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Pacific Northwest Magazine Paul Dorpat

Roots In The Water

Historian Paul Dorpat takes us back

Today, Paul Dorpat begins his second quarter-century writing the weekly "Now and Then" feature for Pacific Northwest magazine. His first contribution was on Jan. 17, 1982.

Fifteen years later, the venerable Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society awarded him its honorary life membership. The award may have had something to do with the 99 articles he had by then devoted to waterfront subjects, not counting the lakes. However, it may have had as much to do with the way the honor was given. Upon receiving the membership at the society's annual Christmas banquet, Dorpat was made to don a dunce cap and sit in the corner while listening to a list of his mistakes recited by the society's canny members.

In his quarter century with The Seattle Times, the historian has managed to win a few more honors and write a dozen books, including an illustrated history of the waterfront for the Seattle City Council. Look for his next book, "Washington Then and Now," with co-author Jean Sherrard, later this year.

MY FIRST STEP on Seattle's central waterfront had a kind of historic timing. It was the late spring of 1952 — 100 years and just a few days after the eastern shore of Elliott Bay was first settled by the Borens and Bells, and Doc Maynard and the Dennys soon after. I was 13 and visiting Seattle with my parents for my brother Ted's graduation from the University of Washington Medical School. Afterward, we got a table at Ivar's Acres of Clams, and Ivar was near the front door that night, as he often was during the first years of the Acres, seasoning his reputation among many as the greatest self-promoter in the history of the city.

Unlike the pioneers and early immigrants who almost always stepped ashore from the bay, the Dorpats from Spokane by way of North Dakota approached the waterfront by land, passing through the concrete clutter of the Alaskan Way Viaduct that was then being built to seismic standards unsuited for our soft, unstable waterfront. Built over many years about 200 yards out from the original shoreline, it is made principally of local rubbish — including waste from construction sites. There have been distinguished contributions, too, like the schooner Winward, which is buried beneath Western Avenue near Columbia Street. The most exotic contributions were, no doubt, from all the ships that carried ballast here from distant ports and dumped it near the foot of Washington Street in the early 1880s before taking on coal at what was then the longest and tallest structure on the waterfront, the King Street coal wharf and bunkers.

If I seem to imply that my 1952 entree gives me personal memory of fully one-third of Seattle's entire waterfront history, I don't mean to. Like the Dennys and Borens and Bells, I, too, am a European who came here from somewhere else. When the first settlers landed on Alki Point in 1851 they were not alone. Beside their company of 24 they were surrounded by hundreds of natives whose forebears had hunted, fished and farmed here for many hundreds of years. Consequently, they knew about clam nectar and where to find the berries. It was a charmed land, and they were generous with it.

When most of the Alki party moved in 1852 from that exposed point to the protected east shore of Elliott Bay, there was much more native land to soon divide among themselves with the blessings of the U.S. Congress.

What they saw when first approaching this waterfront is now radically altered with regrades, reclamations, constructions and reconstructions. Gone, for instance, is a bluff at King Street and the tidelands to the south of it. Gone, too, is the knoll at the foot of Cherry Street where Arthur Denny helped build the blockhouse in which he and everyone in town huddled during the one-day Jan. 26, 1856, "Battle of Seattle" while Indians fired at them from the forest. The ravine at Seneca Street where the Indians once buried their dead is now the off-ramp from the viaduct to the central business district. Also lost is the larger "Belltown Ravine" that reached from the waterfront east as far as First Avenue and Bell Street. But the most startling subtraction is Arthur's namesake Denny Hill, erased in a string of regrades that began in the mid-1880s and continued with pauses until 1930.

The earliest photograph of the Seattle waterfront is a splendid one. It was taken in 1869 by George Robinson, a visitor from Victoria, through an open window on the second floor of Plummer Hall at the southwest corner of what is now First Avenue South and Main Street. The left half of Robinson's pan shows Denny Hill with uncanny detail. The bluff and beach below the hill — roughly between Union and Broad streets — is very much as it appeared to Denny and the others. The Robinson pan also includes the Denny home at Union Street (just this side of the hill) and the Magnolia peninsula, upper left. The then-7-year-old territorial university at Fourth Avenue and Seneca is on the far right horizon. A line of native dugouts at the foot of Washington Street appears bottom-left; at center-left is the earliest photographic view of Yesler's Wharf.

Henry Yesler began building his dock in 1853 and started milling lumber that year, too. His was the first steam-powered mill on Puget Sound. However, neither Yesler's industry nor the first settlers' intentions to build a city could make one. The Indian war of the mid-1850s followed by the Civil War of the 1860s encouraged neither growth nor hope anywhere on Puget Sound. It was not until the year of Robinson's visit, 1869, that Seattle experienced the exhilaration of its first boom. The arrival in California that year of the first transcontinental railroad stirred the entire West Coast. The presence of Northern Pacific Railroad surveyors in Snoqualmie Pass, the pass that Seattle considered its own, spiked property prices and kept Yesler's mill busy supplying the local boom in building. That year Yesler also built a bigger sawmill on his ever-growing pier. By then, however, there were greater mills than Yesler's on Puget Sound operating in company towns like Port Blakely and Port Gamble.

Seattle's real "cash crop" was not lumber but coal. The Central Pacific Railroad's appetite for coal quickened the exploitation of the rich reserves on the east shore of Lake Washington and so also the construction of first the 70-foot-high Pike Street Coal Wharf and bunkers in 1871 and seven years later the coal wharf and bunkers at King Street. By then Seattle's waterfront was already the shipping and transportation center for the independently owned steamers on Puget Sound. Their generally small size and sustained whir earned for them collectively the informal name "Mosquito Fleet."

When in 1873 the Northern Pacific Railroad announced — via telegram to Arthur Denny — that the first transcontinental to reach the Northwest would land in tiny Tacoma (or rather near it in New Tacoma), not in Seattle, a 20-year struggle with the company town on Commencement Bay began. Above the tides, Seattle put up a grand wooden avenue for railroads — Railroad Avenue — ultimately nine tracks wide at Columbia Street, and reaching as far from the old shoreline as the secured seawall that first shut out tides south of Madison Street in the early teens. During this railroad rivalry, Seattle citizens built two railroads of their own — accepting the help of absentee capitalists only if they had no home address in Tacoma. With their names, both the Seattle and Walla Walla (1877) and the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern (1887) promised to connect with Eastern Washington and thereby the world. Neither, however, ever made it over the Cascade Mountains. They did open up the hinterlands of King County and brought to the Seattle waterfront more coal and lumber, miners and lumberjacks. In 1881 Seattle became the largest town in Washington Territory, barely beating Walla Walla. And although the transcontinental Northern Pacific was completed to Tacoma two years later, Seattle held and increased its lead in the counting of both heads and coins.

The city's "Great Fire" of June 6, 1889, destroyed most of its business district and the entire waterfront south of University Street. Within half a year the waterfront was rebuilt to grander dimensions. The 1893 arrival of "Seattle's transcontinental," the Great Northern Railroad, was Seattle's penultimate trump on Tacoma. The ultimate card showed an ironic face: the nationwide economic panic — also of 1893 — bankrupt the Northern Pacific but not the Great Northern. Better than the narrow economics of the company town on Commencement Bay the diverse wealth of Seattle was able to withstand the suffering of the long depression that ensued.

Still famously celebrated, it was the Gold Rush of 1897 and several years following that revived the city. The wealth of that "excitement" rebuilt the waterfront with uniformly aligned piers and their broad-shouldered warehouses some of which — such as piers 54 through 57 — survive.

The 1905 opening of the railroad tunnel beneath the city to new and grand depots and railroad yards south of Jackson Street was prelude to the motorcar's long annexation of Railroad Avenue. In this protracted conversion from rails to rubber, the sleek steamers of the Mosquito Fleet were also replaced by or widened into snub-nosed ferries for the Black Ball Line. About 16,000 cars were licensed in Seattle by 1916. A dozen years more and the number had piled up, so to speak, to 129,000 cars operating on Seattle streets. Consequently, by the late 1920s Railroad Avenue was regularly used as a detour around the business district, but without either a viaduct or a tunnel.

Seattle was rated the 22nd-busiest port in the country in 1908. Ten years later it was No. 2, trailing only New York. Most of this bounty was handled not on the central waterfront but at Smith Cove and in the waterways on either side of Harbor Island. The island was man-made, mostly of black mud dredged from the Duwamish River to make way for ships. The 1911 creation of the Port of Seattle played an activist's part in this expansion, as the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal made shipping to the other coast an often economic alternative to the railroads. Twenty percent of all the ship tonnage built in the U.S. during World War I was built in Seattle. The pay was so good that many professionals dropped their white collars for blue and lawyers left the docket for the dock.

The successes of Seattle during the war inspired a chamber-of-commerce public-relations campaign titled "Seaport of Success." For labor, however, peace was not so buoyant, especially on the waterfront. Seattle's General Strike of 1919 got its spirited start in the shipyards, but that "little revolution" ended miserably and with considerable loss to labor's clout. It would not get some of it back until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when there was relatively little to gain. And, by then, the waterfront was literally rotting. Mayor John Dore closed parts of the dilapidated Railroad Avenue in 1933 to "nuisance traffic" — the type that used the waterfront to go around the Central Business District. The both brilliant and canny Dore thereby got what he wanted: completion of the central waterfront seawall in 1936. The extension continued the wall north of Madison as far as Bay Street. Meanwhile, while the wall was under construction in 1935, the street name was changed. After the early favorites Cosmos Quay and Seatlaska Way were eliminated, Railroad Avenue was dropped for Alaskan Way.

Although 29 shipyards operated in or near Seattle during World War II, none of them was on the central waterfront, where the shipping was also practically all war-related. When the war was over, the Port of Seattle tried to pull the waterfront out of the doldrums by proposing more than one grand plan for replacing the still-not-so-old waterfront of Gold Rush-era finger piers with a belt of long piers paralleling the waterfront in order to service the behemoth ships that were expected to soon revolutionize shipping. The Port was half right. The ships would get bigger — much bigger — but they would carry containers and park south of the central waterfront beneath gantry cranes that moved like calypso dancers in tight yellow pants through sprawling fields of uniform boxes.

Especially since 1960, when a successful $10 million bond issue was timed perfectly for the Port of Seattle to develop container fields south of King Street, the central waterfront has turned increasingly to play. Such a great array of waterside attractions followed that Ivar, in one of his many full-page ads, referred to the waterfront as "a many-splendored thing."

Besides Ivar and his venerable neighbor Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, the central waterfront's "play list" has featured several aquariums, a hotel — the Edgewater — that encouraged fishing from its windows, and a revived "mosquito fleet" for sightseeing on Elliott Bay. A few of the waterfront's Century-21 inspirations such as the 1961 Polynesian Restaurant have succumbed, and some with corny names, like Pirates Plunder, have endured. The waterfront's playful revolution has also created a nostalgic trolley (temporarily derailed), a maritime museum, a small boat harbor, a park, the Seattle Art Museum's expansive new Olympic Sculpture Park and many other "splendors." Cruise ships now berth at the Bell Street Pier 66 Terminal, inviting all to come aboard and carry the party north to Alaska. Of course, all these merry players still share much of the waterfront with one very big and earnest neighbor, that double-decker speedway, which Ivar first described happily as "acres of covered parking."

Later he had a change of heart. Not long before his death in 1985, the "King of the Waterfront" confided, "When you spend a lot of time below — on the sidewalk — you learn what this thing is: a kind of factory of noise and odors and also an exceedingly ugly fence. It's funny what boosters we were for the viaduct when it was built. Someday it will come down, but I hope not on its own. When it does, the waterfront will awaken like Sleeping Beauty to the kiss of its prince, the city. But I doubt that I'll ever see it."

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