Lake View is Seattle's origin story carved in stone. The Denny Party, the group of settlers who landed at Alki Point in 1851 and founded the city, claimed this hillside as their resting place. Arthur A. Denny, the party's de facto leader, lies here alongside Carson Boren, Thomas Mercer, and David Swinson "Doc" Maynard, the gregarious frontier doctor who platted much of early Seattle. Henry Yesler, the city's first millionaire, whose sawmill on the waterfront created what became Yesler Way, is buried here too. So is Princess Angeline, the eldest daughter of Chief Seattle, the Duwamish leader for whom the city is named. William Grose, the second Black resident of Seattle who arrived in the 1860s and became a prosperous hotel owner, rests among the pioneers who were his contemporaries.

Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong on July 20, 1973, at the age of 32. His family chose Lake View Cemetery for his burial, and Seattle's Capitol Hill became the final home of a man who transformed martial arts and cinema. His son Brandon, killed in a filming accident on the set of The Crow in 1993 at age 28, was buried beside him. Their side-by-side graves became one of Seattle's most visited sites, listed by Time magazine as one of the top ten celebrity graves in the world. Jesse Glover, Lee's first martial arts student, also rests at Lake View, as does actor and martial artist John Saxon, who appeared alongside Lee in Enter the Dragon. The cemetery's connection to martial arts is deeper than any single headstone.

The headstones at Lake View read like a directory of Seattle institutions. John W. Nordstrom, the Swedish immigrant who founded the department store chain, is buried here. Guy Carleton Phinney, whose estate became Woodland Park and its zoo, claimed a plot. Horace Chapin Henry, the businessman and art collector whose name adorns the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, rests among his fellow civic builders. Captain William Renton, the sawmill operator for whom the city of Renton is named, lies here too. Walter B. Beals, who served as Chief Justice of the Washington State Supreme Court and later presided as a judge at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1946 and 1947, represents the graveyard's reach beyond local history into the currents of the wider world.

In late 1947, when the U.S. Army began returning the remains of Japanese American soldiers killed in World War II, the Nisei Veterans Committee in Seattle organized a response. Members went door to door across the Puget Sound region, collecting donations of one to five dollars from Japanese American families, many of whom had only recently returned from internment camps. They raised over $10,000, enough to erect a 21-foot column at Lake View Cemetery listing the names of 47 Japanese American soldiers from Seattle who died in the war. The Nisei War Memorial Monument was dedicated in 1949. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, the monument was toppled by unknown persons on July 3rd, a painful moment for a community whose memorial had already endured years of vandalism and graffiti.

Lake View Cemetery occupies a gentle slope on Capitol Hill, just north of Volunteer Park with its conservatory and water tower. The grounds are managed by an independent nonprofit association, keeping the cemetery outside the city's park system. From the higher sections, the view that gave the cemetery its name stretches east across Lake Washington to the Cascade foothills. It is a landscape that has changed enormously since the Denny Party's survivors first claimed these plots in the 1870s, yet the cemetery itself has maintained a quality of stillness. The trees are mature, the paths wind without hurry, and the headstones span a century and a half of Seattle history, from the territorial period through two world wars to the present.