See Also: Column From 1984 Predicts Viaduct’s Fall
And: Seattle Says So Long to Viaduct – and Not a Tear in Sight
 

They’re tearing it down?

OLYMPIA, Oct. 19.—I’m sure there’s going to be a celebration in Seattle this weekend when the wreckers start smashing the Alaskan Way Viaduct. It’s the final triumph of the do-gooders, the architecture critics and those crazy fools who think everybody ought to ride the bus. For years they’ve been saying it’s big, it’s filthy, it’s noisy, it walls the city from the waterfront and it’s gotta go. Now, finally, they’ve won.

And all I can say is that none of them have ever owned a convertible.

For those of us who actually like driving and believe there is nothing evil about the automobile, and who want nothing more on a sunny day than to put the top down and turn the radio up full blast, Friday is going to be one of the saddest days in the history of this state. Somehow a city that prides itself in being progressive in all things failed to realize that a freeway can be a thing of beauty. The Alaskan Way Viaduct isn’t just one of the greatest things about Seattle, it’s one of the wonders of the world.

You hit the ramp at Safeco Field and you shoot into the sky. For two miles you soar above the harbor. The buildings of Pioneer Square whiz by on your right. On your left, the ferry terminal, always with a boat arriving or leaving.

There’s the jog to the left near the Federal Building – careful, don’t overcorrect, you’re five stories in the air! On your left you see the roofs of the wharf buildings; on your right, the office towers on the hill crowd in close. Off in the distance, the Space Needle.

Two more minutes of that breathtaking view and then you’re careening through the Battery Street Tunnel, first a tight curve to the right and then a gentle one to the left. The strobe of the overhead lights reminds you that it’s time to toot the horn. And maybe, if you stay on 99, you soar into space again on the Aurora Bridge a few minutes later and come back to earth again in the green of Woodland Park.

I’ve made that drive hundreds of times over the last 30 years, and I’ve gone miles out of my way to do it. You can get a view of the harbor from any old skyscraper. But only on the Viaduct can you do it at 50 miles an hour. Demolition begins Friday night.

One of the World’s Special Places

A view for those with joy in their hearts and romance in their souls.

It’ll take ’em years to properly wreck the thing. That first 9-day closure is designed to create a detour around the entrance to the new downtown Seattle tunnel, and that won’t be finished until 2016. But it’s the beginning of the end. The first mile of the Viaduct, south of Pioneer Square, will be jackhammered into rubble in the next few weeks. The rest of the 3.8-mile freeway will go when the tunnel is done.

To read the Seattle press these days and the musings of its leading citizens, you might get the idea that no one will miss it. When the first onramp was pulled down earlier this year, Seattle city councilwoman Jean Godden called it a “decrepit, deteriorating falling-down freeway that should never have been built in the first place.”

Well, what does Jean Godden expect? Does she think asphalt is supposed to be a pretty thing? Freeways are built of concrete and steel. You drive cars on them. I don’t know of any that are made of hand-rubbed mahogany. What makes a beautiful drive is what you see from the windshield. And I think it just shows there are two kinds of people in the world. You have the ones who make decisions in a city where the personal automobile is public enemy number one, and you have to lump them together with those nasty small-minded people who support them and make them do terrible things. And then there are those of us who have romance in our souls and joy in our hearts and who know the Viaduct is one of the world’s special places. They’re waging war on cars, and I’m afraid it’s us regular joes who are losing.

They Dreamed Big

Careful! Don’t veer too far to the left!

Seattle had the right stuff back when the Viaduct was built. It went up between 1949 and 1959, and when the first segment opened in 1953, Mayor Allan Pomeroy was full of gee-whiz: “You will be able to drive from Spokane Street to the north end of Green Lake without stopping for a single traffic light.” There were speeches and dancing girls, a color guard and a drill team. Good old Ivar Haglund hired an orchestra. And they did it all for just $18.5 million – that’s $136.8 million in today’s money.

Even I would say it would have been a mistake to build all the freeways they were thinking about at the time. Seattle’s master plan put Los Angeles to shame, and there wouldn’t have been much left of the city by the time the bulldozers got done. But the Viaduct was different – it followed an old railroad corridor. As near as I can tell from looking at ancient photos of the waterfront, not a single historic building was harmed in the making of this freeway. Yes, it created a wall between downtown and the waterfront, but it wasn’t the Chinese type. You could always walk underneath. It was actually kind of cool looking up at it and thinking about the stream of traffic just overhead, and about the amazing thing those forward-looking folks had left behind.

I suppose the wonderment wore off for most people. Interstate 5 punched through the east side of downtown in the early sixties and took most of the north-south traffic, and then the rest of the freeway plan was abandoned. First time I hopped the Viaduct was when I was a college student at the University of Washington, back in the early ’80s. I told a cabbie downtown I needed to get to the airport pronto, and he took a half-dozen quick turns to the Columbia Street onramp. “It’s the taxi driver’s secret,” he explained. “You never hit traffic.”

 Yuppie Fern Bars?

By the time I got my first car, a ’63 Pontiac convertible, I was the Viaduct’s biggest fan. On sunny afternoons in college, when those of us at the campus newspaper office had nothing better to do, I’d say, “come on, let’s put the top down and hit the Viaduct!” And then we’d go flying over the city.

But right about that time a disturbing idea was beginning to emerge. The smart people of the world were beginning to argue that maybe there was something wrong with the freedom you get in a car. The Viaduct was a symbol of that whole screwed-up way of thinking. I remember reading wordy essays in the old Seattle Weekly about what a splendid city Seattle would be if they could just tear the sucker down. I remember hearing Jim French interviewing an urban planner from New York on KIRO radio: All Seattle needed was a subway, he said, a few more sidewalk cafes, a big statue out in the harbor and a great big grassy strip where the Viaduct used to be.

What? Tear down the world’s loveliest freeway to put up fern bars for yuppies? It was the biggest outrage since they ripped the Bubbleator out of Seattle Center. Twenty-seven years ago this week I dashed off an editorial in the campus paper. If this kept up, public sentiment would be turned, the authorities would begin deferring maintenance, and that would become the excuse for the wrecking ball. I called on Congress to immediately declare the Viaduct a national historic freeway – not that it listened.

This was 1984, mind you, and the funny thing is that this is pretty much the way things played out. There were even a few folks 24 years later who tried to get the Viaduct declared a landmark, but it didn’t work.

Excuses, Excuses

Oh, sure, there was that little problem back in 1989 when they had that earthquake in the Bay Area and a freeway exactly like the Viaduct collapsed during rush hour. Forty-two people dead. But the Viaduct could have been fixed. I have to suspect it was those nagging doubts, fostered by the Weekly and others, that kept Seattle from doing the job.

Things take longer in Seattle these days, and it was another dozen years before the talk even got serious. After the 2001 Nisqually Quake, a noted engineer came up with an estimate of $800 million. The state Department of Transportation picked it to death. So maybe it would have been double – that sounds about right. But then DOT argued for a Cadillac fix that would have cost $2.3 billion. And then it argued that if you were going to do that, you might as well build a new double-decker for $2.8 billion. And then if you were going to do that, you could tunnel under downtown instead for just $3.1 billion – a miracle of the estimation process that has most folks thinking they’ll believe it when they see it.

Somehow I get the idea the decision-makers really weren’t interested in fixing the darn thing. The other day I bumped into one of those guys who wrote for the old Seattle Weekly. He never wrote about the Viaduct, he explained, so it wasn’t his fault. “But it’s noisy and smelly, and when it’s replaced by the tunnel you won’t have something that will pancake in an earthquake and creates a two-mile wall between the waterfront and downtown.”

What a killjoy. And on the other hand, you will get a great big hole in the ground that won’t let you on and off downtown because there won’t be any entrances or exits. It will cost you a fortune to drive it because of the exorbitant tolls they plan to charge, and it will carry only two-thirds the traffic. And the only really good thing about the tunnel is that it beats the alternative: Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and his allies in the Sierra Club wanted to replace it with nothing, choking the city with traffic and forcing everybody to take the bus.

Penn Station of Freeways

The whole thing makes me think about the demolition of New York’s majestic Pennsylvania Station, back in the early sixties. In those days it was just a train depot, but elderly New Yorkers still get weepy when they think about it. The tracks are still there, in a dismal basement under Madison Square Garden. Architecture critic Vincent Scully offered the best-known epitaph: “One entered the city like a God. One scuttles in now like a rat.”

And this is different – how?

What I’m remembering right now is the bright summer day back in 1984 that I took a college girlfriend for her first spin on the Viaduct – top down, of course. First we hit the southbound lanes, which take you down and under. We got to the south end and I pulled off about where the state liquor warehouse is today. She said, “You know, Smitty, man – I know you talk about this a lot, but it seems kind of like, umm – you know, a freeway.”

I told her to hush. “Don’t say a word,” I said. “I can’t tell you about it. You have to see this for yourself.” I turned around, roared back onto 99, hung a left and headed north. We shot into the sky and landed on the upper deck. The sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud. The car radio was playing a happy tune – “Be My Baby,” I think. The water sparkled. A ferryboat was pulling into the dock. The skyscrapers were gleaming.

And by the time we rounded that big curve in the tunnel, she was as giddy as I was. “Oh, God, I thought you were a nut,” she said. “But I get it. I totally get it.”

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