Sit back, close your eyes, and think out of the box. It is 2050 and beautiful, downtown Bellevue is thriving with healthy retail and cutting edge business. And the heart of the greater downtown residential community identified and nurtured in the early part of the twenty-first century beats with genuine sense of place.
Central to this scene is the sharing of the Bellevue Story via a dynamic clean cultural tourism industry enabled by light rail mobility in 2010.
Visitors from near and far are enlightened and entertained to hear about the American Pacific Whaling Company that occupied Meydenbauer Bay during WW11 … the story is interpreted at the restored company dock at the Meydenbauer Bay Waterfront Park.
They revel in the stories of the Aaron Mercer family’s primitive existence on the shore of Mercer Slough in the 1860’s as well as the B.F. Winters’ Family Bulb Farm, the Balatico Truck Farm and the La Belle Ranch of the 1930’s told at interpretive installations all along the western edge of the Mercer Slough Nature Park.
The ghosts of the 1904 Wilburton Train Trestle, the Hewitt and Lea Sawmill and the disappearance of the northern end of Mercer Slough itself with the 1916 lowering of Lake Washington are revealed and celebrated on the eastern edge of the Slough at Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center’s early twentieth century Sullivan House.
And the enclave of Omer Mithun-designed homes in Surrey Downs also attracts folks to the story of the city’s mid-twentieth century suburban development.
Settlers in the 1950s in mid-Bellevue are enjoying their new friendly and accessible downtown. Turn of the century immigrants and transplants are finally gaining a sense of community. And visitors are appreciating the unique growth mode of this beautiful and successful edge-city … Bellevue, the City in a Park.
Ingeniously, it all started with the spectacular witness and availability of the area from a new suspended footpath and gondolas integrated into the light rail system traversing the Slough above the Mercer Slough Nature Park. Who would have thought.
L. Lee Maxwell, Bellevue
