Living in Ballard, Seattle

Ballard Avenue's brick storefronts hold restaurants, boutiques, and bars inside a landmark historic district that has kept the block's early-1900s facades largely intact. The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks connect Salmon Bay to Puget Sound, and the fish ladder built alongside them draws a steady stream of visitors watching salmon climb a series of stepped pools toward Lake Washington. Golden Gardens Park closes out the neighborhood's western edge with a sandy beach and fire pits facing the Olympic Mountains across the Sound. The National Nordic Museum sits a few blocks from Market Street's shops, its galleries tracing the Scandinavian immigration that shaped the neighborhood's early fishing and boatbuilding trades. A farmers market fills several blocks of Ballard Avenue with produce stalls and food vendors on Sundays, closing the street to cars for the day.

Street parking along Ballard Avenue and near the Locks disappears fast on weekends, and finding a spot within a few blocks of the market can mean circling for a while.

The Locks, the beach, and Ballard Avenue's storefronts sit close enough together that a weekend here rarely requires a car, groceries and dinner both within reach of almost any front door in the neighborhood.