The other project that always comes up is Boston's "Big Dig," believed to be the biggest public-works undertaking in U.S. history. The project, now estimated at just under $15 billion, involves burying and reconstructing two sections of the interstate highway that runs through the heart of the city, including a dangerous, rusting elevated section of I-93 that runs along the city's waterfront. Known as the "Big Pig" by detractors, the project has suffered mismanagement, a fumbled cover-up of $2 billion in cost overruns, and an image as one of the most exorbitant road projects ever attempted. When completed, the project will include an eight-to-10-lane buried freeway, two new bridges, and acres of new parkland. It will cost nearly $2 billion a mile.
In general, people's level of optimism about the viaduct fluctuates in proportion to their confidence in the big dreamers' ability to implement their grandiose plans. For skeptics like Skolnik, the potential of the viaduct will inevitably be limited by history—the fact that our city and state governments have, time and again, been a reactive force to businesses' plans for the waterfront. It wasn't until after the Edgewater Hotel was built in 1962 that the city responded by rezoning the waterfront to prohibit—among other things—new high-rises, housing, and hotels over the water. View corridors extend along all the east-west streets leading to the central waterfront except Pike Street; but major developments, including a nine-story hotel and a proposed 200,000-square-foot aquarium in direct view of Victor Steinbrueck Park, were overturned only after infuriated citizens unleashed storms of protest. "Historically, the trend has been that things get proposed on the water and the city reacts to them," Skolnik says.
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That trend also, paradoxically, could limit the economic potential of the waterfront by restricting waterfront land uses to small businesses and cultural activities. "The economic value that might be achieved from properties adjacent to waterfront may not be there because the buildings are too small," Skolnik says.
On the other hand, the optimists say the waterfront is primed for its long- delayed moment in the sun. The waterfront, Dramov believes, "is the easiest place to create public space, because it has intrinsic meaning to us. I don't know if you want to call it religious or spiritual or what, but for some reason waterfront areas are something we are attracted to as people." Create an expectation of the waterfront as a pleasant, attractive place to eat, shop, skate, or hang out and think, Dramov says, and pretty soon "you'll have a great public space that's meaningful to the city and the region as a whole."
ebarnett@seattleweekly.com 
