Urban Landscape, Native Landscape: Harbor Steps

Friday, June 4, 2010

Harbor Steps

The Harbor Steps April 2010

The Harbor Steps in Downtown Seattle is a broad flight of stairs that span the width of University Street between 1st Avenue & Western Avenue. The planting design is spare & uninspired. But the hardscape (a series of steps, terraces & expansive water features that qualify as both fountains & waterfalls) is quite nice. Restaurants & shops line the steps. There are many places to sit, some with shade from trees. The land is too steep here to accommodate a street with vehicular traffic. Before the Harbor Steps were built, there was a fence across a high retaining wall & a narrow staircase. The Harbor Steps are a very pleasant way to move from Downtown to the Waterfront. They are directly across from the Seattle Art Museum, very near Benaroya Hall & the Garden of Remembrance, close to the Pike Place Market. Post Alley connects to the Harbor Steps at their center.

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About This Blog

This blog began in 2008 as Metropolitan Gardens to provide information on gardening in Seattle & places like it. Click on Gardening in Cascadia. The blog expanded to include Parks P-Patches Public Gardens in the US, Canada & Europe. Then Nature was added. (The difference between nature & gardens is intent. Nature happens. Gardens are planned.) Many recent posts are not about Seattle, or even Cascadia. They are Urban Landscape: streetscape & architecture. Cascadia is the region including the Cascade Mountains of Washington & Oregon. If you want to contact the blogger, leave a message in comments. Comments are moderated & private messages will not be posted.

Our Land & Climate

The city of Seattle rests between 2 bodies of water: Puget Sound & Lake Washington. Puget Sound is a substantial part of the Salish Sea & a very small part of the Pacific Ocean. The Salish Sea is set apart from the Pacific by the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington & Vancouver Island in the province of British Columbia. The dense, wet clouds of the Pacific Ocean travel as far as the Cascade Mountains, near the Salish Sea & not very far from the ocean. East of the Cascades lies the desert of the Columbia Basin. The moist, temperate climate of Seattle extends south to northern California & north to southeastern Alaska. The Pacific Northwest Coast from San Francisco Bay to Cook Inlet shares a flora dominated by evergreen coniferous forest. The central portion, west of the Cascade Mountains, is called Cascadia. The climate is cool & wet from fall to spring, warm & dry in summer. The Olympic Mountains block Seattle from much of the Pacific rainfall. Seattle is drier than the Atlantic coast of North America & northern Europe, cooler in summer & warmer in winter. It lies near the latitude of Paris & Quebec City.