On a lovely summer Saturday morning, members of the J&RR team along with some friends and neighbors gathered at the corner of 20th and Madison to experience "Seattle's Infamous Redline" walking tour.

With the app downloaded to our phones and our earbuds in place, we started the tour. We knew we were on the right corner when we found a poem embedded in the sidewalk. As we listened to the narration on our app, our virtual tour guides shared the history of the poem and guided us to our next stop.

The tour covered about a mile and a half, with twelve stops along the way. Some highlights were Mount Zion Baptist Church, sculptures created by Dr. James Washington, Jr., Homer Harris Park, Midtown Square (featuring local small businesses, many of them Black-owned), and Wa Na Wari (a community space for Black art, community organizing, and social connection).

I love walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods. I always notice so much more when I'm walking than when I'm driving. Hearing the history of the houses, businesses, and streets as I walked made it even more meaningful. Interspersed throughout the tour, we heard stories from residents of the Central District told in their own voices. For example, at the Meany Middle School stop, Marie Kidhe shares about what it was like as a kid walking to school and exploring the neighborhood with her friends.

Along the way, our narrators shared about how the history of exclusion caused by redlining and restrictive racial covenants harmed the Black community, but they also shared stories of Black collective action and economic empowerment. At each stop, the app provides links to learn more about the people and places we saw, and I'm excited to explore these links now that I'm home.

A few notes on the mechanics of the tour:

• It was really easy to get there from the Eastside – just a quick trip across the 520 bridge and down 23rd Street. Street parking was easy to find near the first stop.
• On the tour, I appreciated how thoughtfully the narration was timed. We would get instructions to find our next stop, and the narration continued as we walked there. The narrator would say, "You should now be close to our next stop," and I'd look up and find that I had arrived!
• If I do the tour again, I'll allow time to eat at one of local businesses we discovered along the way.
• This is a great tour to do with a friend or two, and I think it would also be a great family outing with kids who are interested in history.

Although I think the tour is best experienced on foot and in person, you can do the entire tour virtually on the app. There are photos for each stop to help you see what it looks like on the ground. The app also includes transcripts of the narration, so I've been going back to re-read some of the stories we heard along the way.

I hope you'll be inspired to explore a piece of our city's history through this great walking tour!