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Geographical information on Bellevue.
Bellevue is a city across Lake Washington from Seattle in King County, Washington, in the Eastside area. It is the fifth largest city in Washington and the third largest in the Seattle metropolitan area. It has been referred to as an edge city, boomburb, satellite city, or suburb. In the 2020 census, there were 151,854 people living there. The French phrase belle vue (“beautiful view”) is the source of the city’s name. Some of the biggest tech companies in the world are based in Bellevue. Its downtown area has been rapidly changing, with numerous high-rise structures being built both before and after the 2008 recession. Downtown Bellevue, which has 10,200 people, 1,300 businesses, and 45,000 jobs, is currently the second-largest city center in Washington state. The city had one of the top five median household incomes in Washington in 2018, according to a 2018 estimate. Bellevue was named the top location to live and start a business by CNNMoney in 2008, and it was once more listed as the fourth-best place to live in America in 2010. USA Today named Bellevue the second-best place to live in 2014. Currently, PACCAR Inc., T-Mobile US, and Valve are among the more than 145 businesses that have called Bellevue home. Jeff Bezos established the technology company Amazon in Bellevue. Along the Mercer Slough, south of modern-day downtown Bellevue, the Duwamish maintained a small outpost community known as Satskal. Their major towns were situated in what is now Renton and Seattle. An attack on the residents of Elliott Bay was planned from this village. ‘Pah-pah-DEEL’ was another Duwamish settlement. It was located close to Factoria. William Meydenbauer and Aaron Mercer were the first European Americans to establish Bellevue in 1869. They each claimed a homestead plot that was several miles apart. Within a few years, both left, and it wasn’t until 1879 that permanent residents showed up. A settlement had developed by 1882, primarily made up of homesteaders who worked as loggers. In order to facilitate small-scale farming on leased land plots, the logged land was gradually cleared, mostly with the help of Japanese immigrant labor in the early 20th century. By the early 1900s, Bellevue had established itself as a popular weekend escape for Seattleites, who would take the ferry from Meydenbauer Bay and spend the day at neighboring Wildwood Park. However, Bellevue’s tourism declined after the ferry port was rerouted to Medina. The Bellevue Strawberry Festival was created in 1925 to combat this decline, and by the 1930s, it had expanded to draw up to 15,000 people. Approximately 2,000 people lived in Bellevue at the time, making it a tiny town. Bellevue was primarily an undeveloped rural farming area when the Lake Washington Floating Bridge opened in 1940. Despite its tiny size, developers were working to change that; James S. Ditty projected that it would grow to a city of 200,000 people in the 1920s. His ideas were for linking Lake Washington and a region teeming with airports and golf complexes. In 1928, his map containing these visions was released. Access from Seattle became easier with the opening of the Murrow Memorial Bridge, and the neighborhood started to develop into a bedroom community. Bellevue Strawberry Festival was canceled in 1942. The main cause was that around 90% of the region’s agricultural labor force was Japanese, and all of these farmers and their families had been incarcerated in camps after World War II began. Forty-five more years would pass before the fair was recreated. A significant amount of farmland became accessible for development after the ethnic Japanese farming community was forced to leave. The Bellevue downtown area’s first development was made possible by this. On March 31, 1953, Bellevue became a third-class city. The city started to expand more quickly after the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, a second bridge across the lake, opened in 1963. In 1964, the village of Crossroads was annexed. 1969 saw the annexation of Lake Hills. After Seattle, Spokane, and Tacoma, Bellevue was the fourth most populated city in Washington by the 1970 census. With a growing corporate community and a number of high-rise buildings in its center, Bellevue is still one of the biggest cities in the state. The mid-2000s saw a building boom in the city, with the construction of complexes like the Bravern and Lincoln Square. One of the biggest retail malls in the area is presently Bellevue Square, which is situated in downtown Bellevue. Since its 1946 opening, the mall has experienced multiple major expansion phases since the 1980s. The Bel-Red Corridor Project, a comprehensive planning initiative to promote the redevelopment of 900 acres in the expansive Bel-Red neighborhood of the city that borders the nearby city of Redmond, is one of the city’s initiatives. The idea is comparable to the downtown core’s reconstruction, which included private developers’ superblocks of mixed-use complexes. A mixed-use residential and business district called the Spring District was created on 36 acres of industrial land near a future light rail station. The 2 Line of Link light rail is expected to be expanded to Seattle in late 2024 after opening from South Bellevue station to Redmond Technology station in April 2024.