Picture a tidal flat at the base of a steep hill — that's where Seattle began in 1852. Henry Yesler built the city's first steam-powered sawmill here at the foot of what is now Yesler Way. Loggers skidded logs down the hill on a greased wooden track — the original Skid Road, which gave the English language a new phrase for a street of destitution.
The neighborhood's Romanesque Revival brick buildings date from the rebuild after the Great Fire of 1889. Look up at the ornate facades, the arched windows, the terracotta ornaments: these buildings were put up fast by men who knew cities were built of stone and brick, not wood. Pioneer Square became Seattle's first skid row as the city's center moved north, then was rediscovered by artists in the 1960s.
Today it is one of the best-preserved Victorian commercial districts in the country, a National Historic District of thirty-some blocks where a boomtown's architecture survives intact. The totem pole in the triangular park was taken from a Tlingit village in Alaska in 1899; a replacement was carved by Tlingit artists in 1940 after the original burned.