Seattle Landmarks: Book Tickets Now

Two of downtown Seattle’s best high viewpoints are Sky View Observatory and Smith Tower, and they give you very different outlooks. Sky View Observatory sits on the 73rd floor of Columbia Center, 902 feet up, with a 360-degree view that takes in Mount Rainier, the Cascades, the Olympic Mountains, Elliott Bay and the Space Needle. Smith Tower’s observatory is lower, on the 35th floor, but its outdoor deck keeps you closer to the streets of Pioneer Square.

On a clear day, either one is a good way to get your bearings early in a trip.

Smith Tower opened in 1914 and was the tallest building on the West Coast for almost 50 years. The 35th floor is the reason to go up. The Chinese Room has a carved ceiling and heavy carved furniture that have been there since opening year, and an outdoor deck sits just beside it.

The ride up in one of the building’s historic elevators is part of the visit.

Seattle Center is the 74-acre site of the 1962 World’s Fair, and the Space Needle was built for it. A guide can fill in the story of the fair and how the grounds changed afterward, and a guided walking tour lets you hear that story on the spot.

It’s a relaxed way to see the area if you’d rather not work out what you’re looking at on your own.

The Seattle Center Monorail was built for the same World’s Fair and still runs the same short route. It covers 0.9 miles along Fifth Avenue between Westlake Center downtown and Seattle Center, with no stops in between, and the trip takes about two minutes. Near the Seattle Center end, the track passes through the Museum of Pop Culture building before reaching the station.

Plenty of visitors use it simply to get between downtown and the Space Needle, and it works well for that too.