Urban Outcast Music #30 - A Little Bit of Everything by Dawes. A dark selection for a post about a big bridge but it ends on a higher note.
I can only assume the Seattle waterfront was a cesspit of industrial sludge and fish guts when city planners thought it was a good idea to build an elevated, two tier highway right along the edge of Elliot Bay. The monstrosity that was the Alaskan Way Viaduct was completed in the 1950s and it took a major earthquake in 2001 to get the city thinking seriously about replacement strategies. If you are having a vague recollection of double deck highways being problematic in earthquakes, this viaduct has a very similar design to the bridge that sandwiched the lower deck in Oakland.
The plan for a replacement tunnel was unveiled in 2009 and it was ambitious. The largest ever tunnel boring machine (Bertha) would be custom built to make a single pass underneath downtown and in its wake would be a two mile highway. No more squid fishing with the thundering of trucks flying overhead at 50 mph (eventually).
In 2013 when I interviewed to become a biodiesel engineer, I was ambivalent about the job but excited by the prospect of watching the progress from the office's view of the entrance pit (above). Things didn't quite work out that way and by the time I started work in Jan 2014, Bertha had chewed through a water sampling pipe left by the state and was in need of serious repairs. The rescue plan included digging a gigantic pit that the machine crawled into and the entire cutting face was lifted to the surface and retrofitted with new hardware.
I found all of these setbacks and workarounds fascinating but my apologies to everyone that was in hearing range back then that had to listen to me drone on... Fishing and Bertha updates were all I had to offer and if you substitute baby for Bertha, not much has changed. When Imperium was purchased in the summer of 2015, the tunnel was still on pause and in 1.5 years of waiting I never got to see barges of dirt being hauled away.
The payoff finally came on Feb 2nd, 2019 when the city put on a party to celebrate the tunnel's completion. You might be thinking, infrastructure openings do not count as parties but Seattle has an admirable habit of throwing shindigs when hundreds of millions of dollars (or billions in this case) finally come to fruition. I spared you the riveting stories from the openings of the UW/Capital Hill light rail stations and the 520 floating bridge but tens of thousands took part. For the end of the viaduct almost 100,000 folks came out to celebrate.
We started the tour with the Muterspaughs (frequent sponsors) by taking the southbound tunnel and after dropping to 200' below downtown, it popped us out right in front of the old office.
The line to get onto the doomed viaduct wrapped around a full city block and then some but we waited patiently with the rest of the faithful and eventually climbed the Seneca on-ramp.
From the top deck you can peer into the 5th story offices on one side and look over the bay and Olympics on the other.
My favorite overlook is the view into the workings of the Seattle Steam Company (officially the uninformative Enwave Seattle). Founded in 1893, below is one of two plants which still supply steam to 190 buildings through 18 miles of pipe underneath downtown.
After passing along Pikes Place Market and the random art exhibits we made it to the end of the Viaduct.
To complete the tour we entered the Battery Street Tunnel which will be re-purposed as a repository for Viaduct rubble. In this case, tunnel is a generous designation for what is really a ditch with a lid.
Success!! Completed the 5 miles without any meltdowns and the little man was well behaved too.
With the tunnel now in operation, the next phase of the project is to pull down the hideous death trap that is the Viaduct. This plan has survived several misguided attempts to save the structure and I like to think a few enthusiastic members of the demolition crew jumped the gun to punch out a section to make saving it just a little bit less appealing.
