By LYNN STEINBERG
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

In his household, Tom Hollowed has morning duty, which means he is charged with getting his two children off to school. Seven-year-old Elise and her brother Myles, 5, buckle their life vests and pile into a rowboat tied up a few feet from their house. Then Dad rows them across a little lake to Broadview-Thomson Elementary School.

It's not a bad way to start the day. Hollowed's only regret is that it took him so long to discover this little slice of paradise in Seattle's North End.

He and his wife had lived in the city for about 15 years before they stumbled upon Bitter Lake, a small body of water that is nearly concealed by the homes, apartment buildings and condominiums that surround it.

A year ago, the Holloweds were living in a 720-square-foot house in Ballard, a few miles south of Bitter Lake. Tom's wife, Danae, longed for more space and saw a "For Sale" sign one day while she was out with her children.

"We were going to Grandma's house," Elise remembers, "and we accidentally made a wrong turn."

Danae was curious. She walked down a long driveway beside a house on North 137th Avenue and was taken aback by what she saw: a lovely urban lake rich in wildlife.

"It seemed like a little piece of country in the city," she recalls. "It seemed so peaceful, to come off these busy roads and find this setting.''

Better still was that at $339,000, the four-bedroom rambler was within the family's reach. They bought it in May.

"It's magic," Tom Hollowed says, peering at the water through the picture windows in his living room.

Though many consider Bitter Lake part of the larger community of Broadview, residents say their neighborhood has an identity and flavor all its own, defined by the lake itself.

It acquired its name from the bitter taste of tannic acid left from the days in the early part of the century when logs filled the water and the west shore of the lake was home to a sawmill.

Homes and later multistory apartment buildings eventually grew up around the lake, forming a little oasis that stretches from North 130th to 137th, and from Greenwood Avenue east to Linden. Some say the boundary goes one block farther, to Aurora Avenue.

On May 27, 1930, an amusement park called Playland opened on the south shore of the lake, transforming the area, and drawing throngs of patrons from near and far.

It cost 17 cents to take the Interurban from Seattle to Bitter Lake, and at the end of the trolley ride was an attraction inhabited by jolly concessionaires, a merry-go-round, water slide, a haunted house and a big-dipper roller coaster.

It was an enchanting time to be a child at Bitter Lake. "We fished in it, swam in it, played in it," says Ray Langberg who still lives in the waterfront house constructed by his father and uncle in the 1950s.

These days, Langberg is a parent with a 9-year-old son who frolicks in the lake, just as his dad did as a child. But their experiences are different.

For one thing, Playland is long gone. It shut down in 1960. Gone too are the wooded areas that surrounded the lake. There's not an empty lot on the water, Langberg says, and when a modest house is put up for sale, it is invariably replaced with a larger, more extravagant dwelling.