♪♪
[JENNIFER OTT] In order to understand this
beautiful new waterfront that we have,
you really need to understand where it all started.
The glacial era creates this incredible deepwater harbor,
but also our north-south trending hills.
And so those two things
have really shaped the history of this waterfront.
The human story goes back when Dzidzilalich
was established where Pioneer Square is today.
And this waterway is a canoe highway.
It's just an amazing way to move around this region.
And so you have Duwamish people, Squamish people,
and then all sorts of people from all over the region
meeting here,
coming together for social reasons, for trade.
Beginning in the 1850s,
you have non-Native settlers coming in.
And they are here for the deepwater harbor
and the incredible resources of inland area.
And they build the finger piers, because they are using
sailing ships
and very soon steamships to move
around on the waterways, not canoes.
But because of that glacial action,
you have a pretty tight narrow
space here on the waterfront.
And you have all
this traffic that wants to go north-south,
because that's how the railroads move in the region.
They have to go around our big hills and waterways.
And there's still, of course, Native people here
that are coming in
because they want to be part of this economy,
because they are still connected to place,
even though it's being radically changed.
And then it becomes an immigration corridor.
This was the easiest way to get
to other parts of the country and from around the world.
In 1887, the city established Railroad Avenue,
which eventually grew to nine sets of tracks wide;
it was just behemoth of...it was like a rail yard right
in the middle of the city.
And so it's because there's nowhere else
to put it on flat land that's adjacent to deep water.
And so you start to build a city here.
It's pretty slow going for the first few decades.
And then the Gold Rush hits
in 1897 and it's just boom! It's just an explosion.
And it's like a flood starts
and people
are coming into the city
both on their way
to the gold fields in Alaska and northern Canada,
but also to work here and to settle here.
And then the depression hits, and
that enables the sea wall to be built.
At that point, the beach disappears,
there's no more access to the water
on the central waterfront, and they create traffic lanes
for vehicles and parking areas,
and it reconfigures the whole waterfront.
And that's what creates the space for the viaduct.
The viaduct that gets built in the very late ‘50s
comes and takes advantage of that north-south corridor,
but is just a behemoth and it's just such an eyesore
and it's so convenient,
but everybody hates it and it cuts off downtown
from the waterfront
and almost immediately it's
how can we get rid of this thing?
And really it was until that 2001
Nisqually earthquake that sealed its fate.
And so it was a lucky happenstance
that we could then re-envision the waterfront.
And it did take some time to figure out
which way we wanted to go. But that's how we got here.
♪♪
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