 175-foot Ferris wheel that has turned above Pier 57 since June 2012.

• Pioneer Square (Pioneer Square)

  Picture a tidal flat at the base of a steep hill — that's where Seattle began in 1852.

• Bill Speidel's Underground Tour (Pioneer Square)

  Your feet now rest above Seattle's original street level.

• Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (Pioneer Square)

  Picture the ton of gold that stepped off the steamship Portland right here in 1897.

• Smith Tower (Pioneer Square)

  Look up at Smith Tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi when it opened in 1914, a record it held until 1931.

• Occidental Square (Pioneer Square)

  Notice the cobblestones beneath your feet — pulled from the old Skid Road and relaid here when the city closed this block to traffic in…

• International District (International District)

  Your walk here crosses a neighborhood known at different times as Chinatown, Japantown, Little Saigon, and the International District — and still all of them…

• Uwajimaya Village (International District)

  Picture a small tofu shop in Tacoma — the seed that grew into this 65,000-square-foot Asian supermarket serving Seattle since 1928.

• Lumen Field (SoDo)

  Your ears are about to understand why Lumen Field in SoDo counts among the loudest outdoor venues in professional sports.

• Space Needle (Seattle Center)

  Overhead rises the Space Needle, the 605-foot tower that has defined Seattle's skyline since 1962, built for the Century 21 Exposition that put the city…

• MoPOP — Museum of Pop Culture (Seattle Center)

  This crumpled-metal building is the Museum of Pop Culture, which Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen commissioned Frank Gehry to design and opened in 2000 as the…

• Chihuly Garden and Glass (Seattle Center)

  Chihuly Garden and Glass opened in 2012 as a permanent installation bringing Dale Chihuly's work home to the region that formed him.

• Seattle Center (Seattle Center)

  Every summer these 74 acres fill with Bumbershoot crowds, but Seattle Center began as the campus of the 1962 World's Fair and has been the…

• Kerry Park (Queen Anne)

  Kerry Park, a small terraced park on Queen Anne Hill, gives you perhaps the most photographed view in Seattle: the Space Needle in the foreground…

• Belltown (Belltown)

  Between Pike Place Market and Seattle Center lies Belltown, a dense neighborhood that has been, by turns, a working-class waterfront district, an artists' colony, and…

• The Crocodile / Belltown Music Scene (Belltown)

  Since 1991, The Crocodile on Second Avenue has been the center of Seattle's music universe, and you are just steps from its door.

• Capitol Hill (Capitol Hill)

  Broadway's bars, bookstores, and coffee shops mark Capitol Hill, Seattle's most culturally electric neighborhood and the city's LGBTQ hub since the 1970s.

• Cal Anderson Park / CHOP Site (Capitol Hill)

  In June 2020, Cal Anderson Park became the center of one of the most unusual events in Seattle's history.

• Cal Anderson Park (Capitol Hill)

  Cal Anderson Park, seven acres of lawn and water, is named for the first openly gay man elected to the Washington State Legislature.

• First Hill (First Hill)

  Profanity Hill, the earliest settlers called this steep ridge east of downtown, for the swearing required to climb it, and yet First Hill became Seattle's…

• Frye Art Museum (First Hill)

  Free admission has been the rule at the Frye Art Museum since 1952, and this quiet cultural treasure asks only that you spend unhurried time…

• Central District (Central District)

  Historically the heart of Black Seattle, the Central District was shaped by both the ingenuity of its residents and decades of deliberate exclusion.

• Rainier Valley / Columbia City (Rainier Valley)

  Columbia City anchors Rainier Valley, the corridor running south from the Central District toward Renton along the Rainier Avenue spine.

• Little Saigon (International District)

  After the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, Vietnamese refugees built Little Saigon along Jackson Street, the district you are walking through now.

• South Lake Union (South Lake Union)

  Amazon built South Lake Union, or more precisely, Amazon transformed it into the glass-tower campus you see now.

• Amazon Spheres (Belltown/SLU)

  Three interconnected glass domes, the Amazon Spheres opened in January 2018 as the most distinctive addition to Seattle's skyline since the Space Needle.

• Gas Works Park (Wallingford)

  Rusting towers and tanks of a coal gasification plant that ran from 1906 to 1956 form the heart of Gas Works Park, one of the…

• Fremont Neighborhood (Fremont)

  Fremont declared itself the Center of the Universe in 1994 and has never rescinded the claim.

• Fremont Troll & Aurora Bridge (Fremont)

  Under the Aurora Bridge crouches the Fremont Troll, an eighteen-foot concrete sculpture clutching a Volkswagen Beetle, in place since October 31, 1990.

• Ballard (Ballard)

  Ballard was its own city until 1907, and it still carries itself with the independent dignity of a place annexed against its will.

• Hiram M. Chittenden Locks (Ballard)

  Completed in 1917, the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks connect Lake Union and Lake Washington to Puget Sound.

• University District (University District)

  Everyone here calls it the U-District: the University District grew up around the University of Washington campus in the 1890s and has been a center…

• University of Washington (University District)

  Founded in 1861, when Seattle was a town of a few hundred people, the University of Washington now spreads its campus across this plateau above…

• Burke Museum of Natural History (University District)

  Teenagers started this: the Young Naturalists Society, collecting specimens in the fields and forests around Seattle, founded the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture…

• Coleman Dock (Downtown/Waterfront)

  Coleman Dock is the main terminal of Washington State Ferries and the busiest ferry terminal on the West Coast.

• Bainbridge Island Ferry Terminal (Bainbridge Island)

  On March 30, 1942, the Winslow ferry terminal on Bainbridge Island became the site of one of the most significant and shameful events in Pacific…

• Ferry Terminal / Puget Sound (Downtown/Waterfront)

  Puget Sound stretches out from this shore, one of the great inland seas of North America, a glacially carved fjord running 100 miles from the…

How it works