Living in West Seattle (Junction), Seattle

Alki Beach runs along two and a half miles of sand and driftwood facing Elliott Bay, its promenade filling with volleyball games and bonfire pits through the warmer months. The Alki Point Lighthouse marks the point's westernmost tip, a concrete tower the Coast Guard has maintained since 1913, while the Log House Museum a block inland traces the neighborhood's history back to the Denny Party's 1851 landing on the beach. California Avenue Southwest carries the shopping district known as the Junction through the neighborhood's commercial core, its blocks holding grocery stores, restaurants, and boutiques around the intersection of California Avenue and Southwest Alaska Street. West Seattle sits on its own peninsula, and the West Seattle High Bridge and the lower Spokane Street Bridge carry most of the traffic across the Duwamish Waterway to and from the rest of the city.

Those two bridges are West Seattle's main link to the rest of town, and when the high bridge closed for structural repairs from 2020 to 2022, drivers were pushed onto the low bridge, the 1st Avenue South Bridge, and the South Park Bridge, detours that turned a short commute into a much longer one for more than two years.

Alki's beach and the Junction's shops sit far enough from downtown that many West Seattle residents describe crossing the Duwamish as leaving the peninsula, not just leaving the neighborhood.