Alaskan Way

Alaskan Way, originally Railroad Avenue, is a street in Seattle, Washington, that runs along the Elliott Bay waterfront from just north of S. Holgate Street in the Industrial District—south of which it becomes East Marginal Way S.— to Broad Street in Belltown—north of which is Myrtle Edwards Park and the Olympic Sculpture Park. The right-of-way continues northwest through the park, just west of the BNSF Railway mainline, and the roadway picks up again for a few blocks at Smith Cove. It follows a route known in the late 19th century as the "Ram's Horn" (because of its shape). Alaskan Way gives its name to the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which carries Washington State Route 99 through Downtown Seattle.

The idea of building a rail corridor along Seattle's Central Waterfront goes back at least to Thomas Burke and Daniel Hunt Gilman and the construction of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway in the years before the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Railroad Avenue was built as a planked roadway on pilings over the waters of Elliott Bay. South of Downtown, the rail line constituted the one major man-made feature in an area of tideflats.

The portion of Railroad Avenue from Yesler Way in what is now the Pioneer Square neighborhood to University Street near today's Harbor Steps burned in the Great Fire, as did most of the city and most of its piers. All were soon rebuilt on a grander scale. In the case of Railroad Avenue, this was largely the work of the Northern Pacific Railroad and Great Northern Railway. The tideflats were steadily filled in, placing the rails south of Downtown—and the route of the southern portion of today's Alaskan Way—on dry land.

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