Founders' Dreams
According to Seattle MOHAI's Lorraine McConaghy, Henry Yesler hired a guy with a wheelbarrow to dump waste wood from his mill into Elliott Bay for eight hours a day. This might have been Seattle's first civil engineering project. Yesler and other Seattle founders dreamed of a smokestack town like the ones they knew back east. The poor fellow with the wheelbarrow was just another sign of their determination to bend the land here to suit their vision.
McConaghy spoke about Yesler's obsession to members and friends of the SMP Citizen's Advisory Committee on their recent floating tour of the city's waterways. Over the course of the day, the tour saw first hand how Seattle ultimately transformed its shorelines and altered the courses of its rivers in pursuit of this dream.
Harbor Tour
Around noon on a brilliant Saturday last September 9th, a contingent of floating home residents including Diana Forman, Betty Swift and Bill Keasler joined other members and observers of the CAC piling aboard a school bus parked at the Armory at South Lake Union. The CAC harbor tour was to give members a common frame of reference for discussing the city's waterfront. The bus ride was to avoid parking downtown. The day looked to become even more gorgeous and fueled the bus-riders' buzzing enthusiasm for the prospect of an afternoon on the water.
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The CAC Harbor Tour made it as far south as the First Avenue Bridge. Compare the ruler-straight boat wake with the course of the Duwamish on the map below. |
By the time the Kitsap County passenger ferry (presumably borrowed) got the bus passengers loaded and left the dock at Pier 66, fifty or so people had managed to climb on board, including Committee members, luminaries from the city bureaucracy and a few just interested folks.
Leaving downtown, the boat turned south toward the Duwamish. Once underway, the three commentators for the afternoon introduced themselves. Maggi Glowaki, a planner with the Department of Community Development and CAC staff member, would speak about land use and wildlife habitat. Eric Harmon, a CAC member from the Port of Seattle, would describe not only the Port's role but also how business is critically dependant on the shorelines. And McConaghy, an historian with Seattle's Museum of History and Industry, would tell the story of how Seattle's shorelines came to be the way they are.
You Really Want to Look at This Map
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McConaghy knew what she was doing when she distributed copies of this Railroad map of the region drawn about 1888. The impact of comparing the shorelines now to what they were then was stunning. For a larger version click here.. |
The first thing McConaghy did was handout a copy of an old railroad map of the Seattle area drawn about the time of statehood (1889). She advised that we keep this map on our laps throughout the afternoon. Her reason soon became dramatically apparent as the boat barely turned making its way down the Duwamish to the First South bridge, while the map showed a serpentine, meandering course for the original river. The waterway has obviously been radically straightened and widened.
This audacious bit of engineering was, she reminded us, a rather minor component of a grand regional scheme that changed not only the course, but also the tributaries of the waterway we were presently on.
It was not hard to see the Port's influence as the boat headed up the Duwamish. Elliott Bay itself is lined with its piers, its cranes crowd the skyline and acres of containers are piled along the shores. Harmon explained that industrial uses account for 12% of Seattle's jobs and that the vacancy rate for industrial land is only 2%. The Port is an obvious component in Seattle's industrial engine. It owns 250 feet on either side of mid-channel in the Duwamish, for example, and manages its shorelines for the economic benefit of the city.
Glowacki, on the other hand, tallied the cost of this commerce to be an ecological disaster. After passing site after site with troublesome environmental situations, the boat nosed into a side channel that, we were told, held an outflow from Boeing Field drainage that was especially challenging. The city is studying how to improve conditions for wildlife here, and Glowacki pointed with fierce pride to a couple little pocket parks where the shoreline has been sloped and modulated to provide some shelter for migrating fish.
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This pocket park on the Duwamish is a demontration of what can be done to make it easier for the migrating fish. |
As the boat left the Duwamish and churned north past Discovery Point headed for the locks, Glowacki pointed out the "feeder bluffs" which normally create the sloping beaches found around much of Puget Sound and how they have been stabilized here by development so that their function isn't working any more. She then drew our attention to the sewage treatment plant situated behind the lighthouse at the tip of what is arguably the most spectacular beach in Seattle as another of the endless tradeoffs needed to cope with our population.
The wait for the large lock seemed endless too, as was the loading process and the rest of it. Most aboard found little to do but commiserate with their fellow passengers and kicked back to enjoy the spectacle. Unfortunately, by the time the boat was through, there was no time left for the scheduled tour of Lake Washington, and it headed straight for the Armory on Lake Union.
Lesson of the Locks
Harmon noted how the fishing industry is changing from a multitude of "mom and pop" boats to fewer factory ships as the tour passed through Ballard and Salmon Bay. The Port, he said, is adapting at facilities like Fisherman's Terminal.
McConaghy had everyone looking at her map again. In particular, she wanted people to find that "portage" between Portage Bay and Lake Washington. The same huge engineering project which set the locks in place also slashed a channel across that isthmus, which became our Montlake cut, and changed the shape of Seattle's shorelines forever.
The founders' dream of the city's waterways rebuilt for commerce was finally fulfilled.
When the project was completed, the locks held the water at a level about nine feet higher than previously in Lake Union and about nine feet lower than it had been in Lake Washington. Houseboaters may be familiar with the flooding of Lake Union land, over which many houseboat docks are now situated. But they may not realize that the opposite thing happened at the same time to a much greater extent in Lake Washington when the level dropped nine feet and acres of new land were drained.
To make this work, the engineers also had to rearrange the courses of several rivers to the south, with the result that Lake Washington now empties out the locks instead of through the Duwamish by way of the Black River like it used to. The Black River has completely disappeared.
Clearing the Aurora Bridge, McConaghy described some of the many influences on the inner city waterfront, including the "civic industry" of the Lake Union Gas Plant, the City Light Steam Plant and the very Naval Reserve Armory to which the boat was pulling up at the end of the CAC's sunny day on the water.
