Lowman Beach Park

About

Lowman Beach Park is a beautiful shoreline park with rocks and driftwood. The park offers a large lawn space for gathering, swings and a wonderful location to take in sunsets with a view of the Olympics, Alki Point, and Williams Point. The entire shoreline is available for hand carry boat launching and landing. The final portion of the seawall and the tennis court at Lowman Beach Park was removed in 2022, the beach was restored, and a remnant of Pelly Creek was daylighted. Before there was a sawmill and then a park, the local Indigenous peoples called the area around the park gwalali, meaning Capsize-Place.

T. T. Waterman (Thomas Talbot Waterman, 1885-1936), a U.S. anthropologist, was here in the Pacific NW around 1917-1918 recording/cataloguing indigenous place names. For Lowman Beach, he wrote down “GwEl” which means “Capsize/turn-over.” More recently, Professor Coll Thrush in Native Seattle, Histories from the Crossing-Over Place updated the spelling this area to g^wel based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which all tribes use for the Lushootseed language. Today, “capsize/turn-over” would be g^wal, while -ali means “place”  - so it’s g^walali or shortened to g^wali for “Capsize-Place”. The name may have been a warning about the offshore potential for the tipping of a canoe.