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Given the acrimonious political debate over the Alaskan Way Viaduct's replacement, leading to—but certainly not ending with—Tuesday's mail-in advisory ballot, you'd think the elevated eyesore was controversial evenbefore its 1953 opening. Not true. Everyone loved it then, in part because the duplex waterfront highway was an entirely native solution to the downtown gridlock caused by U.S. Highway 99 dumping cars into both ends of town. It wasn't a new, forced mandate from Olympia or Washington, D.C., but the fruition of almost three decades of municipal planning—mostly forgotten now, and poorly documented then.
The great bypass route was actually conceived during the 1920s, well before there was any need for it. Seattle still had streetcars; private automobiles were rare; the north–south Pacific Highway 99 was new and clear; and the Depression would soon empty the streets of all but the most necessary traffic. It was then, on a 1927 visit to the Midwest, that local engineer J.W. "Arch" Bollong beheld the majesty of Chicago's new bilevel Wacker Drive, which still roars today along the shore of theChicago River (and which is best known from the final chase sequence in The Blues Brothers). Though his exact words—and indeed most of his biographical details—are lost to the sands of time, he essentially declared, "Damn, we gotta build us something like that back home on Elliott Bay." And build it we did.
It took another 26 years, basically the rest of the young traffic engineer's career, for the northern third of the viaduct to open on April 4, 1953, and it's unclear whether Bollong lived to see it. His presence isn't chronicled at the official ribbon-cutting ceremony, and I was unable to locate any of his descendants. But he would have been the happiest man in Seattle that day. Arch Bollong's story is one of triumph—a cheerful, optimistic, partisan's view of how problems could be solved with careful planning, popular support, the cooperation of public officials, and sound financing. All of which the viaduct originally enjoyed. In the words of 97-year-old former Washington Gov. Al Rosellini, whose political memory goes back to that era, "I don't recall there was any particular fuss about it."
Of course, that may also be because the city approved the project on Christmas Eve during a newspaper strike.
The secret history of the Alaskan Way Viaduct is one of little opposition and even less public scrutiny. The documents I followed through our city library and municipal archives aren't even remotely complete, and the gaps and literally X-Actoed-out pages hint at a broader problem that haunts us still: a lack of government transparency and accountability. No one can fully account for how the viaduct was built. No one seems able to clearly explain how it ended up under the control of the state. No one appears capable of stopping or starting its successor. Is it any wonder our long-fought clusterduct battle has such long roots?
Following his 1927 visit to Chicago,Bollong drew up an elaborate scheme of highway corridors throughout the city, of which the eventual viaduct was just one."A double-deck roadway should be built on Railroad Avenue," Bollong wrote in an official report to his superiors at the City Engineer's office. At the time, Railroad Avenue ran alongside Elliott Bay, following the route that's now called Alaskan Way. It was basically composed of offshore pilings and wooden decking topped with a maze of railroad tracks and interspersed with open "man traps" through which unlucky souls occasionally fell into Puget Sound. Bollong proposed that the mounds of inconvenient dirt then being blasted off Denny Hill be used as fill to widen and stabilize the avenue and build the viaduct above.
He bolstered his presentation with many photos and impressions of his recent trip. "This Wacker Drive in Chicago and the Riverfront Plaza in St. Louis hold a very close relation to our own Railroad Avenue," he wrote, "where plans have already been brought forth for the erection of a two-deck roadway, the lower deck to be used for commercial vehicles and the upper for fast-moving passenger traffic." The viaduct would also provide 5,000 parking spaces beneath it, he noted, "as business and the automobile go hand-in-hand."
Then, page 42 of his viaduct proposal reads: "See sketch attached." The next page has been neatly sliced out, like the centerfold in a vintage Playboy someone desperately wanted to keep.
At the time, Bollong's plan to build a highway over a rail-choked apron of rotting pilings was far-fetched and risky, not to mention that there was no money. Moreover, Railroad Avenue was still somewhat disputed turf. The region's two great rail monopolies, the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific, had dominated the waterfront since the late 19th century, when young, weak Seattle was desperate to move freight eastward. Their properties and wide rights of way were gradually diminished by the 1905 completion of the rail tunnel (removing a tangle of waterfront tracks from Washington to Stewart streets) and the 1911 creation of the Port of Seattle, which wrested most of the piers away from railroad ownership.
