u/loopstarapp

For anyone who does the photo and building detective work here: the city's landmark designation reports are some of the best primary sources we have, but they're scattered and hard to browse by place.

I put all 451 City of Seattle designated landmarks on one map. Each one links straight to its ordinance or designation record, and the header shows that 122 are also on the National Register. You can search by name, filter by neighborhood and kind, or browse themed collections like Women Who Built Seattle. The map is built into the page, so it works offline once it's loaded.

Link (free, no sign-in): https://mchatai.com/hub/seattle-landmarks

Disclosure: I'm a software developer in Seattle and I built this; it's part of my free app, mChatAI. Each landmark also has a short narration, and that narration is AI-written from the designation report and, where one exists, the National Register nomination. Treat the linked records as the authority, not the summary.

Which designation report do you think is the best read? I'd like to point people to a few good ones.

With October almost here, I'd like to suggest Frankenstein for the next two-week read, specifically the 1818 text.

Why 1818? It's the original: published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818. Mary Shelley revised the book heavily for the 1831 edition, adding the famous introduction about how the story was conceived and giving it a more explicitly moral tone. Editions differ, so it's worth everyone reading the same one.

Free text (1818 edition): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41445 (Gutenberg's 1818 edition. Watch out: #84, the copy most people land on, is the revised 1831 text.) Free audiobook of the 1818 text: read solo by Cori Samuel for LibriVox, 7h59m: https://librivox.org/frankenstein-or-the-modern-prometheus-1818-by-mary-wollstonecraft-shelley/

A possible split: the first half in week one and the second half in week two.

Disclosure: I'm the developer of mChatAI, a free iPhone app that plays LibriVox recordings offline. Both links above work in any browser, though, so no app is needed.

If you have a modern iPhone the you also have a free text to speech AI model you can use for any text you have.