Roadwars | The battle over major transportation projects

Name this highway project:

It divides the community as engineers, elected officials, bureaucrats and community groups line up on opposite sides of a proposed major multi-lane expressway through the heart of the city.

Conflicting claims over costs, taxes, feasibility, urban design and neighborhood impacts dominate the news for months. The governor, members of the Seattle City Council and the mayor trade barbs as various agencies accuse each other of either railroading or foot-dragging.

Various alternatives are proposed, including use of existing surface streets, a tunnel and a trench. A front-page headline in The Seattle Times condemns one proposal: " 'China Wall' is Branded Politician's Dream Road."

And officials toss the hot potato and tax bill to the voters.

Alaskan Way Viaduct? Highway 520 bridge? Interstate 90? Interstate 5? R.H. Thomson Expressway? Bay Freeway? West Seattle Bridge?

All good guesses, but, sorry, it's none of the above. Try the section of today's Highway 99 that slices through Woodland Park, built nearly 75 years ago.

Although it cost only $2 million at the time (inflate that tenfold for today's price, and throw in a few more millions), the debate over the half-mile Aurora Avenue "speedway" generated much the same fervor and friction as the current head-knocker between Alaskan Way's mini-dig and mega-duct advocates.

The Woodland Park bisection was not Seattle's first big public transportation fight — although it was one of the first to focus on a highway versus a street railway — and it was definitely not the last. Although barely remembered today, the great Woodland Park Speedway war of 1930 offers many parallels for today's urban design and mobility issues, and a caveat perhaps for those who think that in transportation politics the shortest route between two points is a straight line.

The city of Seattle purchased Guy Phinney's private Woodland Park in 1899 for $100,000, over protests that it lay "too far out" from the urban center (then-Mayor Thomas Humes vetoed the purchase but was overruled by the City Council). As the city grew northward, Woodland Park was soon recognized for the jewel it is, and John Olmsted planned its original zoo, Green Lake shore drive and sylvan trails and groves.

Unfortunately, the park sat athwart natural north-south routes to support the city's accelerating development between Fremont and Greenwood. Fremont's new bascule bridge, soon after opening in 1917, became a major bottleneck clogged by automobiles, trucks, streetcars, interurban trains and frequent openings for maritime traffic, and pressure grew for a new high-level bridge to span the Ship Canal. In 1929, the state committed $1 million to the project — to be matched by the city of Seattle and King County — as part of the Pacific Highway, later U.S. 99, between Baja California and British Columbia.

By then, Roland Hartley, a cantankerous and conservative Republican, lumberman and former Everett mayor, occupied the governor's mansion. Upon taking office in 1925, he clashed almost immediately with fellow members of the state's Highway Committee, which included him, the state auditor and the state treasurer, and ran the state road program. The Legislature intervened to eliminate the Highway Committee and gave the governor direct authority over a new Highway Department in the hope that it would take politics out of transportation policy.

Which returns us to the issue of Woodland Park. After much debate, state, county and city officials decided to build the new George Washington Memorial Bridge above Fremont's Aurora Avenue and over the Ship Canal to Queen Anne Hill. For obvious reasons, engineers favored extending Aurora through Woodland Park to serve bridge traffic.

This horrified parks advocates and businesses along the established north-south arterials, and they won the support of The Times. It condemned the Aurora speedway as a fiscal "superfluity" and warned, "Everybody understands if Woodland Park can be violated, Seward Park and all the rest of the city's playgrounds will be at the mercy of promoters."

The brunt of this populist agitation fell on Mayor Frank Edwards, who had defeated the city's one and only female mayor, Bertha K. Landes, in 1928, and on the City Council, whose president, Oliver Erickson, opposed the speedway. Gov. Hartley and the state Highway Department supported the speedway, but wisely kept their heads low. Pushed by the mayor and city engineer, the majority of the council approved the park route on June 30, 1930.

Denouncing the "sacrifice" of Woodland Park and comparing Edwards with Nero, The Times spearheaded a drive to put the speedway and its North End tax assessment district to a popular vote on Nov. 6, 1930. Gas overran grass as city voters approved the project and $1 million in King County bonds.

Work had just begun on the speedway when, on Feb. 22, 1932 — the bicentennial of George Washington's birthday — the first president's namesake Memorial Bridge (now Aurora Bridge to most) officially opened. Hartley joined Edwards and other officials in cutting the ribbon, and President Herbert Hoover tapped a telegraph key in Washington, D.C., to unfurl flags along the elegant cantilever span.

The party did not last long. Voters recalled Edwards the following July after he fired popular City Light Superintendent J.D. Ross at the behest of private utility interests, and Hoover and Hartley were swept out of office that November by Democrats amid the deepening Depression. The Woodland Park Speedway opened soon after and memory of the controversy quickly faded, eclipsed by more urgent questions of economic survival and impending world war.

Today, most people take Aurora Avenue and the park speedway for granted. I use it personally nearly every day, and I can't imagine getting between my downtown office and Phinney Ridge home without it. In 1970, a city plan to lid the highway for an expanded Woodland Park Zoo triggered another citizen referendum — to preserve the highway trench and, ironically, to protect the "lower" Woodland Park it had created.

As noted at the outset, the trench warfare over the speedway was the first of many "road wars" to come. Battles around the state led the Legislature in 1951 to create an appointed state Highway Commission, later renamed the state Transportation Commission, to "professionalize" highway planning and turn down the political heat. By then, plans were well advanced for the construction of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which stirred barely a ripple along the Elliott Bay shore.

Flash forward half a century. Much has changed and the community is littered with the wreckage of, or monuments to, various road wars: Interstate 5's half-healed gash through the heart of downtown Seattle, an anorexic 520 floating bridge, the forlorn Arboretum ramps of the abortedR. H. Thomson Expressway, the lingering Mercer Mess, a shrunken I-90's Mount Baker lid, and tardy construction of a rail transit system nearly 40 years after it was first proposed — and needed.

In recent years, frustration with highway construction delays and budget overruns fueled taxpayer revolts and demands for greater accountability. This gave the state Legislature a new "old" idea in April 2005: It returned direct authority for state transportation programs to the governor's office, which had recently been occupied by Christine Gregoire. State voters indirectly blessed the new arrangement later that year by soundly rejecting an attempt to repeal the largest transportation budget and related tax increase in history.

Which brings us almost to the present. I will leave it to others to debate the relative merits of tunnels and viaducts. In transportation policy, there is rarely an obvious "right answer" because issues like the viaduct replacement involve foremost competing visions and priorities for urban design, economic development and regional cohesion, and least of all the best way to get from point A to point B.

The viaduct is the first major road war to be fought since the 2005 state highway reforms. The governor and the Legislature are now responsible for transportation investments in a way they have not enjoyed, if that's the right word, since 1951. Not surprisingly, they find themselves not automatically agreeing with Mayor Greg Nickels and other local officials, who must report to their own constituents.

The people wanted accountability, and now they have it, but accountability is a euphemism for politics, and the current battle over the viaduct is politics at its most basic, for better or worse. It also reminds us of another caveat for would-be reformers in transportation and most other fields: Be careful what you wish for.

Walt Crowley is director of HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history, and was recently named historian of the year by the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild. Among his many books, he co-authored "Moving Washington Timeline," the centennial history of the Washington State Department of Transportation, with Kit Oldham, who contributed research to this essay. It also incorporates research by HistoryLink associates and staff members David Wilma, Priscilla Long and Margaret Riddle, but the opinions expressed are solely Crowley's.