Rising On A Razed Hill
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 COURTESY OF LAWTON GOWEY THEN: With a little perseverance, both the New Washington Hotel, on the right, at Second Avenue and Stewart Street, and the Volunteer standpipe, in silhouette on the horizon top left, can be found in Jean Sherrard's repeat from late October of this year.
JEAN SHERRARD NOW: Increasingly stocked with high-rises, the Denny Regrade has become the neighborhood its planners foresaw for it more than a century ago. |
Although completed long ago, only recently may the great public work of razing Denny Hill for a Denny Regrade be considered fulfilled. The little hill has been replaced with a high-rise skyline, just the sort of thing regrade visionaries expected in 1907 when this "then" was photographed.
Both views concentrate on four regrade blocks between Stewart Street, far right, and Bell Street, far left. Denny Hill appears between a distant backdrop of the much higher Capitol Hill and the line of wharves and warehouses attached to Railroad Avenue (Alaskan Way). The scar that extends left from the center of the photograph is a temporary cross section of Denny Hill — a bluff left along the east side of Second Avenue during that street's 1903-'06 regrade.
The residences and boarding houses on top of that exposed bluff were all either destroyed or moved by 1910 as Denny Hill as far east as Fifth Avenue was mostly washed into the bay with the blasts of water canons. The regrading then stopped at Fifth Avenue with another cliff, which was left to loom above the regrade for nearly 20 years before the work was resumed and the flattening completed.
Both the 1907 view by an unnamed photographer and the contemporary repeat by Jean Sherrard were cropped from citywide panoramas photographed from West Seattle's Duwamish Head. A wider treatment of this '07 pan and its contemporary repeat extending from the Space Needle to Qwest Field are found in our new book, "Washington Then and Now." The full panorama — from Smith Cove to Safeco Field — and comparisons with two similar pans from 1906 and 1910 can be found at www.washingtonthenandnow.com.
"Washington Then and Now" ($45) can be purchased through the Web site or Tartu Publications at P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.
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