Eastllake @ Twilight

Photo & Text Copyright 2009 Seattle Daily Photo. All rights reserved, including reproduction or republishing.

This is a compressed view looking across Lake Union to Eastlake and the north end of Capitol Hill behind it. There are two long docks of houseboats/floating homes on the water, but you can only see the front row. If you look behind the classic liveaboard boat "Owl" on the right you will see the upper deck of a houseboat with a line of colorful chairs--a nice place to watch the sunset, non? Behind the floating home community on the water there are apartments, and beyond those, condos, apartments and houses marching up the slope of the hill, and a school on the upper right. The lighted street heading uphill is Roanoke Street. Wave if one of these sunset windows with the lake view is yours :-).

It might interest you to know that the Roanoke Reef floating homes you see here which usually sell for well over a million and a half dollars each are actually fronting quite an historic piece of Seattle real estate. A controversial proposed block-long 60-foot high over-water condominium complex was blocked from being built here years ago, and these houseboat docks use the pilings originally installed for that. "A court challenge by the Eastlake Community Council and the Floating Homes Association stopped the over-water project, but not before the historic 188-foot long Boeing hangar on the site had been demolished (its footprint is now occupied by the Roanoke Reef houseboats). The first Boeing airplanes were assembled and painted here, and William Boeing himself piloted the company's first test flight in 1916 (his next words: "Gentlemen, we are in the airplane business"). The world's first international mail flight originated here in 1919, as did the birth of United Airlines." (from Eastlake, Seattle)