U District Station

In 1911 Virgil Bogue proposed an underground subway from downtown Seattle out to Latona, as the neighborhood was then known, and voters rejected it the following year [1]. A 1920 proposal called for surface rapid transit along Eastlake Avenue ending at 14th Avenue NE, and city leaders did not act on it [1]. The Forward Thrust plan of the late 1960s put a line to Lake City with a station at 15th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 45th Street, beside the Burke Museum, and voters turned it down twice [1]. In the 1990s a regional transit authority proposed light rail through the district near The Ave; that measure lost in March 1995 over its 6.7 billion dollar price, and a smaller 3.9 billion dollar plan passed in November 1996 with the district as its northern terminus [1]. Sound Transit picked a preferred route in 1999, and cost overruns pulled the line back to downtown in 2001 [1]. The Brooklyn Avenue site followed years of debate, and the agency took the name U District in 2012 [1]. The station opened October 2, 2021, underground on Brooklyn Avenue NE next to the campus [1].