Regrade reborn

Washington Hotel atop Denny Hill

Seattle, like Rome and San Francisco, is a city of hills.  One of those hills -- the one most closely associated with downtown -- was Denny Hill. Note that I say "was." The hill stretched out over a fairly large area, roughly a hundred feet in height, with a summit at about Third Avenue, between Stewart and Virginia.  Atop Denny Hill was the magnificently Victorian "Washington Hotel."

The Washington Hotel no longer exists.  Nor does Denny Hill.  The city, fearing that a hill would impede the rapid development of downtown northwards, washed the hill into Elliott Bay in a series of "regrades" between 1900 and 1930.  The hotel was demolished in 1906.  To the northeast, the Denny School, described as "an architectural jewel... the finest schoolhouse on the West Coast," succumbed during the final stage of the regrade in 1928.

Ironically, although the regrade was undertaken to open up flat land for future development, the Great Depression removed all demand for buildable real estate.  The vast area, known as "the Denny Regrade," remained until recently a bleak, boring expanse of single story buildings surrounded by acres of parking lots and used car lots.  Although I do a lot of walking, I rarely walked through the regrade. Like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, there was no "there" there. So boring and so unattractive was the area that every so often some one would humorously suggest, as a major public works project, "the reconstruction of Denny Hill."

The term "Denny Regrade" has been heard less in the past twenty years or so, probably because developers disliked the unfortunate image of undeveloped desolation it brought to mind.  The Regrade has been carved up linguistically into two new neighborhoods -- "Belltown," closer to the Sound to the west, which for some time now has been a trendy place to live, eat, drink and socialize; and the "Denny Triangle," east of the Fifth Avenue monorail, which merges, once past Denny Way, into South Lake Union proper.  Increasingly, however, in the public mind, South Lake Union proper is increasingly joined with the Denny Triangle as "South Lake Union," a single neighborhood built around Westlake Boulevard, the central corridor connecting the traditional downtown with Lake Union.

This lengthy backstory leads to the point of this essay.  Which is -- Regrade-wise, things are looking up!  In December 2008, I wrote a gloomy post about the state of the economy, noting that I could see no new construction starts under way in Seattle.  Since then, happily, I've observed an explosion of new commercial construction.  Much of it is in the old Regrade, or its South Lake Union extension, and much of it is being built by or for Amazon, the Seattle on-line retailer. Amazon has been constructing one building after another throughout South Lake Union.

During the past few years, while construction in general has been at a standstill, Amazon has been filling in the blocks along Westlake, near Lake Union. At the same time, partially in response to Amazon's expansion, new housing and retail has been constructed in the area, especially in the area where Westlake crosses Denny. The city has helped development of this neighborhood by laying track for the South Lake Union streetcar, and developing South Lake Union Park where Westlake meets the lake. The endless blocks I at one time avoided walking have suddenly become a vibrant and fascinating destination. Auto mechanic garages have been replaced by outdoor cafés, warehouses by shops; on-going construction projects guarantee that every visit rewards me with something new to applaud (or abhor).

But the most obvious new construction at present is at the downtown end of Westlake, where Amazon is well into excavation of the first of three large adjacent blocks on which it's constructing its world headquarters. The second block has already been razed to the ground, and now also awaits excavation.

Most of this development actually lies slightly to the north and east of the actual physical footprint of the regraded Denny Hill, but -- because sharing the same image of flatness and bleakness with the actual regrade itself -- has long been tarred with the same gray, gloomy epithet -- "the Regrade."

Now, I suppose, we should call its sparkling reincarnation "Amazonia." A resident of the old Washington Hotel, looking out his window at the city below him, would have found it difficult to imagine the changes that were to take place a century later.