At the first Christmas the Denny Party spent in Washington after landing at Alki Beach in 1851, the Indigenous locals shared clam juice with the underprepared newcomers who had no milk for their children. Seafood had nourished the people of the Salish Sea for thousands of years, salmon forming the backbone of Indigenous culture while clams, cod, and oysters rounded out a rich buffet.
In 1938, one big fire and a gold rush later, a man named Ivar Haglund opened a sightseeing aquarium on Pier 54, along with a fish-and-chips stand to feed the customers—an eatery that evolved into Ivar’s Acres of Clams, billed as “where clams and culture
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