James Colman built the original dock at the foot of Columbia Street for the Oregon Improvement Company's coal bunkers. Seven years later, the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 consumed it along with most of the downtown waterfront, but Colman rebuilt quickly. By 1908 the dock had grown into something grander: a long pier stretching out into the bay, crowned with a domed waiting room and a clocktower designed by the Seattle architectural firm Beezer Brothers. The Colman Dock Company managed its business, and after the Puget Sound Navigation Company absorbed the operation, the terminal became the beating heart of western Washington's inland steamship network. Rival companies jockeyed for access. When Joshua Green took control of the dock, he barred the competing Kitsap County Transportation Company from landing its boats there, forcing them to relocate several piers north. By 1917, Colman Dock served the Puget Sound Navigation Company, the Merchants Transportation Company, and several other shipping lines.

On February 21, 1966, the ferry Kalakala rammed the terminal. The collision was dramatic enough to make headlines, but the damage proved surprisingly manageable. The ferry needed only minor repairs and returned to service the next day. Fixing the slip cost $80,000 and took two months. That resilience is a recurring theme at Colman Dock. In April 1912, the steamship Alameda crashed into the dock and knocked the clocktower's clock into Elliott Bay. Just weeks later, in May 1912, a gangway failed as crowds boarded the steamer Flyer, injuring 58 passengers and drowning two. Two catastrophes in a single spring -- and the dock continued operating. Through decades of steamship competition, two world wars, and the eventual transition from private ferry lines to the state-run Washington State Ferries system, the terminal adapted rather than disappeared. The current ferry terminal dates to a 1964 expansion that absorbed the surrounding piers into a single large facility at what is now officially Pier 52.

The most recent transformation cost $489 million. The first phase of the new terminal building opened on September 15, 2019, and the remainder of the main building followed in November 2022. The redesigned facility holds up to 1,900 passengers in a waiting area fitted with 362 seats and twelve turnstiles, its orientation shifted to face the water rather than the city. An entry building along Alaskan Way opened on August 3, 2023. Adjacent Pier 50 received its own new facility in August 2019, with a covered waiting area for 500 people serving the King County Water Taxi and Kitsap Fast Ferries. A pedestrian overpass connects the two. The outdoor vehicle queueing area can stage 611 cars, feeding two automobile ferry routes: one to Bainbridge Island and one to Bremerton, the same Puget Sound crossing points that steamships served over a century ago.

In June 2023, the Washington State Transportation Commission approved indigenous Lushootseed names for the new plazas at Colman Dock. The north plaza at Columbia Street received the name ʔulułali, chosen by the Suquamish Tribe, meaning 'a place of traveling water.' The south plaza at Yesler Way was named sluʔwił by the Muckleshoot Tribe, meaning 'a canoe pass.' Signage in both plazas was installed in March 2025. The names reach back far deeper than the dock's 1882 origins, acknowledging that these waters carried canoes long before they carried coal barges and automobile ferries. Standing on the terminal's redesigned waterfront esplanade, with the green-and-white hulls of the Washington State Ferries fleet churning into the slip, it is easy to forget that Colman Dock has already died and been reborn multiple times. The clock on its face, rescued from the bottom of the bay, knows better.