Then & Now: Old Juanita Steamer Dock

A LOT OF PEOPLE must wonder while strolling the causeway across the wildlife-rich wetlands of just what the line of decaying pilings extending out into Lake Washington might have once supported.

Our Then & Now historic photo here showing a steamer landing and store in that very location on the bay would be a fine assumption. Back in time before two floating bridges spanned the lake, small steamboats scooted here and there to many points, including Forbes Landing, shown in this photo sometime before 1916.

However, according to the book , the pilings that can still be seen from the park (see the “Now” photo) are not the ones upon which Forbes Landing perched. The pilings and structures shown in the old photo extended from the first bridge across Juanita Bay, built by settler Dorr Forbes in 1890, and they’re long gone.

The pilings you can still see today, often serving as a perch for cormorants and typically in winter surrounded by waterfowl such as coots, teal and even trumpeter swans, came later and were part of a wharf for sand and gravel barges. The City of Seattle used the wharf to load sand and gravel mined from the site of today's .

The original bridge across Juanita Bay was built by Forbes to connect Juanita and Kirkland, and seems a mighty feat of engineering for this primitive area in 1890. Forbes had been busy logging Finn Hill and operating shingle mill in the bay near Juanita Creek, according to McCauley, when Peter Kirk brought his steel mill boom to town.

The lake was then 7.9 feet higher, before the Montlake Cut was completed in 1916 to connect the lake with Puget Sound via Lake Union, and Juanita Bay substantially larger and deeper. So to link Juanita with booming Kirkland, Forbes somehow built his half-mile bridge. It remained until 1932 when it was replaced by the current causeway, now part of Juanita Bay Park and open only to pedestrians and bicyclists.

At some point the steamer landing was built and later, Forbes son Les added a small store. This is what you see in the older photo.

The lowering of the lake in 1916 made the bay to shallow for steamers, rendering the landing useless and sinking the Forbes’s business.

The lowering of the lake also likely eliminated centuries of aboriginal use of the bay. Long before people of European origin arrived, a band of today’s Duwamish tribe, the TAHB-Tah-Byook, lived in a village near the mouth of Juanita Creek, and here in the bay dug wapato bulbs, a nutritious, starchy staple, and no doubt hunted waterfowl. Smallpox that ravaged native peoples on the early 1800s, like introduced by early Spanish explorers, apparently eliminated this band. But Native Americans are reported to have continued to stop at Juanita Bay to harvest wapato seasonally until the lake was lowered.

Like Forbes Landing, that’s all just part of Kirkland’s interesting history now.