City of Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board

The City of Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board is responsible for designating and preserving structures of historical importance in Seattle, Washington. The board recommends actions to the Seattle City Council, which fashions these into city ordinances with the force of law. The board is part of the city's Department of Neighborhoods.

The board consists of eleven members appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council. By its establishing ordinance, the board must include at least two architects, two historians, one member of the City Planning Commission, one structural engineer, and one person each representing the fields of finance and real estate management. As of 2015^[update], more than 450 individual Seattle sites, buildings, vehicles, vessels, and street clocks have been designated as Seattle Landmarks subject to protection by city ordinance.

The board was established in 1973 as part of a rise in consciousness about historic preservation in Seattle and elsewhere. In 1966 the federal government passed the National Historic Preservation Act. In Seattle, Allied Arts, Victor Steinbrueck, Ralph Anderson, Richard White, and Alan Black, among others, reacted to proposals to radically redevelop Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market by agitating for a more preservationist approach. These two districts were designated as "historic" by the city in 1970 and 1971, respectively. The city then passed a Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, establishing what was originally the Office of Historic Preservation and now consists of the Landmarks Preservation Board and some other portions of the Department of Neighborhoods.

Besides individual landmarks, Seattle has eight historic districts: Ballard Avenue, Columbia City, Fort Lawton, Harvard-Belmont, the International District, Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, and Sand Point. Pioneer Square is a neighborhood dating back to Seattle's earliest years and contains many buildings from shortly after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889; the adjacent International District is the historic center of Seattle's Asian and Pacific Islander community, with many buildings dating from 1905-1910 after the neighborhood was regraded; Pike Place Market is a public market founded in 1907 and including some buildings older than that; Fort Lawton (in Discovery Park) and Sand Point (in Magnuson Park) are the sites of former military facilities; Ballard Avenue and the Columbia City district were the urban centers of separate cities that Seattle annexed as it grew; the Harvard-Belmont district includes some of Seattle's most prestigious residential buildings.

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