♪♪ Upbeat Music ♪♪
Thank you, everybody, for coming out
and sharing my interest in history and passion for Seattle.
We're going to
find out who built Seattle first
hundred years.
We're going to do a history speed date with the builders of Seattle.
We have about 5 minutes for each one of them.
Sales of Boomtown,
it was once covered with fir trees.
Now we have a forest
of cranes.
This was not Seattle’s first boom.
First it was logging.
I think we cut down every old growth we could find.
Then came the Klondike gold rush, selling it
to all the disillusioned miners.
And then during World War One.
13,000 Seattle ship workers built ships for the war effort.
Right down here on the waterfront
during World War Two.
So we built.
It was B-17s and B-29.
Boeing had 50,000 workers. Another boom
in 1958.
Boeing started the jet age with the 707.
Then they had about 100,000 workers at their peak.
And then in 1970, we had the Boeing bust.
They laid off 70,000 workers when the SST was canceled
and the Seattle had a famous sign.
The last person leaving sell.
Please turn out the lights.
Now we are.
Now we. We're booming again.
Yeah.
We've got 25,000 amazonians downtown.
Soon to be 70,000 Amazonians swarming
the food trucks at South Lake Union.
Let's go back and start with Seattle.
Began
in 1850.
President Millard Fillmore signed the Light Land
Donation Act.
This using this law, Arthur Denney and Doc Maynard
claimed most of downtown Seattle.
Denny claimed
320 acres of very steep forested hills north of Yesler.
Maynard claimed 640 acres south of Yesler.
there, much of it underwater.
Mudflats
and the Duwamish became Seattle's
first homeless people.
The quick the quick money was in land sales.
Denny laid out his streets northwest.
Maynard laid out his north north and south.
The town laid out, had two problems.
Much of it lay underwater, and the streets
just didn't line up.
Henry Yesler started Seattle's economy with a steam
powered mill at the foot of Yesler Avenue.
Dozens of mills were built in the next few years.
This is the Western mill located at South Lake Union, the site of today's
MOHAI Museum.
By the turn of the century, Seattle was shipping
lumber all over the world.
Near Seattle were scores of miserable logging camps where young men worked.
Cold, rainy days, 12 hour days.
Lumberman came to Seattle looking for a little warmth and comfort.
Matt and Lou Graham created Seattle's
first service economy, adding to this decadence.
Seattle built a luxurious French style hotel.
The Occidental Hotel
like Sodom and Gomorrah.
Seattle paid for its wicked ways.
Fire and brimstone consumed 32 blocks
in 1889.
The Great Fire.
When the smoke cleared,
the remains of the Occidental Hotel appeared.
The fire gave Seattle an opportunity to reshape the city
sewers.
The first thing Seattle need was sewers.
Seattle was up to its neck in vice,
but it was up to its knees and sewage
two men came to Seattle’s rescue.
Benezette Williams and R.H.
Thompson.
In 1889, Seattle was a very unhealthy place to live.
Contaminated drinking water, causing typhoid
fever, killed 166.
Like Seattle, Memphis had an extremely poor sanitation
with frequent epidemics of cholera and yellow fever.
And in 1878, 5000
residents of Memphis died of yellow fever.
The following year,
Memphis hired George Waring to design a sewer system
Waring designed an innovative, separate sewer system that kept sewage
and stormwater in separate pipes.
In 1889, Seattle hired
George Waring based on his experience in Memphis.
Waring recommended a separate sewer system for Seattle.
Remember this?
Or Waring’s advice was not taken.
Big, big mistake Seattle’s
still paying for it today.
In 1891,
a new consultant, Benezette Williams, recommended a combined system
that produces enormous volumes of mixed sewage and stormwater.
And we go
on the right.
On the right is a map is an 1891 map of Bethenny's Bassetti
is that his combined sewer system?
That's his original map of the sewer system.
1891 On the left is the system we have today.
The yellow area is a is where the sewers are still combined,
which is most of downtown.
The green area
was originally combined, but now partially separated.
During the sixties, some of the stormwater was diverted from the sewers
and the pink area was the last area of the city annexed
and it's fully separated out in the north
and south ends.
R.H. Thompson became city engineer in 1892.
Thompson was a college grad but not a trained, trained engineer.
This map shows Seattle's current sewer tunnels
in red and its transit tunnels in green.
Thompson built his first sewer tunnel under a lake under from Lake Union
Elliott Bay, to divert sewage from a polluted lake union.
That was the source of Seattle’s drinking water.
Thompson did a tidal study and discovered West Point at the tip of Discovery Park
was the only site that he could dump sewage
that would not work back up on the beach.
And yeah, so so he built the West,
the West Point tunnel under Discovery Park
to get the only bay.
That's one of the early tunnels.
And then he went on to for 20 years, he went on and built 350 miles of sewer.
Next 20 years, here's a photo of the West Point tunnel under construction.
It goes underneath Discovery Park.
It's about two miles long,
digging out 1912.
Here's the combined sewers required
big pipes to handle storm, both stormwater and sewage.
So R.H.
Thompson supersized his sewers.
Supersized sewers caused super sized sinkholes, a collapsed combined sewer
washed away the full width of Ravenna out of there in 1957.
This is the West,
the West Point outfall in 1918.
By 1950, 40 million gallons of raw sewage was being dumped each day
on a rainy day.
Sewage streamed across the beach
since 1950.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on a super sized treatment
plant at West Point, which an enormous capacity of 44 million gallons per day.
Each Seattleite uses about 50 gallons a day,
generating about 34 million gallons a day.
You do the math down there.
So why do we need such a large plant
it rains in Seattle.
And the stormwater goes in the sewers.
Okay.
Without that, we probably could have by a much smaller plant.
February 9th, last month,
we had a massive sewage spill as reported by the Seattle Times.
They said 90% of it was stormwater and 10% sewage.
And we spilled at least 269 and I think they're lowballing the number,
but that's okay.
So 440 million gallons per day was not enough
for here's the
poor budget for a King County sewer guy.
Enormous volumes of combined sewage still plague us today.
This was his comment, and this was how it came through all the newspaper.
And they estimated it's going to take 25 million at least to fix it.
Supersized sewers and treatment plants give you super sized bills.
This is this is my bill for two months, which is not pretty typical.
I don't take long showers. But.
Seattle is one of the highest sewer stormwater rates in the country.
Memphis one of the lowest, though.
Memphis gets 17 more inches of rain annually.
We should have listened to George Wein 128
years ago.
Okay.
After sewers, Seattle needed clean water.
City engineer R.H.
Thompson built the Seattle
the Cedar River Water System, Basically after the Great Fire of Seattle
voted, the private water companies couldn't put out the fire, socially voted
1875 to 51
for a city owned water system.
In 1890, Seattle
bought out the Lake Union and the Spring Hill Water Company.
Both were pumping water from sewage polluted Lake Union and Lake Washington.
That's a little steam pump there where Worthington Popular
Oak sold
in 1895. R.H.
Thompson started the construction of the Cedar River water system, the Masonry
dam for storage, a diversion down
and a pipeline to Seattle's Capitol Hill,
up to volunteer Park the Reservoir and Volunteer
Park.
Not taking advice from
several geologists, R.H.
Thompson built the Masonry Dam on top of a very porous gravel moraine,
and the reservoir leaked like a sieve.
When the reservoir filled, the downstream,
downstream town of Monckton slowly flooded as the water seeped around the dam.
Three years later, at midnight, the town of Edgewood
was instantly wiped out by a spectacular flood of dirt and water.
15 houses in the mill were swept away.
Neither town was ever rebuilt,
but just last year the city installed a dam failure.
Sirens.
The diversion
dam stopped migrating salmon for about 100 years.
The fish ladder was built in 2002.
A wooden pipeline delivered water to the top of Capitol
Hill.
Some of the wooden pipes lasted 60 years.
The first water was delivered to Volunteer Park Reservoir in 1901.
So to protect the water, to protect sailors water supply, R.H.
Thompson acquired 19,000 acres of the Seattle of the Cedar
River watershed, an area larger
than Seattle.
Okay, now we have sewer, We have water.
Seattle needs power City Light. J.D.
Ross built Seattle's first power plants and created Seattle City Light
in 1900.
Eastern robber barons
had a monopoly on Seattle's electrical power.
They owned the Seattle electric company, providing
providing high prices and poor service.
J.D. Ross, an unlikely looking hero,
freed Seattle from the grasp of the robber barons.
He he was he was hired by City to build a small power plant.
A self-taught electrical engineer
he built.
He built a plant on the Cedar River.
Here's a photo of the generators being delivered
by horses.
Sale became one of the country's first municipally owned electrical systems.
I love this quote here.
Owned and operated by the people of Seattle.
It was fairly abnormal to be a municipally owned electrical system at that time.
Most were private.
In 1905, the Cedar River plant started supplying
power to Seattle's streetlights.
My guess is that's why they call it City Light.
City Light rapidly took customers from Seattle's electric monopoly.
50,000 customers by 1917, J.D.
Ross built the Lincoln and Steam plant in 1914.
So 40 megawatts.
Here's the
plant generating room.
The generators
to meet demand.
In 1924 1936, Judy Ross constructed
two dams on the Skagit River.
The Gorge Dam at 24
megawatts, nearly million watts
and the Diablo down again at 130 megawatts
at that time.
In its day, it was the highest dam in the world.
Here's the generators for the
the two generators for the Diablo Dam.
Here's a great quote.
Seattle's electric
sales electric rate plunged from $0.20
per kilowatt hour in 1905 to a fraction of a penny in 1930
and didn't have a rate increase until for 50 years.
They raised the rates in 1971.
How's that for socialism?
In 1905 was the Progressive era.
In City Light was progressive politics and action.
Private utilities targeted J.D.
Ross and elected Frank, the elected mayor, Frank Edwards, in 1930.
Edwards fired J.D.
Ross in 1931, claiming City Light was socialism. The
Seattle citizens like socialism.
And they recalled Edwards by a vote of 10 to 1.
Ross was rehired
in Seattle,
still battling monopolies.
But the spirit of J.D.
Ross lives on
in 1905.
In 1905,
J.D. Ross gave his city Seattle City Light.
Maybe tomorrow Sawant can give us
Seattle City Internet.
Okay, enough fun.
Down to serious stuff. Here. Now.
Now. Now that R.H Thompson had sewer, water and power,
he set out to flatten the city and fill the mudflats.
He had help.
A real estate developer, Eugene Semple, created
Harbor Island, Sodo and the East Waterway.
RH Thompson, the city engineer, leveled much of downtown
Seattle.
Seattle is famous for the Denny Regrade that created
the area just east of Belltown.
But much of Seattle was also built on landfill.
Magnuson Park,
a university new village,
Smith Cove, just Pier 91.
The Denny Regrade Your Bell Town,
Jackson Street,
Dearborn Street.
Harbor Island was
sodo and much of the Duwamish
river was filled.
This is an early map of Elliott Bay, made by Charles Wilks of the U.S.
Navy in 1841.
Before it was even U.S.
territory.
Note Pioneer Square is a little land
spit on Elliott Bay.
Here's an 1855 map of Pioneer Square.
Supposedly a high tide Pioneer Square was an 84
island
just barely above sea level.
This is the this is Seattle looking from Beacon Hill
down on Pioneer Square before any fill into the Duwamish into the damage.
Mudflats.
And here's an early map showing Pioneer Square before any field.
Harbor Island or Soto which were right there.
Eugene Semple
was the last Washington territorial governor in 1893.
He became a real estate alchemist, turning mudflats into gold.
Simple turn turned the damaged mudflats into valuable industrial land.
Watch closely as Semple transformed Elliot Bay
Bay into Harbor Island and Soto
or the Duwamish.
Mudflats actually
got that.
Let's go back and do it again.
Okay.
Watch quite closely.
All right.
There remain.
Those were Costco is Starbucks, right? Okay.
Okay.
Sample use, dredges,
the anaconda and the python to suck up mud from Elliott Bay
to create the great waterways in Harbor Island.
He used hydraulic giants to knock a big chunk
out of Beacon Hill
and sluices to move the dirt to to Soto.
But something about sample
fails a dig, a far fetched 300 foot
deep sea level canal through Beacon Hill from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington.
You can believe that 200 foot ditch
go right through Beacon Hill.
Here's simple original plan
to fill 1500 acres and then dig the canal through
Beacon Hill.
R.H. Thompson put a stop to this Mad Canal plan, but not before simple.
Put on a large notch and beacon Hill, now used by the freeway ramps
and the notch created.
Was it 52 acres in Soto?
When they took out took it out.
Here's an advertisement in 1909 advertisement for the Tidelands
created by Semple and touting the land's
speculative value.
I'll have you know, a bill came out of my pocket
when I went back to Cambridge. It
lets chase
the Treasury secretary, Treasurer.
Okay.
Sears and Roebuck was one of the early occupants
of Sodo.
Now Starbucks headquarters.
No, no.
The Mudflat in the foreground hadn't even filled in in 1950.
This is looking west towards west Seattle,
across the bay before Harbor Island was created.
Harbor Island would be about there when it pops in.
And this is what it looks like today, if not quite the same perspective,
but similar.
Okay.
Downtown Re Grades.
RH Thompson, City Engineer,
leveled much of downtown Seattle.
Thompson slashed 85 feet
from First Hill on Jackson Street.
Everybody knows just the street.
Jackson Street used to be just like.
Yesler. Yeah.
During the demolition of the original Holy Names, Academy was demolished.
Today, Jackson Street passes under the freeway
up to up to 12th Avenue from Chinatown up
to about 12th Avenue, because Jackson Street has an easy grade now.
It's used by the trolley when it's not running backwards
to get riders from Pioneer Scrub Capitol Hill.
There's the trolley.
Here's an engineering drawing showing the grade reduction
from 15% to 5%.
Now, you actually flat that out.
Basically, the red obviously is the what it was flattened to.
And the the blue is the original profile.
The Dearborn street regrade was made even a deeper cut in the first hill.
They lowered it 108 feet.
And that's connected the connected downtown
to rainier valley.
Here they're digging the digging the cut.
And there it is today.
Where did the dirt go?
Well, this is this is Chinatown in 1908.
This is fifth.
This is fifth Avenue, South and South Weller.
Here's the same spot today.
You can actually look at the street sign.
And so that's what it says in the street sign.
There. This is a
union
union and King Street stations in 1911.
Note The Jackson Street in front is elevated.
Jackson streets no longer elevated at all.
Got filled in.
This was Denny Hill in 1879
at 240 feet.
It was just north of the Pike Place Market.
It was lowered by 110 feet by 1911.
This is the Denny Hotel on top of Denny Hill.
Again, at 240 feet.
And it was demolished when they lowered the hill 110 feet.
Hydraulic giants were used to knock down
Denny Hill.
Here's another view of the regrade
in progress.
Seattle had a grand.
Had a grand plan for a civic center on Denny Regrade.
In 1911, it was called the plan for Seattle.
It was, and looks kind of like San Francisco
that everybody's been asked to have a grand civic center.
But it was voted down, actually.
Here's a denny.
Here's the Denny regret.
Just people know exactly what the dimensions are.
It's more of a triangle bounded by Denny way all of and Third Avenue.
There was little development on Denny way for 90 years after the level
it mostly used for parking for about 90 years.
It was a parking lot for the.
The 1972 World's Fair.
This is a this is a picture of.
But finally, Denny, Danny Denny, as being rapidly
developed today.
But I can't help but imagine
what Denny Hill might have been.
We might have had our own Telegraph Hill being taken
it down.
In 1893.
Seattle needed a railroad.
Seattle loved James Hill.
He connected Seattle to the eastern United States by rail
and made Seattle a World Trade Center.
A bold,
bold Gilded Age robber baron.
He was called the Empire Builder.
The train from Seattle to Chicago is still called
the Empire Builder.
In 1893, James Hill
built the Great Northern Railway over Stevens Pass,
connecting sales of the eastern United States.
Seattle loved James Hill so much.
When Seattle their coming out party at the Alaska Yukon
Pacific Exposition in 1909
in front of 90,000 fairgoers,
James Hill gave the opening the Expo's opening speech.
Hill was also honored with a bronze statue still on the UW campus
in front of the Civil Engineering building
in 1892.
Hill filled 600 acres of Smith Cove, just west of Queen Anne,
for his rail yard
in 1905.
Hill wants two large partnerships the S.S.
Minnesota and the S.S.
Dakota, the connected Seattle to China and Japan.
He connected
his ships and trains at Smith's Cove docks
today.
They're used by cruise lines
and Warren Buffett's railway.
B.N.S.F.
Berliner
in 1905.
Hills Trains went down Seattle's waterfront on Railroad Avenue,
a mile long wooden platform.
The Orange line shows Railroad Avenue in 1900.
City engineer R.H.
Thompson made Hill Hill dig a tunnel to get the trains off Sale's waterfront.
The tunnel starts just below Pike Place Market
and ends at King Street Station.
The old liner
in 1906, Hill built
King Street Station for passenger traffic.
But before he could get there, he had to build this tunnel.
And here's the north entrance to the tunnel just under Pike Place
Market, just below Pike Place Market, dug by hand.
The tunnel was the highest, widest
in the United States, one mile long
and amazingly large enough for today's stacked containers.
How's that for foresight?
Hill used.
Hill used immigrant labor,
but he bought American tools
in 2011.
Cielo bought a giant Japanese tool
to dig the Alaskan Way tunnel and named her
and named the machine Bertha after Seattle's only woman
mayor.
If Bertha ever finishes
after eight years,
her tunnel will be two miles long
and 57 feet wide.
For comparison to side by side, Great Northern tunnels
would be larger than the Bertha Tunnel.
350 men built the Great
Northern Tunnel in a year and a half.
Here's here's a good what if question.
What if in 19?
What if in 2011, instead of buying Bertha,
we had hired 700 unemployed miners,
using it to using using 1904 technology.
We could have dug a tunnel the size,
the size and length of Bertha's in three years
and completed the tunnel three years ago.
Great.
What if question
okay.
Alaskan Way.
Dan Evans was a young University of Washington civil
engineer, graduate, and he helped design the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
Later became state governor and U.S.
Senator.
By 1935, Alaskan Way was riding a rotting
timber trestle, the length of Seattle's waterfront.
It was still called Railway Avenue in 1935
during the Great Depression.
With the help of a $400,000 grant from the NHRA National Recovery Act,
not the National Rifle Association, Seattle built the seawall
to create Alaskan Way.
And here's the first seawall under construction. 1936
Current sea wall under construction,
costing about 500 times more.
After World War Two, there was too much traffic on Alaskan Way,
the only way through town.
So the viaduct was built.
1953. Now.
Now it's coming down.
It's rare to see an engineer in politics.
The viaduct is a strange stepping stone to a successful political career.
Dan Evans was a three time governor and U.S.
Senator.
Okay, let's go on to the ship Canal
in 1906.
Much of sales economy depend on water for transportation.
The ship canal gave access to Lake Union and Lake Washington, Hiram and Chittenden.
A West Point grad designed the Ballard Locks that are now named for him.
The Corps of Engineers built the locks.
Washington State paid for the Fremont
and Montlake cuts.
Hiram Chittenden was a Renaissance man.
He was more famous as a historian than an engineer.
He spent several years building roads in Yellowstone Park
and wrote about the American fur trade
in the 19th.
In 1917, the canal was was opened, but it was not built for the yachting class.
It was built for industry
to move logs to the mills.
Here's a Ballard mill
of the floating logs in front just right by the Ballard Bridge there.
I mean, it was still there, I think, when I was just in
grade school.
Here's a stack of lumber.
Ballard had 20 mills making 3 million shingles a day.
It's called Shingle Town.
The canal move calls the Shell's
gasworks plant.
The canal moved ships to the dry docks on Lake Washington and Lake Union.
There was a large shipyard over in Kirkland
and fishing boats.
The Fisherman's Terminal.
Here's some construction photos of the canal on the logs
under construction.
The ship canal included
two channels the Fremont and Montlake cuts
paid for it paid for by Washington State.
Here's the Montlake cut 19.
And here's the daily.
Here's the day they flooded the Mortlake cut.
Lake Washington was lowered by nine feet,
drying up more than a thousand acres
to the dismay of many Madison Park houseboat owners.
The Lower lake,
a Lower Lake Washington, created an area for the Mortlake dump in 1955.
Later, Husky Stadium parking.
There's there's the stadium in the back.
I went there when I was a kid.
I remember going to that dump
and there was no craft beer in those days.
Okay.
The ship canal separated the north end from the rest of the city.
This traffic barrier was solved with four bascule bridges.
Bascule is the good French word for seesaw.
Here's a Bascule bridge.
There's a good French seesaw.
And the Fremont Bridge will be 100 years old this summer.
A good excuse for Fremont to celebrate.
I don't say Didi.
Excuse.
And I just read the paper I think was yesterday.
It has 5000 openings every year or over 5000 openings every year.
Here's another.
Here's another Bascule Bridge.
Ballard is just about as old as Fremont.
Here's the University Bascule Bridge
and the model later.
The drawbridge was built in 1932.
It's correct.
Name is the George Washington Memorial Bridge.
Okay.
And you can impress your friends by telling me how many wood pilings
are underneath each pier.
Good trivia.
Okay.
To connect to the east side, we built the floating bridge
for 60 years.
Still had ferry service across Lake Washington.
Madison Park to Kirkland and less shy to Medinah
or Mercer Island.
In 1934, a round trip across the lake cost you $0.25.
There's the ferry schedule to prove it.
The last run was in 1950.
Homer Hadley did the ferries in during World War One.
Homer Hadley was a young civil engineer, and he built concrete
ships in Philadelphia because steel was in short supply.
After the war, Hadley came to Seattle
and proposed the crazy idea of a bridge
floating on concrete pontoons.
He wanted to finance finance a toll bridge,
and the local bankers had a good laugh.
And Nick DAVIES Bridge, Hadley's Folly
during the Great Depression.
The federal WPA programs funded Hadley's folly to create jobs
in the state Highway Department stole Hadley's idea.
Open the 1940.
The bridge constructed in only 18 months
that included building those tunnels.
And it was paid for in just nine years.
It was a toll bridge,
and it was actually funded again, the funded half by the federal government.
The federal government gave us a grant.
Same for the we call it the waterfront of the seawall,
the shell, the bridge sunk in 1990.
The the bridge.
The bridge was named after the state highway director, Lacey V. Murrow.
He was the brother of Eward R Murrow Earl, famous famous.
But the sort of an injustice to Hadley because he's really his idea.
But when they built the second bridge, Hadley finally
got recognized to name the second bridge after Homer.
Homer Hadley. What a name. Group area.
Homer Hadley Bridge.
Okay.
As sales infrastructure grew, Seattle
built its business centers, and Elmer
Fisher and Carl Gould gave Seattle its most iconic buildings
in it.
In 1889, the Great Fire burned down most of Seattle.
Architect Elmer Fisher was in the right place at the right time.
He opened an office in 1889, just before Seattle burned down.
Elmer's background and training are a mystery?
It's the question whether you really went to school.
Who knows? But he. He.
He designed more than 50 buildings in 12 months after the Great Fire
and abandoned his practice two years later.
And moved and moved to L.A.
after being sued by his mistress.
But he did.
He gave us really great buildings on Pioneer Square.
There's there's the Pioneer Pioneer Building, still famous for its architecture,
the Schwab Anchor Building,
the mutual Life building.
You know, one of Elmer's best designs was the brick building.
It was demolished for the Henry and Jackson Federal Building.
Often described as the waffle building
or what's currently the awful waffle
Castle, Gould gave Seattle some
some of some of its best 20th century architecture.
Google studied five years in Paris
to give Seattle a little Beaux-Arts glass.
He also founded the University of Washington School of Architecture
in 1914.
He designed the Sears, all the library
Little collegiate Gothic there
design the Asian Art Museum.
Late Art Deco
and the U.S.
Marine Hospital.
And I think Art Deco, according to what I'm reading up there
and then some Beaux Arts Flatiron Shape
Times building downtown
Parks and UW
at the turn of the century.
John Olmstead was hired in response to a national movement
called the City Beautiful Movement.
He designed Seattle’s, parks, playgrounds, boulevards
and the UW campus.
John was the stepson of the famous architect, Frederick Law Olmsted,
designer of New York's Central Park, and the 1893 Chicago
World's Fair Grounds.
John Olmsted designed 25 Seattle parks,
12 playgrounds and 25 miles of boulevards.
There's Green Lake,
Ravenna Boulevard,
Lincoln Park,
the Arboretum. And.
Now again in 1895, UW
moved its campus from downtown to 355 acres
of stump land.
A decade later, John Olmstead designed the Alaska
Yukon Pacific Expo grounds on the on the UW
campus.
Olmsted's Alaska Yukon Pacific
design is still the basic design for the current UW campus.
You can compare those two up there.
They're pretty similar.
And here's Rainier Vista on a spring day.
The cherry blossoms are almost out.
I think.
Okay.
19, 1960, Alaska
almost lost its pioneer heritage preservation.
Victor Steinbrueck, a UW professor,
saved the soul of Seattle.
In 1950, Northgate, the nation's first suburban mall, opened
threatened in downtown Seattle's core
design by John Brown and Company,
a 1960s promoter of downtown redevelopment.
Sarah sells
Retailers moved from downtown to Northgate.
Seattle's finest 80 stores, their Barnum.
To compete with Northgate, there was pressure to destroy
historic downtown buildings to build parking garages.
This is the Seattle Hotel.
It was a replacement for the Occidental Hotel that burned down
there.
They're taking it down.
And we got this
sinking ship garage
that outraged some architects around town.
Downtown businesses, the mayor and John Grand Company
proposed the demolition of dozens of Pioneer Square buildings
with the aid of federal urban renewal money.
You know what federal money won't do?
Okay.
Here's Pioneer Square, the area they want to knock down.
And here's what they wanted to do to it.
Victor Steinberg and Bill Speigel,
a columnist for The New York Times, not The New York Times, The Seattle Times.
And self-made, historic
self-made historian thought the proposed urban renewal, destruction
of some of these quotes are grubbing for federal funds
to turn Pioneer Square into a colony of cheap
parking lots.
At the same time,
the Pike Place Market was threatened by urban renewal.
The Seattle Central Association again wanted to create
basically a North street on top of the market.
Quoting Joni Mitchell, Seattle Plan to Pay Paradise and put up a parking lot.
Here's your sales redevelopment plan for the market.
4000 cars, parking lots.
Victor Steinbrueck
and Bill Seidel waged a seven year battle to save the market.
The market in Pioneer Square
on November
79, 19, 1971.
Sell voters approved an initiative to keep the market from the wrecking ball.
There's a quote down here, Honor, if you can read.
It says The central business Merchants of Greed are using the urban renewal
to murder the market and strangle, rape
and whatever goes on.
They didn't they didn't pull any punches
in their wording.
Victor Steinbrueck
was instrumental in creating Seattle's first two historic districts.
Pioneer Square in 1970 and the Pike Place
Market in 1971.
And that's who built Seattle.
But I showed this to my daughter and she says, Where are the men?
Where are the women?
They're coming.
And I think I think there's more women in med school,
in law school now than there are men or boys.
- Two really quick questions and one really quick comment.
The really quick questions are, do you have a book or a website?
The second question is
what kind of earthquake prevention stuff
does the railroad tunnel have from a century ago?
And the quick comment is we all laughed at the comparison
of the costs of building the stuff between then and now.
But do you have the inflation
adjusted costs and how do the inflation adjusted costs compare with.
- I tried.
Okay. Let me start the last question first.
I tried to do that.
It just gets too, too messy.
Yeah, but actually, inflation is from the turn of the century till now.
It's almost a thousand times you construction index.
There's a magazine called Engineer Engineering Years Record.
And I looked it up and it's like, yeah, it's. It's pretty.
It's pretty astonishing.
Yeah.
I mean, actually, if you did labors were getting $0.22 an hour
when they dug that tunnel.
If they would have stayed
up with the inflation, they should be getting like 200 bucks an hour.
Yes. They would have stayed up
with the other other inflation indexes and construction, which is now.
So what was the.
Well, structurally, I don't think they knew anything about earthquake
design back then for the tunnel, but they made the walls five foot thick.
Now. So it's now the overengineered.
Most stuff built back to the turn of century
was overengineered and overbuilt because they didn't know how.
And it was a third question.
- There was you have a book or a website.
- I'm not that literate.
- Hi. You've alluded to the rise of the automobile
Like I mentioned, the parking and cars in Northgate mall do you have any stories
or anecdotes about how the freeways and interstates of Seattle came to be.
- There was the little
protest, actually, Victor Steinberg and some of the architects and so forth.
Did protest, but they just got rolled over by the politics in those days.
And, you know, it was you know,
you could never do it nowadays, obviously.
I mean, but in those days, I don't know the just
people just weren't politically active and there was a lot of money
behind building freeways.
That was was, what, 90% federal money.
So, you know, it's free money.
Yeah.
- Is there any place to find these slides online
- Uhm no.
- What kind of engineering
had to go into building the I-5 path along Capitol Hill?
And was that
dug out or was that naturally that low?
- Well, I only went up to 1950
and often
I'm off the hook on that first hundred years.
That's one of the reasons I stopped in 1950.
- Hello. Thank you so much.
My name's Laura.
Okay.
And one of the great things about Seattle is just our diversity.
And so, of course, in the early 1800s, early 1900s,
you see a bunch of white males.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the other peoples
who built Seattle, what you've uncovered in your.
- Oh, well, it was the Chinese contractors that we they built
the first canal, the Montlake cut to move logs with just the little ditch.
Basically, I can remember the name of the Chinese contractor.
But then shortly after built it, they drove all the Chinese out of town.
They were Chinese riots. So
trying to think of any.
Yeah, mostly
there weren't many minorities up here because it was all Scandinavian, you know,
lumber guys, you know, you know, the I'm trying to think of,
you know, there's a lot of ethnic I think you're coal miners, you know, over
and there's a lot of coal mined Newcastle and those are sort of miners
from different parts of probably Eastern Europe whatever
and that I didn't really get into all the ethnics construction.
- I really enjoyed the presentation.
It's easy to watch that and think that Seattle might be
sort of unique in terms of the grades and all the infrastructure development.
But in the context of American cities, is it unique?
- No, not at all.
I mean, basically half of half of Boston is fill on fill, much of San Francisco's
on fill, there's a lot of the lakefront in Chicago was on fill matter of fact,
there's a building in San Francisco tilting right now.
I was reading it was a great big condo, no multimillion dollar
condos with 60 storeys high.
It's totally because they put it on and build material.
Yeah.
- Do you have any presentations on other cities?
- Come to my class.
- Do you have information on the establishment
of the Pike Place Market and that history a little bit about the market?
- No, no, no more than most people can find on the web, actually.
I mean, most of this is just kind of skimmed off the web.
It's put together.
Yeah.
You kind of
a good story.
You know, you got some things.
I have more depth on other things. I just kind of.
Yeah.
- There was a question asked about the images,
and I know that you can find a lot of that kind of thing on history
Link and yes, Seattle Times Archives and I,
there were probably people here who know a lot more of them,
but a lot of those images which are wonderful with that
and they wouldn't have your great comments and stuff.
- No, where they came was all came right off the web.
- They are available. Yeah.
- Well there's also a some website Then & Now Seattle
and I can't read the name of it.
Somebody probably knows it but they they have a lot of photos of then and now.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks.
Thank you.
- Good evening. Thanks for the talk.
It was great.
You showed one slide about the
proposed Beaux Arts
Civic Center.
That was part of the Virgil Bold plan.
Yeah, the whole plan. Yeah.
Which I've heard a little bit about.
The only photograph I've ever seen is that photograph.
But I understand it was part of a much more ambitious plan
that included tunnels and preserving all of Mercer Island as a park.
Yes, exactly. And a number of other components.
I had heard actually a tunnel from Seattle to Kirkland.
So do you know
and have you ever seen any other photographs or drawings related to that?
- Yes, I did some research on that.
Basically, they want to put 90 miles of history from New York.
So you wanted to make Mercer Island like Central Park.
You want to put in like 90 miles of Subway and you wanted to make the town
look like Paris.
I mean, the civic center and all this, you know,
all the buildings, about the same height.
It really you had a very extensive plan, but it all got voted down.
- By a close vote. I understand.
- Yeah, I think it was really.
But the the people down in Pioneer Square that, you know,
they controlled the politics and they had that
they didn't want the town moving up on the grid and.
- The city would look quite different.
- Yeah. Yeah.
Well, you know, he had the idea of making it look like a European city,
you know, very much like it was pretty much like Paris, you know,