We used a mixture of light-colored stone and tiles for most of the walls, with accent colors where required. Westlake Station sits in the center of the Retail District, an area made up of light-colored stone, brick and terra-cotta department stores and office buildings with active retail spaces at street level. Our hope was that this differentiation would help riders to identify the stations with the neighborhoods even though they were underground.

Since this was to be the first underground transit system that Seattle had built, we adopted a user-friendly approach to the architecture: those elements that were system-related from station to station would be handled consistently but, in contrast to most systems at that time, the character of each station would be determined by the nature of the neighborhood in which it was located. This brought back a lot of memories because way back in the 20th Century I led a team that designed the five stations, including Westlake, that serve downtown. We started by riding the local bus downtown and then boarding the train at the Westlake Station.

We took a little time the other morning to ride our Link Light Rail system in its just-opened extension from downtown Seattle to the University of Washington campus.

Westlake light rail station