E Olive Street continues the original name of Olive Way east of Bellevue Avenue. As noted in that article, it was named for Olive Julia Bell Stewart (1846–1921), who was five when the Denny Party arrived at Alki Point in 1851.
E Olive Street begins at Bellevue Avenue and goes ⅕ of a mile east to Harvard Avenue. On the other side of Seattle Central College and Cal Anderson Park, it resumes at 11th Avenue and goes another ⅖ of a mile east to 18th Avenue, where it’s interrupted by E Madison Street. Picking up again at 20th Avenue, it goes ⅞ of a mile east to 39th Avenue, where it becomes a short stairway down to Lake Washington Boulevard.
Its initial segment, the block between Melrose Avenue and Bellevue Avenue, was renamed E Olive Place sometime between 1912 and 1919, and its final paved segment, the block between Lake Washington Boulevard and Lake Washington, was renamed E Olive Lane in 1971. As noted in that article, the shoreline street end, for some reason, retained the E Olive Street name.
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.