Houseboats

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.

This vision of water-haunted New Yorkers, standing in their thousands "like silent sentinels" around Manhattan, is from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It picks up on a desire that seems apposite to Seattle: here, people don't just stand at the edge of the land, they build houses to float at the edge of the water.

And not just a few. Houseboats began to appear here in 1905, and by the Depression of the 1930s there were over 2000 on Lake Union and Portage Bay. These were floating shacks with wood stoves where you could live for next to nothing, homes for the down and out. As the decades passed they became fully fledged bohemian communities, then as moorage fees rose and city laws tightened they became more exclusive enclaves. Today, there are about 500 houseboats in Seattle, mostly owned by professionals.

It's not hard to see why houseboats have become desirable. Their beautiful views, urban location and characterful community would be enough. But nothing compares to the sheer delight of living at the "extremest limit of the land." Here, houseboats stretch out into the lake five or six deep, with narrow canals between them, or cluster around miniature harbors. Amerigo Vespucci was so taken by the profusion of houses on stilts on the shore of Lake Maracaibo in South America that he named the region Venezuela, or "little Venice." It's an apt description of this part of Seattle, too.