Waterfront: A Highway Comes Down and the Shore Returns
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Seattle's central waterfront has spent more than a century changing what kind of infrastructure gets priority.
Rail lines and piers made it an industrial edge.
Later, the Alaskan Way Viaduct carried highway traffic above the shore.
The elevated road opened in the 1950s, part of an American era that treated high-capacity automobile movement as urban progress.
The viaduct also separated downtown from Elliott Bay physically and psychologically.
A major earthquake in 2001 damaged it and intensified questions about seismic safety.
Seattle eventually replaced the elevated structure with a deep-bore highway tunnel.
The viaduct came down.
Surface waterfront space could be redesigned for pedestrians, parks and transit.
That transformation resembles changes in cities from San Francisco to Boston.
Infrastructure once celebrated as modern becomes an obstacle to a later urban ideal.
Removing it can restore access while moving traffic impacts somewhere else.
Tunnels are not the absence of highways.
They are highways made less visible.
For locals, the waterfront redevelopment is a current lived change rather than distant history.
The permanent lesson is the cycle.
Seattle filled shorelines, built piers, added rail, elevated a highway, buried a highway and reclaimed surface space.
Every stage was presented as solving the city's needs.
Every stage created new problems.
Finish by looking back toward Pioneer Square.
Seattle began as a timber port.
It became a gold-rush gateway, aerospace center and technology capital.
The waterfront kept changing because the city kept changing what it needed the water for.