This portion of E Olive Street was renamed E Olive Lane by Ordinance 100274 in 1971. It is unclear why. For some reason, as the quarter section map shows, the name change wasn’t extended into the shoreline street end.
Olive Street was named for Olive Julia Bell Stewart (1846–1921), who was five when the Denny Party arrived at Alki Point in 1851.
E Olive Lane begins at Lake Washington Boulevard at the bottom of the E Olive Street stairway and, passing Howell Place, goes around 380 feet east to Lake Washington.
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.
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