This guest column was written by Ballard resident and FoS member Dick Lilly, who was born in Seattle before the Alaskan Way Viaduct was built.
It’s truly déjà vu all over again.
Remember Westlake Park? There were 20 years of controversy over how big a park and how much should be spent. The late Victor Steinbrueck, who often spoke for the soul of the city, fought for a real park on the whole block between Fourth and Fifth, Pine and Olive. Lots of folks worried about cost and city leaders favored a mixed use development with a bit of open space.
Then the buildings came down and the space was just beautiful, bright and open. All of a sudden, people saw the potential of a park, but it was too late. Westlake Center with its sliver of a plaza (granted by the property owner to end a lawsuit) was a done deal. As I recall, even the editorial pages expressed regret.
It’s not hard to imagine that the same thing will happen when the Alaskan Way Viaduct comes down. People – even people who today want the viaduct replaced – will gasp with the thrill of the open space, the return of a human scale. Who likes walking under an elevated freeway? As with Westlake, many of us will be proven prisoners of our own lack of imagination.
Remember the Bay Freeway and R.H. Thomson Expressway? It appears we’re stuck reliving those several years around 1970-’72 when the highway forces in their ascendancy proposed an “expressway” from Renton to the Arboretum along Martin Luther King Jr. Way (then Empire Way), and a “Bay Freeway” from I-5 across South Lake Union to Seattle Center. The R.H. Thomson Expressway would have divided southeast and central Seattle neighborhoods and continued in a tunnel under Union Bay, along 25th Ave. N.E. and through Lake City in a “deep ditch,” according to HistoryLink, the on-line encyclopedia of Northwest history.
Given the casual and utter disregard for the integrity of neighborhoods and local business districts expressed in these plans, it’s not surprising that lawsuits and voter referenda forced a chastened City Council to abandon them. In a summary eerily applicable to today’s battles, History Link says: “Opposition to the Bay Freeway was fueled in large part by fears of a massive viaduct walling South Lake Union from the rest of the city.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone today proposing such deliberate scarring of the city’s face. After all, those “ring-road” plans arose at a time when serving the automobile was the highest principle of urban design. That kind of thinking remains only in the fossil record, except apparently among the state’s viaduct proponents.
Remember the public vote in 1971 that saved the Pike Place Market from wrecking-ball style urban renewal? Remember the renaissance of Pioneer Square in the 1970s? It’s not just coincidence that both of these areas and the historic waterfront piers were rundown and blighted by the end of the 1960s. All had suffered nearly two decades of neglect as the noise and dirt of the Alaskan Way Viaduct drove people and investment away from the western edge of downtown.
The impact of freeways – elevated, ditched or on the ground – seems always cancerous to the communities alongside. Without exceptional and expensive treatment – lids over portions of I-5 and I-90, tunneling under the waterfront – the cancer can always win.
So after the vote this month, let’s ask some tough questions of the highway folks, including our governor and the speaker of the house.
What’s so sacred about whizzing for just a couple of miles past downtown Seattle when at either end the roadway slows to 40 and then 35? Are you planning an expressway on Aurora north of 65th Street? Do you want to shoot State Route 509 up East Marginal Way to connect the sourth end of the viaduct?
Why not the same urgency to widen the Spokane Street Viaduct, which is the improvement the Port of Seattle
really needs to move trucks to I-5?
Why the red herring of “long distance trips” through Seattle to justify rebuilding the viaduct when more than three-fourths of all rush hour trips using the viaduct and its approaches are entering or leaving downtown?
Seattle’s leaders have played by the rules. The tunnel plans were put forward because you insisted on the same – or greater – vehicle capacity. But now that the rest of us see that a new elevated structure is your only alternative, maybe we’ll find common cause around everybody’s second choice, surface streets and great transit.
Dick, your point about Westlake Mall is well-taken and it's why no "Rebuild" is politically possible if it requires tearing down the Viaduct. See
http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2006/09/index.html
Posted by: David Sucher | March 09, 2007 at 01:30 PM