At Home in King County: Images from the Collections

Health, safety, recreation and transportation are some of the topics that appear in these photographs. Please click on the thumbnails at the right for larger images and descriptive text. Links in the captions lead to other pages that are part of the King County Archives Web site. There, you'll find more photographs, maps, drawings and additional text information.

This online exhibit, prepared in honor of Washington State Archives Month 2008, is based on a display ("A Baker's Dozen: Images of King County from the Collections") originally created in 2003 by Assistant Archivist Helice Koffler.

Twentieth-century King County plans its future

From 1937 to 1959, the King County Planning Commission was the county agency responsible for approving development under the county's zoning codes. The Planning Commission also researched and wrote various reports and studies. The cover of this 1948 report shows what the Commission thought a neat, tidy postwar housing development should look like! After 1959, the county's Planning Department continued to undertake land use research and analyses. One project was a decade-long documentation of all existing county land use, using large-scale maps such as this one showing a portion of Renton.

Planning Commission reports and studies (Series 432), Box 1, Item 1.