Valley neighborhoods lying along Rainier Avenue South rival any other part of Seattle for age, since they are near the historic streetcar (removed in 1937) that in 1892 connected downtown Seattle to Columbia City and then later to Renton, known as the "Rainier Valley and Renton Railroad." The railroad, the reorientation of the Duwamish River and the lowering of Lake Washington, which caused the lake to drain west through Lake Union and the Ship Canal rather than south, made the valley dry enough to allow building, where it boomed along with the rest of Seattle on and after the Alaskan Gold rush right up to the Depression of the 1930s. Because Seattle was a hamlet before the 1889 Alaskan Gold Rush, there is little to distinguish the historic parts of Rainier Valley from other historic neighborhoods in Seattle. Away from Rainier Avenue South, a fair amount of the development is postwar, when the Valley was filled out as part of the "Boeing boom," but historic pre-World War II housing can be found in every part of the Valley, where these often imposing homes once commanded large spreads that were later subdivided and sold off. One such estate was owned from 1902 to 1916 by a certain up-and-coming dry-goods purveyor by the name of J. Walter Nordstrom, who brought up his young family of three children there, as documented by the Rainier Valley Historical Society in 2017 (the estate was at the 3700 block of South Juneau Street). Unlike most of Seattle, then, the Valley has an interesting mix of pre- and post-war houses cheek-to-jowl (in Seattle residential style), with only the neighborhood immediately surrounding Columbia City almost exclusively pre-World War II. Geography There are several identifiable neighborhoods within Rainier Valley, including (from north to south) "Garlic Gulch" (or the north Valley, from Dearborn to the junction of MLK and Rainier), "Genesee" (from the junction to Alaska), Columbia City (Alaska to Dawson), Hillman City (Dawson to Graham), Brighton (Graham to Kenyon), Dunlap (Kenyon to Cloverdale), and Rainier Beach, which is the only neighborhood in the city where Black Americans make up the majority, at 55%. The Valley is centered on Rainier Avenue South and Martin Luther King Jr. Way South, its main (northwest- and southeast-bound) thoroughfares. Both Rainier Avenue South and the Valley were named after Mount Rainier, towards which "[t]hrough a fortunate geographic circumstance" the Valley (and hence the street)