Seward Park is a
neighborhood
A neighbourhood (Commonwealth English) or neighborhood (American English) is a geographically localized community within a larger town, city, suburb or rural area, sometimes consisting of a single street and the buildings lining it. Neigh ...
in southeastern
Seattle
Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...
,
Washington, just west of
Seward Park. It is part of Seattle's
South End. The park occupies all of Bailey Peninsula.
Neighborhood
The neighborhood is bounded on the east and north by
Lake Washington, on the south by South Kenyon Street, and on the west by the eastern boundaries of Columbia City, one of Seattle's oldest neighborhoods.
Environment
The 300 acres (121 ha) of Seward Park has about a 120 acre (48.6 ha) surviving remnant of
old-growth forest, providing a glimpse of what some of the lake shore looked like before the growth of the city of Seattle. With trees older than 250 years, the Seward Park forest is relatively young (the forests of Seattle before the city were fully mature, up to 1,000–2,000 years old). The park's trees largely consists of softwoods, mostly
Douglas firs, but with other species present as well, including
Western hemlock,
Pacific madrona and
Alaskan cedar.
One of the earliest settlers, E. A. Clark, was influential in the life of
Cheshiahud, a young man at the time, the mid-1850s.
The Seward Park neighborhood includes what may be one of the highest residential hills in Seattle (the hill is traversed by Graham Street near its high point, thus earning it the name "Graham hill"). In a series of annexations, the neighborhood joined the City of Seattle in 1907.
Education
Although no schools fall within the borders of the neighborhood as described on city maps, three
public schools,
Graham Hill and Hawthorne and Dunlap elementary schools serve the area's students. In addition the
alternative Orca
K-8 lies within blocks of the neighborhood's boundary.
Jewish Community
Seward Park is home to the largest concentration of
Orthodox Jews
Orthodox Judaism is a collective term for the traditionalist branches of contemporary Judaism. Theologically, it is chiefly defined by regarding the Torah, both Written and Oral, as literally revealed by God on Mount Sinai and faithfully tr ...
in the Seattle area. Established after the Jewish community of the Central District relocated en masse in the early 1960s, the
eruv
An ''eruv'' (; , , also transliterated as ''eiruv'' or ''erub'', plural: ''eruvin'' or ''eruvim'') is a ritual ''halakhic'' enclosure made for the purpose of allowing activities which are normally Activities prohibited on Shabbat, prohibited ...
-bound neighborhood has five
synagogue
A synagogue, also called a shul or a temple, is a place of worship for Jews and Samaritans. It is a place for prayer (the main sanctuary and sometimes smaller chapels) where Jews attend religious services or special ceremonies such as wed ...
s and a
Kollel, and its main thoroughfare becomes a family parade on Shabbat and holidays. The state’s oldest Ashkenazi Orthodox congregation,
Bikur Cholim Machzikay-Hadath (BCMH), runs a campus that includes the local mikveh, a summer camp, and the girls’ high school Derech Emunah. Seward Park also contains two congregations -
Sephardic Bikur Holim, which follows Turkish tradition, and
Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, from the Island of Rhodes - which anchor Seattle’s
Sephardic population, the third largest community in the country.
See also
*
Seattle before the city
*
Seward Park
Notes
References
* . Page links to
Village Descriptions Duwamish-Seattle section
*
External links
Friends of Seward Park
*Cassandra Tate
Seward Park
at HistoryLink
*
{{Coord, 47, 33, 02, N, 122, 15, 52, W, format=dms, display=title, type:city_region:US-WA