Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia

Epilogue: Commons

215 Epilogue Commons “Park Here—Whispering Firs and Salmon Runs: A Different Sort of Downtown Space.” With this tantalizing headline, John Hinterberger, a popular food columnist for the Seattle Times, departed from his normal discussion of Seattle’s flourishing food scene in April 1991. For two years, Hinterberger told his readers, he and “a small group of people sitting in a room at City Hall” had been quietly eyeing the Cascade and south Lake Union neighborhoods just north of the downtown core. Hinterberger described sitting with his influential friends—including the Pike Place Market preservation veteran and local architect Fred Bassetti—before an artist ’s rendering, a “map of the Lake Union/Westlake neighborhoods, with a creek running from the south end of the lake toward the center of Seattle.” He quoted Bassetti: “Salmon could spawn there”; “tourists and children could come to watch them swimming upstream, jumping up through small waterfalls.” Seattle’s nature-friendly readers learned of the forty to sixty blocks of real estate that could be converted into green space, encompassing an area running from the shore of Lake Union to Denny Way and from Terry to Dexter Avenue. “Imagine a salmon run in the middle of Seattle,” wrote Hinterberger. “Imagine new groves of evergreens where once upon a time there was nothing but old groves of evergreens. In short, imagine the essences of the Northwest—right here in the major urban defoliation of the Northwest.” To realize such a vision, the journalist argued with little 216 C o m m o ns irony, would require doing to Seattle “what Baron Haussmann had done to Paris” in the nineteenth century, and he proposed that the city “bulldoze marginal areas, create boulevards, open up the streets to the sky. AND BUILD A MAJOR PARK.”1 The marginal areas to be bulldozed included the Cascade neighborhood , which sits just north of downtown on the south shore of Lake Union. By the 1990s few Seattleites knew of Cascade or its history. This area encompasses a section of the city from Denny Street in the south to the shore of the lake at the north and from the eastern slope of Capitol Hill to the area near today’s Highway 99 to the west. At the turn of the last century, Cascade was a small mill town, and until recently it contained an assortment of ornate Italianate homes, working-class houses, and a mix of light-industrial and small businesses. The neighborhood still reflects a The original Bogue plan for the south Lake Union area, Municipal Plans Commission , 1911. Maps Included in “Plan of Seattle / Report of the Municipal Plans Commission Submitting Report of Virgil G. Bogue,” item no. 619. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives. 217 C o m m o ns working-class character and the cultural remnants of the Greeks, Swedes, and Russians who once lived close to downtown. The neighborhood had a long history as the focus of failed grand plans as well. In the late nineteenth century R. H. Thomson, a city engineer, and Virgil Bogue, an urban planner, had imagined “a major linkage tying the downtown, Denny Regrade, Seattle Center, South Lake Union and Cascade neighborhoods together in an attractive, complementary and coherent whole.” The “conflux ” of Seattle, as Bogue had called it, seemed once again within reach in a new, supposedly greener age.2 This vision of green space soon took hold among a broad swath of Seattleites . Appealing to a readership with increasingly refined tastes, Hinterberger offered a prize to the person suggesting the best name for the proposed park: a wine and cheese picnic with the columnist. Readers sug- 218 C o m m o ns gested “the Promenade” and “Evergreen Acres,” among other names.3 Hinterberger encouraged readers to write to the mayor and city council with their visions of “running paths,” “picnic tables and seasonal gardens,” and a “grand boulevard and maybe a speakers corner.”4 As the plan’s contours broadened, it became clear that the project would include not just a plan for increased green space but a massive redevelopment scheme for the dormant section of the city. By 1992 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editors agreed that the area was ripe for redevelopment.5 The redevelopment might solve traffic problems, “better utilize” a neighborhood of “underused and widely dilapidated real estate,” and even solve environmental problems caused by storm water runoff that affected Lake Union.6 In...