This street was created in 1966 as Union Place, a state-owned frontage road for the recently constructed Interstate 5. (Construction of an earlier, nearby Union Place had been approved and then repealed in 1902.) It was renamed Convention Place in 1988 when the city took ownership as part of the construction of the Washington State Convention Center, which became the Seattle Convention Center in 2022.
Formerly open to the air, Convention Place became a tunnel during the construction of the convention center, which was built over it and Interstate 5. It begins at the intersection of 9th Avenue and Pike Street and goes ⅛ of a mile southwest to Union Street just before its intersection with 7th Avenue.
Born and raised in Seattle, Benjamin Donguk Lukoff had his interest in local history kindled at the age of six, when his father bought him settler granddaughter Sophie Frye Bass’s Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle at the gift shop of the Museum of History and Industry. He studied English, Russian, and linguistics at the University of Washington, and went on to earn his master’s in English linguistics from University College London. His book of rephotography, Seattle Then and Now, was published in 2010. An updated version came out in 2015.
