The "Seattle Squeeze"

Demolition begins
(Seattle Times photo)

In 1963, when I  drove north to the University of Washington to register for post-graduate classes, there was no I-5, at least in the Seattle area. (The I-5 freeway through downtown opened the following year.)   Instead, I drove up US 99, which ran along the waterfront on an elevated double deck structure, the Alaska Way Viaduct. 

After leaving the Viaduct, US 99 dove into the Battery Street tunnel, joined Aurora Avenue upon emerging from the tunnel, and eventually crossed the ship canal over the Aurora Avenue bridge, after which I drove east on city streets to reach the university.

The Viaduct at that time was ten years old.  Saturday, construction equipment began the lengthy process of tearing it down.  Seattle has mixed feelings about its demise.  Motorists loved the views of the Sound and the Olympic mountains from the top deck.  Users of the waterfront lamented the noise, and shadows, and … and the looming bulk of the Viaduct.

San Franciscans who recall the Embarcadero freeway will understand.

The opening of the Viaduct in 1953 was a critical step in Seattle's development as a city.  Until that year, US 99 traffic passed on city streets through the heart of the city -- up Fourth Avenue to Pike Street, where it angled down Westlake, passing through what is now the heart of South Lake Union, Amazon territory.  It took a couple more turns before following Aurora north.  Until 1932, when the high-level Aurora Avenue Bridge was constructed, US 99 had followed Dexter Avenue rather than Aurora, and crossed the ship canal over the Fremont Bridge.

The Fremont Bridge is still in use.  It is a small, low level drawbridge, on which traffic backs up at rush hour.  It is hard to imagine the bridge's having once served as a critical link in US 99 as it carried traffic from Mexico to Canada.

Before creation of the national highway numbering system in 1926, US 99 had been known as the Pacific Highway -- a label cooked up by auto enthusiasts in 1913 -- and in Washington had been labeled as State Road 1.  Our "state road" was essentially a route for cars to follow along already-existing streets and roads.

For the past few years, a new highway tunnel has been laboriously bored under First Avenue, from the area of the football and baseball stadiums, extending nearly two miles north to Aurora Avenue.  The old Viaduct will be reduced to rubble, and the rubble used to fill and close off the Battery Street tunnel.

The Seattle Squeeze.  We have now begun a three-week period of traffic horror, during which neither the old Viaduct nor the new tunnel will be available for use.  Contractors need that length of time to remove the old on-ramps to the Viaduct, and to pave new access ramps that will reroute US 99 (now SR 99) into the new tunnel.  Luckily, if I need to go downtown I have easy access to light rail (which will be strained beyond capacity during this transition period).  (The Seattle Times reports that traffic on this  first business day since closing of the Viaduct went much more smoothly than anticipated.)

But in three weeks, we'll have a brand new system for driving from the south end of downtown to the north end of downtown.  But it will have no exits into the downtown itself.  And it will have no views of the Sound or of the Olympics.

And if you use it, you'll help pay for it by paying a toll.  Progress comes to the Northwest Corner.