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Jennifer Ott, "Where the City Meets the Sound: The Story of Seattle's Waterfront" (HistoryLink, 2025) This
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.
- [00:51]
Commercial Narrator
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- [01:22]
Jennifer Ott
This episode is brought to you by Diet Coke. You know that moment when you just.
- [01:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Need to hit pause and refresh?
- [01:27]
Jennifer Ott
An ice cold Diet Coke isn't just a break.
- [01:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's your chance to catch your breath and savor a moment that's all about you. Always refreshing, still the same great taste. Diet Coke make time for you.
- [01:38]
Jennifer Ott
Time.
- [01:41]
Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Jennifer Ott about her book titled where the City Meets the the Story of Seattle's Waterfront. Published by History Link and documentary media in 2025. This book takes us, well, really up to the present of Seattle's Waterfront. But how we got here, turns out, is a really fascinating story. We're going to go decently far back in time talking about technology, about science, about labor, about immigration, about native indigenous tribes. I mean, there's turns out a whole lot going on here just by focusing on this one very specific place. And many of these threads kind of continue over time. So this is, I think, going to be a discussion where every time we add something to the conversation and create this wonderful complex tapestry to understand this really interesting bit of space. And that's been important to many people over a lot of time. So, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:50]
Jennifer Ott
Thank you so much. Glad to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Jennifer Ott
Sure. I have a dual role. I'm an environmental historian. Western American history is my area of specialty. And I've been doing public history for about 25 years in various forms. And about 20 of those have been working with HistoryLink, which is the online encyclopedia of Washington state history. And I am also the executive director at HistoryLink. I've been in that role for a couple of years.
- [03:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that's a pretty cool day job. Why this book then?
- [03:32]
Jennifer Ott
Yeah, it's very lucky day job. This book is also sort of a dual origins. I started in about 2008. As an environmental historian, it's always curious to see how a city is shaped by people, but then also how this city is shaped by its landscape. And in this case, it's seascape. And one of the interesting things about Seattle's waterfront is that if you are standing right on the central waterfront at the foot of downtown, it is a terrace of land. It is very flat for about a block and a half width along the central shoreline, and immediately inland it goes uphill. Seattle is kind of famous for its very steep hills. And so, you know, in Seattle, if you were adjacent to a waterway like that and the land is level, it is entirely likely that it is made land, human made land. And so I started digging in about 2008, 2009, into the seawall story, which is very interesting all on its own. And then just over the years, I just kept getting pulled into more and more of the history of the waterfront because I really enjoy researching and understanding civil engineering. And it is just project after project on the central waterfront. And so then probably about four years ago, when after all of the drama of replacing the Alaskan Way viaduct, which was an elevated highway right along the central waterfront, we replaced it with a tunnel. But that was a eight year long process to decide to replace it with a tunnel. And it became clear that there is such rich history and this is a place that means so much to the city and to the people who live here individually, that if we could have a book ready for when the new waterfront park and the new tunnel and all these new things open in 2025, that that would be a Wonderful thing to share with the city and with visitors. And so that is what. What we did.
- [05:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Always interesting to hear the backstory of a book. And yeah, engineering's definitely going to come up in our conversation before we get there, though. What's the kind of. Well, obviously not origin story of the waterfront, because we'd have to go back, you know, probably until the beginning of the earth for that sort of thing. But if we go back, you know, some amount of time, if we think of where we're at now, how different was the shoreline sort of in the early 1800s, like before the 1830s, what sorts of ecosystems, food ways, lifeways could we find?
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Jennifer Ott
It would be unrecognizable. If we went back, we wouldn't know where we were. And if we pulled people forward, they wouldn't know where they were before. A non native settlement really starts the radical transformation of the waterfront. You had Elliot Bay, which is an off an inlet, I guess, a harbor on Puget Sound. And it extends in a northwest southeast direction with the river mouth. The Duwamish river enters the bay at the south end. And it's a very nicely protected harbor because of the way the glaciers have worked their magic on this region. It's a very deep water harbor. There was an estuary at the mouth of the river, of course, and then there were extensive tide flats running in inland to the what's called Beacon Hill on the southeast side of the bay. And thousands of acres, like 3,000 acres of Tide flats in that area. And then along the central shoreline, coming north along that eastern shore, there were really steep bluffs and a beach that was kind of a cobbly rocky beach. And it extended all the way around the north side of the Bend Bay to a headland that's called West Point. And then on the south side, there's a headland called Duwamish Head. And those two sort of are the entryway to the bay. And so for thousands of years, there were people living along the shoreline, the Duwamish people. But it's always been a place where people meet the coast Salish communities here. We currently understand them very distinct as tribes. And that as a result of the treaty era with the federal government. But prior to non native contact, it would have been more fluid and more interconnected as far as people's identities. And they were more associated with watersheds running up from Puget Sound. And people would have known each other by which watershed they're from and connected to. And there would have been. There are these beautiful canoes that move people around the region. Sometimes we call the waterways our canoe highways. Because the shoreline was very challenging. And inland were either swampy valley floors or very heavily forested hillsides. So really, if you want to move through this region, you move along the water. And so you would have had people from across the sound, which is the Suguamish people's traditional territories. Up the river would be the different tribal communities that now make up the Muckleshoot Indian tribe and the Duwamish. Some people from the Duwamish tribe joined the Muckleshoot Indian tribe when it was established. And then you would have had people coming from the north and south and east. The reason that they would come to what is now Seattle is that it has all these interconnections. It's pretty amazing. You can go up the river valley and end up at Mount Rainier. You can go up the river a little bit and hook around and go to Lake Washington, which is a massive lake that can carry you all the way north. And then you can connect to another lake, Lake Sammamish, which can take you to the Cascades and the Snoqualmie Mountain Pass, which is a fairly easy way across the mountains into eastern Washington. And you could also kind of hook a left there and go up into the Stoqualmie River Valley, which connects you to a lot of areas in the mountains where there would have been the different seasons, there would be different resources available, and then also connections to eastern Washington, to tribal communities over there. And so it's just this incredibly, richly interconnected place. The village that is where the city of Seattle is now was called Zelolic. And it was on one of the few areas of level land along the central waterfront. What's now called the Pioneer Square neighborhood. Because, of course, when non native people came in the 1850s, that is where they established the first community. Because it's level land adjacent to deep water, which is so important for trade. And so what's also fascinating about this area and the original ecosystem is that you have this rich array of habitats. So you have uplands where there's forests, you have the shoreline where there are certain plant communities that thrive there. Then you have the intertidal zone, and then you have the marine habitat. So it's just a cornucopia of resources. It's amazing what is growing along this shoreline and drawing people here. But it's also a site where there were. Zizalalich was what is known as a winter village, Meaning that people gathered there in the winter. And it was an Incredibly important place for spiritual practices and also for sharing knowledge across generations. It's a place where, you know, you hunker down for the winter and you share stories and you spend time with grandparents with grandchildren, parents with children and those family connections. And so it is a place where culture was carried forward to future generations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is very helpful to give us a sense of just how different the waterfront looks. Looked like honestly not that long ago, right about 200 years ago. And obviously a big part of why that changed is as you mentioned, settlers start to come to the area in the sort of 1840s and 1850s. You told us a little bit about kind of where they were and why there. How were they starting to change the area?
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Jennifer Ott
Well, initially they. There are very surface level changes. The most important thing that they need to do is figure out how to get the resources that they are harvesting from the surrounding areas, which is lumber and coal in the early years, but lumber is the first. And in 1852 we get the first steam powered sawmill on Puget Sound comes to Seattle. It's Henry Yesler's mill. And he has to be able to get the finished lumber from his mill on solid ground in Pioneer Square out to deep water where the sailing ships are going to be able to be loaded. And so he builds what's known as Yesler's Wharf. And it eventually would be a thousand feet long and Y shaped. It became like its own little mini town. But it's the first thing that they do is start to bridge that gap between solid ground and deep water and the within. Not very long. What we see is that it becomes, I sometimes call it like a neighborhood on pilings, is that there are pilings driven all over along the shoreline and trestling and planking the lumber put on top of it. Because if we have anything, we have a lot of forested land here. And so we have a lot of lumber. And it becomes basically an elevated neighborhood to extend the level ground. Because really there is, I think it would, it's best to call it a peninsula. It's just a very small, like four block long, five block long finger of land that's about a block and a half wide that extends south from where Yesler's Mill is. And that is primarily the only level land that's available. And so very quickly the shoreline gets covered in places with planking and trestles and these elevated structures. But they also start filling in. On the eastern side of that small peninsula is what's known as a flounder lagoon. It's a saltwater marsh, flounder were the primary fish that were in there. And they start dumping sawdust, garbage. When they start to smooth some of the streets, they do regrading, they dump the soil into that area and it's fairly well protected from wave action. And so whatever they dump in there doesn't get washed away very easily. On the western side of that peninsula, they want to fill in and make level land, but they can't retain it from the wave and tidal action. It's too exposed. And so they dump a lot of things along the shoreline, but it doesn't fill nearly as quickly as the inland side does. And so you start to see this, a city, grow up very haphazardly. There's no zoning, there's no rules. They just start building out wherever they can meet that requirement of having a place to work and transport goods close enough to the deep water to meet the ships that are coming in.
- [15:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so there's a bunch of ingredients there in what you've just described that don't sound necessarily like recipe for the most harmonious interactions between people.
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Jennifer Ott
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
In a moment. A moment ago you were talking about like hanging out grandchildren and grandparents, like that sounds lovely. Dumping things where they're not going to get washed away, not so much. Right. And a very small amount of land that can be used for this kind of highly commercial practice also doesn't sound like a recipe for kind of everyone getting along. So when and why do we get sort of who questions over who gets to use the land and for what? Escalating beyond tension into violence.
- [16:23]
Jennifer Ott
Yes, it's an interesting story. The tribal members at first are not violently opposed to non native settlers sharing this space. There were cultural reasons that that could be accommodated. As I said, this is a place has always been a place where people come together and lots of interconnections. And so the tribal communities have a certain openness to trading relationships and finding ways to kind of incorporate people into the networks. The British Hudson's Bay Company had been in the region for decades at this point point, and they had fairly successfully integrated themselves into the local economy and found ways to work with the tribal communities. It wasn't completely smooth, but they were more successful for a longer time at that. But mostly it's because I think the Hudson's Bay Company did not envision that they were going to displace the tribal communities. That was not their goal, at least in the near term. But when the American settlers come, there is a big vision to build a city in this place, and that is not compatible in their worldview with accommodating a native village within the same community. And so I often explain to people that those first settlers are looking to establish an American city. And they really do see it as becoming a city. They want to be the railroad's terminus, the transcontinental railroad terminus, which won't be built for decades, but that is their goal. And so they also bring with them some sense of not wanting to be seen as provincial, because we are way the heck out here, if you think about where the center of gravity for the United States is at that time. And so there's a little bit of a sense of, how do we make sure that we're seen as a real American city? And what. One of the ways that they define that is that it is a white community, and they do not want to have native people living in the city. And so the first city of Seattle is established, the official incorporated government, in 1865. And the fifth ordinance that's passed is a prohibition of indigenous people living within the city limits unless they live with and work for a white person. And that law is appalling, of course, but also it encapsulates the entire colonization of Seattle is It's rejecting the people who have lived there for generations and wanting them to leave. But they can't do that because they desperately need those people's knowledge and labor. And they rely on the deep knowledge that those people have about this place. They rely on the ability to transport things in canoes and staff the sawmill. There are not enough adult white men who are able to do that work that's needed to build a city. And so it's right there in that ordinance. It captures that tension. And there are white men that are intermarrying with native women. It is never completely separated. And so the city dissolves in very shortly because this is not a successful city government. And when the city reincorporates two years later, in 1867, that law is not passed again. And I think you can chalk that up to, there has been a lot of displacement even in those couple of years. And so people feel maybe less threatened by the identity of the city. But also, I do think it was a moment of people being like, well, if we're going to be a real city, then we have to have these rules. And that feels less pressing in 1867, because there are different things going on. That is sort of the official government interaction that we have that goes on in the city, but there's an underlying current that's also going on the first non native settlers come here in 1851, the land has not been ceded by the tribes. At that point, there are no treaties that have been signed. And so according to the laws of the United States, there should not be any non native settlement along the bay. But there is a lot of settlement that is happening in this whole region at that time. The treaties are finally signed in 1855, 1854 and 1855. And the tribes do seed the land. But the treaties are not the resolution of the conflict. They are actually the beginning of a conflict. Because the way that it works out is that none of the tribes are happy with where their reservations are going to be established, the size of them. There is a lot of conflict because the most important thing to the tribes is that they retain connection to their ancestral lands and that they are able to continue fishing, gathering and hunting as they have for generations. And the treaties as written do not acknowledge that or protect that. And so in 1855, there is a battle in Seattle. And it is brief, but there is loss of life in the settler community. And. And what we see is that there were other battles, skirmishes around the region. Eventually the governor, the territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, does accept that he cannot strong arm these conditions through. And there are adjustments made to the reservation expectations that what will be set aside and where. But the Duwamish tribe specifically is at this point supposed to. Either individuals are supposed to choose to go to the Meccleshoot Indian Reservation, which is upriver so away from the shoreline, which makes it less appealing and less compatible with their traditions, or they are supposed to go to the Port Madison Reservation, which is across the water. It is a shoreline reservation, but the people that went there because they generally had family connections, that sort of thing. And then there are people that stayed in Seattle because they don't want to leave. This is their home. There was a petition for a reservation along the Duwamish River Valley that would have been far more acceptable, but the settler community blocks that reservation from being established. And so there is today quite a bit of tension and challenges around the very messy resolution of that. Give big, Save big with rack Friday deals at Nordstrom Rack for a limited time. Take an extra 40% off red tag clearance for a total Savings up to 75% off. Save on gifts for everyone on your list from brands like Vince Cole, Haan Sam Edelman and more. All sales final and restrictions apply. The best stuff goes fast. So bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom rack today.
- [24:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [24:46]
Jennifer Ott
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- [24:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [24:54]
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- [25:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, messy resolution indeed. That's still being discussed today. The thing though I think I most want to pick up on though in your description there of the kind of multiple messy tense things going on on paper and off is this whole wanting to incorporate a town because it's going to be the end of the railway. But there isn't a railway that it's like way in advance of the railway actually existing. So like why did they so badly want a non existent railroad road first of all? And aside from writing a bunch of paper down that talked about a railway before it even existed, how else did they try to go about achieving this fantasy?
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Jennifer Ott
Yeah, it's the railroad is just the holy grail is what everybody here wants. And the reason they need it is that if you look at the population of this area, it is the non native population, it is sparse, there are very few people here. And so the only trade that is going to happen from this place is that natural resources are going to be exported out. And that's like I said, lumber, coal, fish, eventually farm produce because there's incredibly rich farmlands around here and but you have to have transportation routes to get those goods to the eastern United States where the population centers are. And there's also the hope that Seattle will be a gateway between the eastern United States and the Pacific Rim. So Asian countries, Alaska, all of those areas. And so if Seattle can be seen as the portal between those two, then that will grow the economy here just by simply the activity of moving that cargo through. And there are no rivers that can be navigated very far inland from the Puget Sound. And so really it has to be transported Eastward by railroad. And anything that's coming from Eastern Washington or the Cascade Mountains has to come into the port city by railroad. And so they lobby as hard as they can. The Civil War, of course, gets into the middle of all of this and really delays things quite a bit. But the idea is, is that the Northern Transcontinental Railroad would cross the Cascades at any of the passes and then drop down into Puget Sound. And Seattle is nicely centrally located for that. And the Northern Pacific Railroad, when a gets to the point that they're actually looking for where their terminus will be, does hire a local person, James Swan, to provide a report on various harbors. There's, I think, seven or eight that he looks at. And it's really interesting because if you just look at a map, it seems like Seattle wouldn't be the best choice because you have to come in from the Pacific Ocean along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and then you have to head south through Puget Sound, and then you have to hook a little to the left. And it seems like there are other places that are more obviously the best location, if you're just thinking about distance and time spent in travel. But if you look at it instead, from the aggregation of the resources and how they're going to come together from this region in order to be exported, Seattle is very easily the hub location you can see as a gathering place for things that are going to then be exported. Um, it makes perfect sense. And the closest mountain past us is Snoqualmie Pass. And it is a relatively easy pass to traverse. And it is fairly close to the city. It's only an hour drive currently. And so that is what they pin their hopes on. But of course, that is not how it played out. There are all sorts of legislative and legal and financial reasons that the Northern Pacific chooses Tacoma to be its terminus, which is a city south of us. It's the next big harbor to the south on Commencement Bay. They chose it because it's closer to where they were bringing the railroad, because at that point, the railroad was coming along the Columbia river, which is the border between Washington and Oregon and the next state to the south. And they were. The railroad was going to come up with from the Columbia river on the west side of the mountains, and Tacoma is closer to that connection. And they needed to get it done. They were running out of time for their federal funding, and so they chose Tacoma. They also had. There was far less development along the shore at Tacoma, and they could acquire more land there that, with the railroad, would control and so in 1860, 73, the railroad goes to Tacoma and Seattle decides that they are going to build their own railroad. And they literally, like pack up their picks and axes and shovels and take a ride out to where? Across the tide flats to where the railroad will meet the shoreline. And they start building a railroad grade. And they're heading toward the coal fields which are east of the city, the town at that point on the way to Snoqualmie Pass. And so people in the UK will recognize one of the towns is called Newcastle, where the mines are. And so they start building. They call it the Seattle and Walla Walla, because they anticipate they will get to the town of Walla Walla in eastern Washington, which is where it would meet up most effectively with the Northern Pacific line that's coming east or coming west from the Great Plains. And so they start to build it. They only ever get to the coal fields in the Cascade foothills. They never get farther than that. It is incredibly hard to build a railroad. And they have very little money and there's no steel production here. And so they have to ship in all the rails. And it takes quite some time, but then it does start operating. And the Northern Pacific does operate a spur line up from Tacoma to Seattle, but it is very sporad operated. And so for many years it is a very rudimentary railroad system that is connecting Seattle to the coal fields and then to the transcontinental that's coming to Tacoma. And it wouldn't be until 1893 that we would get our own transcontinental terminus. And that is the Great Northern, which crosses the Cascade Mountains further to the north and is operated by a separate company. Although it's all railroad history is just an absolute rat's nest of ownership.
- [32:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly begins our discussion of the engineering aspect that we both mentioned at the beginning would be a big part of the history here. So very interesting to get a sense of the complexity there. But I did say that kind of every time there was something complex, we'd add more layers to it. So I want that now because we've talked about the indigenous peoples there, we've talked about settlers coming in. There's also Chinese workers that are very involved in all this, which, again, thinking about railway history is perhaps not a big surprise. They are there, but also then not right, because we run into, again, as we come to the end of the 1800s, more issues around kind of who gets to use these small bits of commercially useful land. So what does that look like in terms of who is allowed to be where, when, by sort of the end of the century.
- [33:15]
Jennifer Ott
So the railroads bring a lot of Chinese workers to the region to work. But pretty quickly, starting in the 1850s, 1860s, you start to see people in Seattle hiring Chinese workers to do infrastructure projects, Things like building roads and trestles and that sort of thing. Um, because they're just as with the lumber mill, there are not enough adult white men who are able to do those jobs. And women are not, of course, being asked to do those jobs. There's very strict secre segregation by gender. And so even though you have the community pushing indigenous people out while still pulling them back for their labor, you have the same thing with the Chinese community. They are not welcome socially. A lot of people complain about their presence, but they also are constantly being pulled back into the city to do these jobs. And in 1862, Chung Ching Hak establishes the Watch On Company, which is partly an import, export, kind of a general store kind of operation, but it is also a labor contracting business. He brings in workers to fulfill the needs of different projects. We see one of the earliest big jobs that the workers are put to is the digging of a log canal between Lake Washington and Lake Union. We have two big lakes in Seattle. And the idea is, is that they dig this canal through what is called the Montlake Isthmus. It is a very skinny piece of land connecting two parts of Seattle between the lakes. And there's enough of a drop in elevation between Lake Washington to Lake Union that they can reach, run the logs through this ditch and get them to a mill that is on the south end of Lake Union for processing. And so there are not enough people to literally hand dig this canal. And so they bring in Chinese laborers. We know that they brought them in for the first section, which was further to the west between Saltwater and Lake Union. But for the second one, that one connecting Lake Washington to Lake Union, we do not know if they did that work because there is so much tension over who is being hired for which jobs and racial prejudices that whoever hired them did not make any sort of public announcement about it. They just got the work done. And so the tensions that's happening is that there are labor organizers and that are using racial tensions to foment violence against Chinese people to. And making the argument they are stealing jobs from white workers. And so there is a lot of violence happening along the West Coast. What doesn't get mentioned by those organizers is that the business owners are choosing to pay the Chinese workers a lower Wage. The Chinese workers do not choose to work at that lower wage. They do not have the choice to turn down work. They do not have alternatives. And so when somebody offers them a job, they do not get to quibble over what they're being paid. And so the employers are pitting these two groups of people against each other. But in Seattle, it comes to a head in 1886 when there is a. A expulsion there. The city council again passing an ordinance that says every worker or every person who is sleeping in a hotel in Seattle needs to have a certain amount of cubic airspace per person. And the goal of that law is that it is targeting Chinese workers who are sharing living spaces because it's a way to save money, right? They can send more money home, or they can save more money if they share living spaces when they're in the city. And so the. There's a mob that is formed, and they enforce that ordinance by going through the Chinese district and pushing all of the people out of the community and out onto a pier at first. And I mean, sorry at Alaskan. No, sorry at Railroad Way, which is the railroad trestle on the shoreline and Washington Street. And they take them out to the boat called the Queen of the Pacific that is tied up there, and they try and force the entire community onto the boat. The captain of the boat will only take people that have paid tickets. So they pass the tip the hat, and they get as many tickets as they can. The remaining Chinese people are brought back into the city, and it sets off a string of events that is a conflict between people in the city of Seattle that do not want this extra legal, violent expulsion. It doesn't matter who. They do not want that because they think it reflects badly on the city. It makes it seem lawless. And there are the people that don't care and really just want to push the Chinese people out of the community. And it comes to blows, and it comes to people being shot. There's a riot in the streets. Martial law is declared, and the National Guard comes or the militia comes in. And so it eventually settles down. There are some Chinese people still left in the city, but a lot of people leave because who wants to stay somewhere where you're going to be violently pushed out? You never know if you're going to be protected or not. And at the same time, you have a pretty much the ending of immigration, certainly of Chinese laborers, because a law passed in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion act, prohibits people from coming into the country from China. And so Seattle's Chinese population doesn't recover for decades because that immigration stream has been cut off at that point.
- [39:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Point, yeah, that's definitely a whole complex entanglement there. The kind of push and pull Is very much in evidence. I do want to make sure we talk about Some kind of key big events, though, that are nearby happening. Seattle, we mentioned briefly the civil war, which isn't really nearby, has some impact, but it's kind of mostly off in the distance. The klondike gold rush, however, way less in the distance. Much more impact.
- [40:01]
Jennifer Ott
Much more impact. Almost impossible to quantify the impact. So. 1897. In June of 1897, the first gold arrives in seattle from the klondike, which is actually in canada. But seattle is the jumping off point for americans to be able to get to that gold rush. And they land on at. In alaska and then travel overland to get to the gold rush area. And it's. There have been other gold rushes in the region, but nothing of this scale. Like the amount of gold that's coming back in that first ship Is just astonishing to people. And so people just drop everything and head north. But quite a few people in seattle Are very savvy, and they figure out that a. It's going to take a little campaign to make sure that people know about seattle and know how perfect it is as a supply depot and a jumping off point to go north. Because you could go from san francisco, you, could go from portland, Oregon. There are other places. But seattle has some very good PR that goes out. It's like, this is the place to get started for the gold rush. And then the other thing that people figure out Is that it is much more likely that you can make money off of gold seekers Than you could make money as a gold seeker. And so there are a lot of retail establishments that get started here. And they range from supplies just, you know, this is the kit you need in order to survive up north, in order until you find gold. But they also have things like, there is a dog sled driving training facility. Like, there's a school that will teach you how to drive a dog sled in seattle. There's a great photo that shows a team of dogs Attached to a sled. But it has wheels because there's no snow here, of course. And so the impact, though, is tremendous. In 1890, city of Seattle has about 43,000 people. And that stays pretty level because there's a massive economic depression here in the 1890s. And so it's pretty level until the gold rush hits. And then in 1910, Seattle has a population of 237,000 people. And so it's just floodgates open up with people coming into the city. And we have the railroad in 1893 that finally comes directly to Seattle. And there's steamer lines that are coming into Seattle. Those get started between Alaska and Seattle, Seattle in the 1860s and 1870s. And so there is a framework that is already there that can be amplified and developed in order to carry people. But there's some amazing photographs of ships just absolutely packed to the brim, leaving port, take people to Seattle. And then I had always understood sort of the popular myth that when they came back, they brought like pouches of gold. Gold, you know, or they got lucky and found a big nugget. But what we actually see is that boxes of gold are coming back from the Klondike. There's a really great photo of about 15 boxes of gold stacked on a pier ready for transport to the local bank. And so the wealth that is coming through is just unbelievable. And a lot of that money is spent here, both in pastimes, bars and brothels and gambling, but also investing in development, business establishments and residential development and all that. And so in the 1890s and 1900s, you just see Seattle goes from being a quaint small town to being an actual urban area and starting to realize its dreams. With Venmo Stash A taco on one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back with Venmo stash, get up to 5% cash.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Jennifer Ott
Was canceled, but they can put us on another flight and we just need.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Book a private vacation rental now@verbo.com well, a key component then of becoming a successful urban area is dealing with the Whole sea wave aspect of things.
- [45:11]
Jennifer Ott
Right.
- [45:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
The sea wall is a pretty obvious thing that it would need as the city expands. So can you tell us more about the long, drawn out process needed to actually achieve such a feat?
- [45:24]
Jennifer Ott
It takes us a remarkably long time to do this. The most important reason why we need a seawall in Seattle is that for much of the central waterfront, where the city is adjacent to the deep water, not the estuary area, which is much harder to work with. There is a beach that abuts a fairly steep hill, and it gets steeper as you go north along the shoreline. And so it is very clear that a seawall needs to be built some ways out into the water so that there can be level land created that is solid ground to build upon. South of Madison street, which is about mid central waterfront, it is not too hard to build that seawall. It can be a very traditional concrete footings. Concrete seawall holds back the bay, but also supports the solid ground that is filled in behind it. It's not foolproof. It does have some challenges from Madison street south to what is Spokane Street. So all the way down the bay to the mouth of the river, which is a couple of miles. I don't know exactly the distance, but it's a ways down. That seawall gets built in the 1910s. And the biggest challenge that area has is that there's thousands of acres to fill behind it. So you can build a seawall, but that doesn't mean that the land behind it is usable until it gets filled. And that's a whole long process about how that eventually happens. It takes a long time. And so you have the area south of Madison fairly well taken care of by the nineteen teens, by nineteen twenty, for sure. North of Madison street, there's a different problem. The sea floor in that area for about it's about two miles. Also, there is a steep sea floor, which means that the seawall has to be taller in order to create enough level land to have workable space on the inland side. And so anything that you're going to put in for fill back there is going to be being pulled downhill against whatever seawall structure is built. And so that has a lot of downward pressure at the same time that it is having to hold the water back on the seaward side. And so a simple seawall is not going to work. It is not feasible. It doesn't have enough strength with just concrete footings. And the challenge that comes then is not that there isn't a solution. The engineers can figure out a solution, but the cost Involved. And it is. So it's a lot of. It's a very high cost involved in building the seawall that needs to be built. And Washington state has a law at that time that if there is a public improvement adjacent to your property, so a street improvement, a sidewalk construction, sewers, sorts of things, things that run along the public right of way, then the private property owner has to pay half of the cost. And it's. They develop things called local improvement districts, and they assess the cost of the project according to the frontage that a particular piece of property has to it. And on the waterfront, that is the railroads and the pier owners, sometimes one in the same, sometimes separate companies own the piers, and they're a very powerful lobby. But the railroads particular are always economically precarious, and they do not want to incur this expense, and they don't think that they should have to pay half of the cost for something that so clearly has a regional benefit. And so the process begins of how should we pay for this? And the city goes to the state legislature for help. And the state legislature says, no, Seattle has all the money. Seattle doesn't need the state's help. There's so many projects that need to be done around the state. No, you can't have the money. And Seattle's representatives argue, but if you invest in Seattle, the whole state will benefit because this is our port for all of these incredible resources that are produced by our state. But that's not a convincing argument. And so no state money is brought into the project, which would lower the cost that the city and the private property owners have to split. And so it. The wrangling just goes on. It's years, decades of back and forth of, we really need to do this, but nope, we don't want to pay for it. And so the city keeps maintaining the railroad avenue, which is the street built on pilings and planks, and the railroads manage their trestles, which are the railroad tracks on pilings. And it is incredibly expensive because as you get more motorized vehicles and bigger locomotives, the rail cars and the vehicles that are running across those elevated streets and railroads are heavier. And so they start to fall through these wooden structures. It is very. The newspaper calls it a makeshift waterfront. And it is. It is just very sort of. I think of it as duct tape and twine holding it together. And eventually we get to the Great Depression, and you would think that that would mean less would happen, but actually, it provides some mechanisms for things to happen. And the first thing that happens is that the mayor Of Seatt, John Doerr loses his patience with this back and forth and this constant repair work. And he starts directing the city streets department to not repair when holes develop, when things fall through or things collapse. And he just puts up detour signs and he's like, oh, this part's closed. And so immediately there's chaos because there's trains and there's vehicles and there's people, and they're all using this space, and sections of it are closed. And he holds his ground. He says, nope, we're not going to fix it until we come up with a permanent solution. And then just the luck would have it, there is state emergency relief aid that's available, and that is state funding that is set aside to pay workers to work. And it's a way to try and get the economy going during the Depression and also to relieve the suffering of people. And when you add that funding in, that reduces the cost to a place that the city and the private property owners can come to agreement. And the seawall gets developed and it gets completed in 1936. And we have this beautiful central waterfront with the railroads are more organized, there's vehicular lanes that had always been very haphazard. There's a really nice sidewalk, and they rename it Alaskan Way. And we all of a sudden have a very functional waterfront. And interestingly, though, they're still in the Depression, so it's still fairly limited economic activity and certainly not very much investment in the area. And then World War II comes in the 40s, and the military essentially takes over the central waterfront for that time period. And by the time the waterfront reopens to private activity, the world is changing and ships are getting bigger and there's more cargo being handled, and the tight space along the central waterfront is becoming less and less practical. And cargo handling is actually moving north and south of the central waterfront to those places that have been filled behind the seawall. And so you actually have almost as soon as you have the stabilizing of the waterfront, you see a decline of the waterfront and the process of change is happening, happening that will lead us to new uses on the central waterfront.
- [53:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, there's this moment of, oh, look, it's all done. Oh, wait.
- [53:43]
Jennifer Ott
Right.
- [53:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And as you discuss in the book, the decades after World War II are not great. Right. Kind of all the way until the end of the century. Obviously, that's a lot of time to cover. But could you give us maybe a brief sense of some of the issues that the waterfront faces through. You know, we're going to talk about what happens in 2001, but kind of up until that point.
- [54:04]
Jennifer Ott
Yes, until that point. And so post war, there is a real emphasis in the city of moving single occupancy vehicles, cars and trucks. And basically, as you see the cargo handling move out the central waterfront, people refer to it as the back alley. Instead of the front porch of the city, it becomes the back alley. And it becomes very much like a parking bypass route. Not a pleasant place to go to. And so when they're looking at how do you move vehicles through the city, the waterfront becomes an obvious place for one of the highway routes. And that is when we get the Alaskan Way viaduct in the late 50s. It's a double decker elevated freeway, runs right between downtown and the waterfront. Absolutely hideous eyesore, Noisy, dirty, awful. People argue against it at the time, but really, if you're looking at how to move people through the city, it does make sense. There is a logic to it. It is unfortunately an absolute blight on the waterfront. And it severs the connection between downtown and the waterfront for decades. And so, but there is still the waterfront. It's still an amazing place. And in the 60s and 70s, it becomes a tourist destination, a recreational destination. There's still some commercial fishing going on in some of the piers and some cargo handling. But primarily what you see is the big transit sheds, which are those big barn like structures that are on the piers that did handle cargo. They get repurposed for recreational uses, retail uses. And there is a waterfront park that's developed in the place of one of the piers. And so you get some activity on the waterfront, especially around the World's Fair in 1962, there's a hotel that's built, there's a restaurant that has a Polynesian theme that is built that becomes quite the destination for a long time. And so you see that level of activity extends into the 80s and 90s. There's efforts to improve the waterfront for the sort of experience that you have, despite the freeway being right there. They move all the railroads off the. All the trains off the Waterfront in 1986. And that helps tremendously because at least you don't have to have cargo trains, freight trains coming through. And so but by the 90s, there's kind of this resignation that it's a freeway and there's. There are limitations to what can be done. And so there are some new tourist facilities that are built in the 70s that help people traverse the hill. The Seattle Aquarium is built, which is an amazing organization. And so we kind of reach a stasis. And then in 2001, the earthquake hits. And all of a sudden there are possibilities of things that can happen. And people who have been thinking about this for decades are ready to jump on the opportunity that the earthquake actually creates.
- [57:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So this, I think, is really interesting to think about in terms of creating an opportunity or jumping on an opportunity. As you said, there's decades leading up to this of, like, something needs to be done, right? And you can see why, or one can see why an earthquake would sort of be an immediate, like, oh, well, something. We're gonna have to do something about it, right? It kind of gives impetus for change. But was that actually, like, necessary? Like, how much damage did the earthquake actually do? Was it a case of something absolutely must be done, or was it kind of like, well, none of us have been happy about this. We should probably do something. I guess this is as good a time as any.
- [58:01]
Jennifer Ott
It was an absolute necessity. And history link we actually did a podcast and we called it the eight year long emergency because it was an emergency situation. The damage that was done is that the elevated structure, the pilings for the foundation for that structure, did not reach to bedrock. They reached down to something called glacial till. That is the soil that had been compacted by the glaciers that passed through Seattle about 15,000 years ago. And so it's solid, but it is not bedrock. And it is all fill around those pilings behind the seawall. And so something that happens when there are areas of fill during earthquakes is you get something called liquefaction, which means that it becomes almost soup, like during the shaking. And so it is not a solid ground. There are a lot of places in Seattle where if I was in a building an earthquake hit, I would run outside because it's a liquefaction zone. And you know that the foundations of those buildings are not secure. And so the pilings are pretty loose. And the viaduct gets a good shaking. And had it lasted 30 seconds longer, the viaduct would have gone down and it would have been just absolutely horrifying. People would have died. And so. But as it was, it stopped. And it was not a particularly shallow earthquake, so that was good. And the state was able to basically create, in the places of the most weakness, an exoskeleton of supports that held the viaduct in place. It looked very Frankenstein esque. And I continued to use the viaduct in this era, you had to just suspend belief and just. Or suspend disbelief and just drive on it. At one point, they lowered the speed limit to like, reduce the Pounding of the traffic on it. And I just laughed because, like, no, I. I will take a speeding ticket because there's no way I was going to spend longer on that thing than I needed to to get where I was going. And so that is a very precarious situation. But equally, if not more so precarious, is that seawall that we were just talking about is that got very shaken up by the earthquake. And the interior or underground elements of the seawall were made out of wood. The wall itself was concrete and steel, but the interior infrastructure of it was wood. And the shipworms and the gribbles, another little burrowing mollusk, had. Had been eating away at the infrastructure for quite some time. And the city was aware of this. There had been some sinkholes that had developed over time, and it was being very closely watched. And so with the earthquake, some real damage occurred to that infrastructure. And one of the engineers I interviewed said their fear was that the seawall could unzip, that if one part of it failed, the whole thing would fail, because it's all interconnected and interlocked. And had the seawall failed within three or four tides, high tides, the fill would have washed out. And all of those buildings and the Alaskan way viaduct that were supported by that fill would have been left standing on their pilings and very exposed. It would have been catastrophic. And plus, there would have just been an absolute horrifying loss of life because it would have just had such a tremendous. A lot of people live and work in that area. And so it wasn't a choice after the earthquake hits in February 2001, that it needs to be replaced. But there's an awareness in Seattle that these big civic projects have a tremendous impact on the community. And who is. The questions that came up are, who's going to benefit? And how do we make sure the most possible people in the city benefit from this investment? And that people that might have been negatively impacted by things like the building of the interstate freeway through the city, which broke up neighborhoods, had lots of impact on lower income people, people of color. And so how do we make sure we don't do that again? And then, of course, how do we pay for it? Which is always a big, complicated argument. You can actually just switch out the nouns in the newspaper articles between the seawall argument in the early years and the replacement argument in the more recent years, because it's the same argument. Seattle gets all the investment. They don't need state funding. Yes, we do. It benefits everybody. And eventually, after eight years, it was Decided that there would be a tunnel built at the time, the largest, deeper, single board tunnel built in the world. And it carries the highway traffic through the city. And then that reopened the entire waterfront. It allowed the removal of the viaduct structure. And what the city decided to do was to build Waterfront park, which is a 20 acre park that connects downtown with the waterfront, provides open space. It's just this amazing place that we have now.
- [63:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about the place that the waterfront is now? Obviously we're not going to be able to cover every aspect of it, but some of the most interesting pieces to it. I know a big goal of the various things that have been done has been to create a waterfront for all. Has that been achieved? What has happened? What are some of the most intriguing things that have changed from this moment of crisis to now?
- [64:04]
Jennifer Ott
I would argue that it has been achieved. It is a wonderful space. It is a wonderful place to be. The key elements are that the main north south road that runs along the waterfront has been moved inland, which means it goes in the footprint of where the viaduct was. And that means that the area on the water side of the street is much wider. They have planted many trees, clever raised beds, all these different things that separate the bike trail from the sidewalk. And there is large open spaces for community gathering. Pier 62, a massive pier that had the pier shed, the transit shed on it, had been removed in the 80s, but it was a large open space that was beloved because there used to be concerts on it, but those had to be stopped because the wooden structure was no longer stable. And so it was replaced with a concrete structure that is just this amazing gathering space along the shore. And it is directly adjacent to what is called the Overlook walk, and that carries people on foot between the shoreline and the Pike Place market, which is our big public market. It's this amazing historic place, vibrant, full of people. And so it connects that experience with the waterfront experience in this. There's plantings. The theme of the plantings is from white caps to white caps. And so basically at the bottom, the plantings are what you would see on the shoreline. So water, white caps, and then the planting change as they go up. And at the top, it is more plantings you would find in the mountains. So the snow capped white caps of the mountains. And so it's just this amazing place, connected experience that you have as you move through the structure and it carries you up this very steep hill in a way that is doable. There's switchbacks and all sorts of things. That make it an easier, more enjoyable walk. And then as you move south along the waterfront, there is a new park on Pier 58 which has a children's play structure which was almost absent from downtown. And there are actually quite a few families that live downtown and it is swarmed with children all the time. It's amazing to see. The primary or centripe structure is a jellyfish climbing structure that has a slide and it's adorable. And then as you move south further, there is a rebuilt Washington street boat landing which is a structure built in 1920, Pergola like structure that is beautiful. And it has now a Molly Moon's ice cream place in it, which is delicious. And all along the way there is public art. And I couldn't even begin to tell you all the public art. It's just spectacular. And there is a new crossing at Union street which is south of the Overlook Walk that used to be just this very decrepit metal structure. And now it's this beautiful bridge with art done by Nori Sato. And then there is a new crossing that connects the shoreline uphill to First Avenue, that Marion street, which is where the ferry terminal is. And so it's a Washington state ferry terminal that has, you know, a million people a year use it. And so it's very busy. And this is the walkway and it's now this beautiful new structure. And then in Pioneer Square, which is the southern end of the waterfront, that original neighborhood for the city, there are new connections east, west, that it's been re landscaped, restored, the sidewalks have been repaired, there's been been brickwork put in to help people understand where the original high tide line was. And so, and it tells, there's some interpretive signage that tells the story of the indigenous people who lived here and their connection to this place. And it's beautiful. It's just absolutely beautiful. And so there's a couple more projects that are still being done. Oh, and I'm sorry, one last thing. There's Habitat beach, which is the southern anchor of what is being called the Salmon Highway. Salmon come out of, juvenile salmon come out of the Duwamish river and they follow the East Waterway, which is a human made waterway at the mouth of the river. And this is the first place that they hit the central waterfront. It's Habitat beach and it's a artificial shoreline that is is a tidal zone that's been created. But directly north of it is the Habitat Bench that starts and it runs the entire length of the new seawall that has been redesigned to be habitat for salmon, Rather than just a seawall. And the old seawall was a smooth surface, and so no sea life could get established there. This new seawall has a cobbled surface, Meaning that mussels and algae and various other critters can get established, and you can start to have some ecosystem developed there Instead of just the sterile environment of the old seawall. And the habitat bench is a raised structure that is basically a pile of rocks encompassed in a metal net, and that runs the whole length of the seawall, which provides the more shallow water that the juvenile salmon and want. And that is augmented by the sidewalk above. Have the sidewalks cantilevered out over this area. It has light blocks in it, Glass blocks that are embedded in the cement that allow light to come through, which is encouraging the salmon to stay close to the wall in the shallower water. And there's food production because there's light getting through. And so it's not going to solve the salmon's challenges of navigating this urban shoreline, but it is going to help the salmon have a higher survival rate. And it's working. They're seeing the salmon use it, and there's less predation when you're closer to the shore. And so more salmon are making it out to open water because they're migrating out to the north pacific, Is where they're on their way to. For their. Where they grow to adulthood before they come back to spawn. And so it's a fascinating. This habitat beach just brings people directly to the water, which is the only place on the shoreline you really can do that. And it's. It's absolutely magical. I love to go and sit there. It's. It feels so much more like a beach than I expected it to.
- [71:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It sounds pretty amazing. So thank you for giving us a sense of the waterfront front today. To wrap up our discussion, Is there anything you want to give us A brief sneak preview of. Of anything you're currently working on, Given that this book is off your desk and out in the world?
- [71:24]
Jennifer Ott
I am mostly focusing on my work at history link right now, but our big project there is that we're telling Washington's forest history, and we have two writers who are working on a book about that. And that is such a key part of our state story. But there haven't been very many books written for a general audience In a couple of decades. And so we're hoping to fill that gap so that all of the people who have grown up here without seeing as much of that forest industry happening, because it is definitely at a smaller scale than it used to be, and it is much less visible in our communities. But also, we have so many newcomers to the region, and I don't know how else else they will learn about that important part of our state's economy and sort of how our state's environment has been shaped. And so we're hoping to engage with a broader audience around that story.
- [72:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, for anyone who wants to learn more about the waterfront history of Seattle, of course they can read the book we've been discussing titled where the City Meets the The Story of Seattle's Waterfront, published by History Link and Documentary Media in 2025. Jennifer, thank for you you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [72:39]
Jennifer Ott
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking with you.