2 Best Sights in University District, Seattle

Founded in 1885, the Burke is Washington’s oldest museum—and also one of its newest, after moving to a new, 113,000-square-foot facility in 2019. It’s an impressive space with an ambitious goal: to exhibit highlights from a collection of more than 18 million objects, encompassing natural history, archaeology, and native Northwest art and culture. You’ll see totem poles, hand-carved canoes, mastodon bones, a whale skeleton, bats, bugs, and lots of fossils. It’s all beautifully displayed, but what’s most striking about the design is the way it “turns the museum inside-out.” Glass walls let visitors look behind the scenes at 12 labs where researchers and conservators go about their work of studying and preserving artifacts. The Burke is also good about activities for kids, with daylong classes on dinosaurs and fossils (handy for parents who want some time to themselves). The museum is affiliated with UW and located on the northwest corner of campus.

This 350-acre park three miles northeast of the University District is mainly used by locals, who come here to jog on the trails, launch boats onto Lake Washington, and let their dogs run free in Seattle’s largest off-leash area. Several unique characteristics can make it worth a visit. From the 1920s through the ‘70s, the park was a naval air base; if you’re interested in aeronautics history or architecture, check out the historic district, where the base’s art deco and Colonial Revival buildings from the ‘30s and ‘40s remain (now repurposed in various ways, including a roller derby arena). If you’re a dog lover, you can find joy watching happy pups swim at the off-leash dog beach. And grunge rock fans like to make a pilgrimage to the park’s northern corner, where, when the breeze is blowing in the right direction, you can hear the Sound Garden that inspired the iconic Seattle band’s name. (The instillation is part of a neighboring NOAA facility that’s not open to the public.)