history paper

CHAPTER 3

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

Harnessing Nature's Forces to Urban Progress

E ngineers, along with city planners and landscape architects, emerged as

the nation's new builders and system makers at the end of the nineteenth

century. Engineering was as much about improving upon human nature

as it was about improving upon physical nature. Reforming one was tied to re­

forming the other. Just as engineers ordered the natural world, they sought to

reorder society and put people and their activities in their proper place as well.

Their philosophy of place, then, did not consider particular locales as anything

more than parts in larger abstract systems. In Seattle, this concept of engineer­

ing took two forms-reshaping the city's topography and claiming an abun­

dant, free source of clean water-and its leading practitioner was Reginald

Heber Thomson, Seattle's most famous municipal engineer.

A newly powerful class of white-collar professionals, engineers remade

the city in North America and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century

into a metropolis. They threw steel across open chasms or straight up into the

sky; they held back rivers and made them do their bidding; they vanquished disease and made the seasons irrelevant to commerce and construction. Mu­

nicipal leaders, they built not only new things like bridges but new societies

as well. Engineers came from an American romantic tradition that venerated

nature as the font of national identity but added to it a more austere tradition of efficiency and mechanization.

Historians have paid considerable attention to how landscape architects and city planners reshaped urban form in turn-of-the-century America, but comparatively little to municipal engineers beyond their building of infrastruc-

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 87

ture and utilities. Architects and planners are portrayed as the designers of the

American metropolis, engineers as the mechanics tinkering with a city's ma­

chinery. Yet these roles were often reversed, especially in the fast growing cities of the West, with engineers addressing the most basic of needs, from sanitation

to utilities but also employing the latent power of the physical environment

to drive civic advancement. Historians who have taken municipal engineers

seriously have nonetheless tended to identify too strongly with them, lauding

them for solving environmental problems but failing to account for the ways in

which their uses of power and politics were sometimes counterproductive.l

During the Progressive Era, city builders and city leaders wrestled with

the moral engagement of their work, especially the municipal engineer, who,

in thought and practice, fused manipulation of the physical environment with

socially responsible action. Engineering was always about turning the city into

an engine for progress by harnessing the physical energy of nature to urban

design. Their vision was one of effiCiency and precision. But benefits of the

engineers' ethic, in practice, were not evenly distributed across the cities they

transformed or among their diverse, and often antagonistic, inhabitants.

For the Relief of the Common People

Seattle came of age in the era of big plans and big engineering, and Thomson

became its master builder. He embodied the stereotypes of American engi­

neering in appearance and in behavior. From the neatly trimmed beard that

framed his gaunt face to the small wire-rimmed glasses suspended on a sharp

nose, he was all right angles and straight lines. Even his name conveyed econ­

omy; he used only his two first initials, R. H. An ar ticle in the Seattle Post­

Intelligencer of January 16, 1916, recalling his years of achievements, said that

Thomson was more than "a skilled technician" because engineering suffused

his "whole personality:' He could "win equally well in a tussle with earth or

with man:' He usually fought both because, as the newspaper reporter inti­

mated, he never separated the two.2

Like many white Seattleites, R. H. Thomson was from someplace else. An

emigrant from an earlier frontier, southeastern Indiana in the Ohio River val­ ley, he was born to a Scots Presbyterian colony there in 1856, then moved to California to work as a surveyor after training at Hanover College. He found a place in ruin. Decades of hydraulic mining had choked rivers with debris and destroyed farmland, throwing thousands out of work and into the arms of

88 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

the demagogues who blamed the railroads, mining conglomerates, and alien

Chinese laborers for their troubles. Unable to find work as a surveyor, he took

a job for three years teaching science at Healdsburg Academy, north of San

Francisco, and then moved to Puget Sound, lured by reports of its rich coal

mines. In 1882, at twenty-six, Thomson was hired as Seattle's city surveyor,

the equivalent of city engineer, for the next decade. After ingratiating himself

with the local mining and railroad magnates, Thomson worked throughout

the Pacific Northwest, learning the craft of engineering just as it was about to

become an established profession. He built Seattle's first sewers and plotted a

canal between Lake Washington and Lake Union. He moonlighted as a mining

assayer, designed railway bridges, and surveyed a railway route around Lake

Washington and over Snoqualmie Pass so the Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern

Railroad could haul coal and timber from the Cascade Mountains. He learned

on the job to plan, to build in future tense, and repeatedly asked employers and

associates what would make Seattle prosper. "I generally received this answer,

'Don't worry your head about that. Some railroad will come here sometime

and that will make it grow: " Thomson knew from his early years in Ohio and

his several years in California that railroads were no guarantee of progress and

that markets were fickle. "Looking at local surroundings;' he said later, "1 felt that Seattle was in a pit, that to get anywhere we would be compelled to climb

out if we could:'3

In the 1880s, Seattle was a wide-open town hacked out of dense forests and

steep brooding hills ruled by speculators and lumbermen who wanted a city

that catered to the quick dollar or a good time. For a new arrival, coming by

sea, the smoking hills of cutover forest and muddy tide flats must have been a

depressing sight, but the built landscape was even more miserable. More than

Seattle's topographical and economic shortcomings repelled Thomson. The

town's open licentiousness offended his midwestern moral rectitude, and the

rapid growth of Skid Row during the 1880s troubled him all the more. The fire

fed by the spilled pot of glue that consumed Skid Row and leveled the down­

town business district on June 6, 1889, must have seemed like a providential

cleansing. Thomson, who was working as a private engineer, had lost nearly all of his maps to the fire, but he soon found work surveying for new buildings and new streets, a financial windfall for the young and ambitious engineer.

Like his fellow citizens, Thomson was eager to rebuild and paid scant atten­ tion at first to the consequences of unplanned growth. As in Boston and Chi-

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 89

cago, the environmental problems that had sparked devastating fires thwarted

attempts to reorganize and rearrange city services, and as the destructive 1889

fire cooled, typhoid struck, killing 166 in that one year alone. The origins of

the disease were in the changed landscape of the city. Roads carved out of the

rocky, clayey soil, strewn with stumps and exposed rock, with grades on many

streets exceeding 10 percent, turned into muddy streams that flowed through

outhouses and garbage sumps on their way down the barren hills into Lake

Union and Lake Washington. Health officials pumped more water from Lake

Washington into water mains, hoping to expel the fever, but this strategy only

worsened the epidemic. Fatalities from typhoid declined from 90 in 1890 to 66

in 1891, but even as new water sources and better sewers abated disease, vice

never disappeared. Brothels and bars, box-houses (vaudeville theaters attached

to the back of saloons) , faro joints, and piano halls that were burned out by the

fire returned before the rebuilding was complete. Soon the wooden-planked

streets of Skid Road were busy once again with the sounds of player pianos,

clanking glasses, and an occasional pistol shot.4

Seattle remained the destination of choice for the single working men

endemic to the industrial Northwest. Rose Simmons, writing for the Over­

land Monthly in 1892, lamented a scene of horrific proportions, the "scores

of shanties, lean-tos, and sheds, holding a heterogeneous mass of humanity"

huddled amid "sewers pouring down contagion and filth, moral and physical

ill-being:' Native-born white workers, Indian hops and fruit pickers, Japanese

and Filipino loggers, Chinese railroad laborers, and southern European and

Scandinavian fishermen caroused in Skid Road's saloons and slept off their

revels in residential hotels or lodging houses. City health inspectors railed

against these poorly ventilated "death traps;' built without plumbing or sewer­

age, and called upon city officials to offer "the poor and ignorant" the same protections enjoyed by "the more intelligent and wealthy class of our people:'s

Seattle leaders had relied on a succession of short-term solutions to solve

the city's environmental ills, though some had tried to get the city to plan.

In 1889, Mayor Robert Moran hired Colonel George E. Waring, a nationally

famous sanitary engineer, who later developed modern sewer techniques for

New York and other cities, to devise a plan for Seattle. Waring's comprehen­

sive report advocated a separate system of underground tunnels emptying into

Elliott Bay to keep sewage and storm or surface water apart. Moran and the

City council had balked at the cost, but after the 1889 fire, they turned to B ene-

90 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

zette Williams, a sanitary engineer from Chicago, for a less costly solution. Wil­

liams's 1891 report rej ected Waring's separated system for a combined system

that carried both sewage and storm runoff. The city's surrounding waters, he

concluded, provided ample room to dilute waste. Although Thomson, who had

reSigned as city surveyor five years earlier to work in private practice, predicted

the Williams plan would turn Elliott Bay and Lake Washington into cesspools,

the city council accepted Williams's findings and commissioned the first trunk

sewer, the North Tunnel, to run from Lake Union to Elliott Bay. 6

Williams had no understanding of the region's geological properties, and

as a result, the North Tunnel workers hit a small underground lake, flood­

ing the tunnel and driving the proj ect over budget. This unseen subterranean

landscape, the legacy of the massive glaciers that had scoured the region re­

peatedly during the Ice Ages, would frustrate city utilities workers in the de­

cades to come. Thomson, however, was not intimidated. After Albro Gard­

ner, Seattle's city engineer at the time, resigned in frustration, Mayor James T.

Ronald, elected as Robert Moran's successor in 1892, remembered Thomson's

warnings about the Williams plan and summoned Thomson from his mining

work in the Cascades to give evidence at public hearings. Thomson testified

that the tunnel had pierced a lens, a glacial deposit of clay and gravel muddied

by groundwater. Solutions, he said, were clear-use pumps and breast boards

to hold back the waters while lining the bore with vitrified brick-but, he said,

only an expert in mining could handle the work. An engineer recommended

by a patron on the Board of Public Works turned down an offer of the job,

whereupon Ronald appointed Thomson city engineer. He would serve in this

position for almost twenty years. 7

R. H. Thomson was a proselytizer as much as a public servant; he believed

in the sanctifying power of reason and technology to redeem society. A devout

Presbyterian, he confided to a friend that engineering resembled missionary

work: "Having put my hand to the plow, I can't look back. There is so much

crying to be done for the relief of the common people, and they are so blind

themselves, and there are so few who care, that it seems impossible for me to

quit:' Thomson's almost Puritanical zeal was consistent with the profession's

definition of itself. Engineers, especially those who worked for government, were cultivating their new power as elites who wielded technology and science. The engineers, who declaimed their good works on behalf of society, turned

out often to be profoundly anti-democratic moralists, distrustful of an unedu­

cated public.8

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 91

The engineer was a symbol of America's quest for reform in the Progressive

Era, between the Gilded Age and the First World War, when new professions

and new bureaucracies promised to tame the excesses of political sleaze and

the consequences of unbridled capitalism. Americans, earlier suspicious of

their cities, by century's end in increasing numbers regarded cities as unavoid­

able, even necessary. In this new climate, engineers held themselves above sor­

did politics and graft. Their office became as indispensable to the workings of

the city as that of the police commissioner or the tax assessor. They were the

vanguard of an urban political revolution that saw power devolve from the

political boss who relied on face-to-face contacts with kith and kin to the dis­

passionate expert who could tap into a transatlantic, even international, com­

munity of professionals all working in the universal language of engineering.9

Thomson was a parent and an offspring of this new order. A cosmopoli­

tan, he had traveled to Glasgow, Antwerp, and cities around North America to

learn the latest planning ideas and techniques. He read voraciously, keeping

abreast of trends in engineering and urban design. He became an able politi­

cal strategist as well, while cultivating a reputation for being above political

schemes. A reporter for the Seattle Times wrote on May 12, 1907, in a review of

Thomson's career, that the engineer's power was "well nigh unlimited:' Thom­

son could "make or unmake councilmen to influence public committees, and

even bring the mayor of the city on his knees, begging favors:'10

Thomson had acquired this power slowly, learning as he went, but, even so,

Seattle had grown so quickly and so heedlessly that he was unprepared at first to

address the overwhelming challenges. Comprehensive city planning had only

come to maturity at the end of the century. The nation's largest cities-New

York, Chicago, and Boston-served as the models for cities like Seattle that

followed them. Commercial and retail activities were concentrated downtown.

Residences rimmed the margins, with industry interlaced through the urban

fabric, near the rail lines and waterways that held the metropolis together.

Municipal engineers, like Seattle's Thomson, as well as architects and land­

scape architects, like Chicago's Daniel Burnham and Boston's Frederick Law

Olmsted, Jr., learned to take in the whole urban landscape, imagining, then

bUilding, an entirely new city from the ground up while the city grew around

them. They were like composers and the cities they built were to be their sym­ phonic scores. Order was the rule of the day. But beyond order, they had an artistic and moral purpose, a so-called City Beautiful movement, which sought

to emulate and outdo the neoclassical splendor of Europe's great cities, an

l.

92 'The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

effort equivalent to the organic struggle for the City Efficient. Still, Thomson,

as an engineer, was concerned about utility first and beauty second. If he was a

composer, his scores were lean and muscular.

In Seattle, engineers, who staffed every major city agency, began to domi­

nate the city's government and the bureaucracies that made it run, from the

Department of Water, led by L. B. Youngs in its various incarnations over the

next two decades, to municipally owned City Light, which broke away from

the Water Department in 1910 to be run by a former Thomson assistant, James

Delmage 0. D.) Ross. Thomson stood at the center of this new political class as head of the Department of Engineering. His first big plans were two daring

projects to meet Seattle's most vexing needs as it grew from small town to large

metropolis: reliably clean water and level, solid land. To achieve these goals,

Thomson set out three immediate priorities: secure a clean and reliable source

of water in perpetuity, complete the sewer system, and decrease the grades

of the city's steep streets. He saw these all as interconnected and essential to

the physical and social well-being of the city. Steep grades had meant higher

costs for street building and hauling goods and had divided the city's neigh­

borhoods by class. Continuing to pump water uphill from nearby lakes was

expensive and risky. Eliminating the hills would reduce expenses, boost real

estate values, and promote social harmony. Level sewers and water lines built

on flattened streets would save money and provide better drainage. Thomson

would embark on lifting Seattle out of its "pit:'

Because territorial laws limiting municipal indebtedness (still in effect

after Washington became a state in 1889) prevented the city from assuming

bond liability, Thomson lobbied the state legislature in Olympia to raise the

debt ceiling. A home rule bill in 1893 gave S eattle the ability to exercise emi­

nent domain and issue bonds-provided it would pay just compensation for

property taken and put strict limitations on indebtedness. The home rule bill

applied to projects within the city limits, a frustration for Thomson's first pri­

ority of bringing a clean, endless supply of water (plus electricity) from the

Cedar River, one of the region's largest, some thirty miles distant in the Cas­

cade Mountains. 11

Unlike most western cities, damp Seattle abounded with springs and seeps.

Freshets gushed from rocks and the sides of hills after heavy rains, flowing

even in the driest of months, so there had been few incentives to build an ex­

pensive municipal water system. Water belonged to whoever could grab it first, pay to pump it up the city's steep hills, and sell it at the best price. The largest

'The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 93

and most aggressive of these suppliers, the Spring Hill Water Corporation,

formed in 1881, controlled the entire supply for the southern end of the city

by 1886. Mayor Moran, at the urging of Thomson and others, in 1888 proposed

building a gravity-driven pipeline from Rock Creek, a tributary of the Cedar

River, south around Lake Washington and into the city, but a clerical error

delayed the special election that September. Eleven months later, in July 1889,

an outraged populace, blaming the city's poor water system for the devastating

fire the month before, voted for the pipeline. The city council, which had no au­

thority to raise the requisite funds, instead had to buy out private competitors,

an expensive process. The aqueduct promised by Moran remained just that, a

promise. 12

While Thomson waited for the legislators in Olympia to define the powers

major cities of the state could exercise, he turned to his next task-the city's

sewers. He started construction on the two main sewer trunks-the North

Tunnel and the South Tunnel, running from Beacon Hill to Elliott Bay. To the

trunks he attached the branches-storm drains, houses, businesses. A neces­

sary bond measure had passed but the Board of Public Works pushed aside

Thomson's preferred contractor, opting to use the project as patronage for

constituents who had lost their jobs in the Panic of 1893. Disgusted, Thomson

resigned in early 1894, only to be reappointed a month later by a chastened

Mayor Ronald, who fired the offending board members and gave Thomson the

expanded powers he demanded in a revised city charter.

Armed with his new authority, Thomson now sought to redo Seattle

completely, beginning with its sewers. Before he could rebuild the sewers, he

needed to start with a new plan. Thomson rejected B enezette Williams's earlier

proposal for a combined sewage and storm runoff system emptying into Lake

Washington and Elliott Bay; dumping effluents so close to the city, he believed,

would create an unsafe nuisance. He looked instead to the deep mixing waters

of Puget Sound and decided to follow George E. Waring's previous recom­

mendation instead: to built sewer outfalls on the sound and on the D uwamish

River that emptied into it. Thomson was no purist in the end and combined

elements from both plans because he agreed with Williams on one key point­

that a combined system would better accommodate Seattle's seasonally heavy

rainfall and save a great deal of money over Waring's complicated but more

hygienic separation of sewage and storm overflow. Thomson's decision, at the

time, was an expedient remedy to the city's pressing problems, but it had far­ reaching consequences for Seattle over the next century. 13

94 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

1bomson's earlier lobbying efforts to acquire the Cedar River for Seattle's

water supply now paid off, thanks largely to legal providence. In 1895, the Wash­

ington Supreme Court affirmed the right of Spokane to build a water system

beyond city limits and issue bonds for its construction as long as the city re­

deemed the bonds through utilities' revenues to avoid the ceiling on municipal

indebtedness. The decision gave teeth to the 1893 state law, handing Thomson

the two instruments he needed to acquire the Cedar River : money and power.

His proponents quickly grasped the Significance, and a city council report in

October 1895 stated that "the time and opportunity has come when the City of

Seattle is in a position to say'Hands off-the inhabitants of Seattle, now and to

come, have a paramount claim upon the Cedar River water supply: "1 4

Winning the Cedar River for Seattle was about more than water alone.

Water catalyzed social reform and moral uplift, just as it had for earlier re­

formers in Boston, who employed the campaign for municipally owned water

as a crusade to transform city politics. Clean, abundant public water was, ac­

cording to Thomson, Seattle's lifeblood, but the Cedar River was also a device

to achieve his third goal-to lay low Seattle's hills. Thomson planned to use the

kinetic energy of the river, channeled through pipelines and nozzles, to reengi­

neer Seattle's topography and address two of its principal evils-its infamous

reputation as a den of iniquity and its persistent unmanaged development. As

he explained to a colleague, with a dose of hyperbole, there were "few cities in

the world more broken or irregular in their topography" than Seattle. Erasing

those hills and gullies would provide a "fair foundation for municipal soli­

darity" by uniting the city's divided neighborhoods. It was a bold proposal, but

it ran against the freewheeling spirit of Seattle's realtors and speculators, who,

in Thomson's opinion, had built with little regard for the "broken and inacces­

sible position in which nature had left" their property. Without regrading, he

said, most of Seattle's real estate would soon have "no commercial value what­

soever:' In a medical analogy, Thomson compared regrading to an operation

enlarging " insufficient arteries" (the city's streets) and removing the blockage

(its hills and ravines) that stopped traffic flow and endangered the city. The

engineers' near absolute power over city planning enabled them to make con­

nections between more than environmental conditions and urban develop­

ment; they proposed to save the patient, body and soul. Nowhere was this more

apparent than in the justifications offered for Seattle's famed regrades. IS

As a relative newcomer to America's late-nineteenth-century urban growth

spurt, Seattle wanted to catch up with the rest of the nation, and big engineering

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 95

provided the boost. Beginning in 1898, and for almost two decades, regrading

consumed the city. In these regrades, totaling almost sixty separate projects,

Thomson's engineers changed the elevation of more than twenty streets, re­

moving several high hills entirely and using the spoils to fill in the remaining

tidelands along the waterfront. Since changing Seattle's topography required

immense quantities of power, Thomson planned to use the rerouted Cedar

River's kinetic energy to drive hydraulic cannons to rub out the city's steep

hills. Erasing hills would make new property, remove unwanted residents, and

cleanse neighborhoods of filth and blight, while delivering endless water that

would also eradicate illness and pollution. To Thomson, clean water and level

land were as much ethical as economic or political goals.

The target of Thomson's regrade surgery was, not surprisingly, the infamous

Skid Row and the polyglot slums of the city's dank ravines and waterfront tide­

lands that fronted Elliott Bay. Although the deep depression that followed the

Panic of 1893 had temporarily cleaned out the box-houses and saloons when

their customers left for better-off locales, the lure of lucre farther up north

brought the brothels and card shops back to the waterfront. The 1897-98 Klon­

dike Gold Rush turned Seattle's social landscape upside-down even as it gen­

erated huge profits for legitimate city businesses. As Seattle merchants, from

the clothier Nordstrom to local hardware moguls, the Schwabacher Brothers,

plowed the profits they made from provisioning miners streaming north to

Alaska and the Yukon back into new facilities, Skid Row proprietors did the

same. By 1898, a major turning point in S eattle's history, downtown saloons

outnumbered dry goods stores, and a market in prostitution and liquor con­

nected Seattle to Alaska, parallel to the legitimate trade in groceries, shipping,

and p assenger service. 16

Thomson wrote to a fri end in Alaska that "the streets are so full that you

can hardly walk through them, but the countenances you gaze upon are not

those which are going to impress a solid householder with the belief that these

are the people [whom] he wishes to make his neighbors:' All of Seattle was now

"wide open:' stricken with "Klondicitus:' a malady that attracted vagrants and

pimps, and corrupted local politics. The proof was in the streets: busted miners

who stayed in Seattle when their dreams up north had evaporated and erected

shacks along the city's waterfront wherever wharves and j etties were not; waves of new immigrants from Japan, the Philippines, southern Europe, and Scandi­ navia who had come to work in the region's extractive industries; and Indians who persisted in making Seattle part of their seasonal subsistence rounds. The

96 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

influx swelled the city's population from 3,553 in 1880 to 237,194 in 1910, one of

the fastest rates of growth in the Far West at the time.17

Thomson believed that decay and depravity emanated from damaged and

overtaxed landscapes and that changing those landscapes would change the

people afflicted by them. He adhered to late-Victorian-era ideals that linked

bodily, mental, and moral health to community well-being, and all of these to

where one lived. Despite revolutions in late-nineteenth-century science and

the rise of germ theory to explain disease, many experts continued to associate

poor health with poor landscapes and poor people. The shifting demography of

Seattle's downtown and waterfront districts only confirmed their suppositions.

As more and more immigrants poured into the residential hotels and flop­

houses along Jackson Street, Skid Row brothels and watering holes, seeking to

capture more of the post-Klondike trade, began to shift their operations north

and west toward the central business district to better serve Seattle's growing

working -class population. As Skid Row's original denizens left, Japanese and

Chinese immigrants and African Americans began to move in and take their

place. The new arrivals found an instant city with an inadequate infrastructure.

Nagai KafU, a visitor from Japan in 1903, found Jackson Street "like a Japanese

city street, with signs advertising tofu, Japanese soup, raw fish, and noodles"

built amid "mounds of horse manure, and an acrid smell of smoke:' To afflu­

ent white Seattleites, having a street reminiscent of Tokyo in their city was an

abomination. To them, Jackson Street was now another "dirty, filthy region that

had naturally become the immoral center of Seattle:'1 8

Many middle-class residents, reacting with their feet, moved to the new

streetcar suburbs of Fremont, Wallingford, and Green Lake, lured there by real

estate agents playing on racial and class anxieties. Reverend Mark A. Matthews

exacerbated such tensions. The minister of Seattle's First Presbyterian Church,

Matthews was an imposing six-foot-five, a giant in the city's reform circles and

a confidant of Thomson. Born in northern Georgia's Hill Country, Matthews

had come to Seattle in 1902, fired by the Social Gospel movement led by Wal­

ter Rauschenbusch and Protestant clergymen of the Progressive Era, intent on

employing Christian principles to temper the ill effects of industrialization,

unrestricted immigration, and rapid urbanization. Although Matthews was

not a strict adherent of the Social Gospel movement, since he believed firmly

in the importance of admitting sinfulness to prompt personal salvation, he

soon turned First Presbyterian into one of the nation's leading Social Gospel

churches. From the pulpit he called for changes necessary to the very fabric of

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 97

Seattle, arguing in one sermon from 1906 that "a favorable environment ren­ ders indispensable service in the development of character:'1 9

Thomson shared Matthews's embarrassment over Seattle's decrepit physi­

cal and moral state, and both blamed a corrupt political system that had pre­

vented any sweeping reforms, particularly the municipal ownership of impor­

tant utilities, such as light and water. But, now, in the wake of the Klondike

boom, Seattle's political bodies, as in other cities during the period, were

coming under the control of the emergent middle and upper-middle classes.

In Seattle, reformers pushed municipal ownership of utilities and ports, and

promoted referenda and initiatives for prohibition and against prostitution.

Most reformers, largely recent newcomers from the East and Midwest, were

white-collar professionals (a few were moderate labor leaders) who advocated

efficiency and economy in city government and expulsion of all vice. Their

enemies were manifold and powerful, ranging from Alden Blethen, publisher

of the Seattle Times, who opposed municipal ownership of utilities, to Hiram

Gill, elected mayor in 1910, who favored open saloons and an open town as

means of promoting social peace.20

In 1911, in response to Gill's election, reformers founded the Municipal

League of Seattle and King County, an organization of professionals modeled

after similar societies around the nation that lobbied for greater effiCiency and

morality in local government. Prominent members in Seattle included, besides

Thomson and Matthews, A. H. Dimock (an assistant city engineer who suc­

ceeded Thomson in 1911); George F. Cotterill ( another former Thomson assis­

tant and future mayor); Robert Bridges (the first Seattle port commissioner);

and J. D. Blackwell (yet another assistant and future chief engineer, and a former

superintendent of the Seattle Electric Company, operator of the city's street­

car system). In its campaigns against political corruption and for municipal

ownership, the league forged a tenuous alliance with moderate labor leaders

against those forces that were "bad for smaller business, bad for morality, and

bad for Seattle's reputation:'21

Until the formation of the Municipal League, however, the most power­

ful reformer in Seattle city government was Thomson, and he exercised his

authority forcefully. Reengineering Seattle's landscapes was inseparable, he

maintained, from cleanSing its social and political structure, because clean

water, proper sewerage, electrical power, and a renovated topography could

yield more than good hygiene and efficient planning. He would instruct the people of Seattle how to build and live in a great city. The Cedar River was the

98 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

key. "I have to have a specific end in view:' he w rote to a friend, "and what I am

teaching the people now is, that with the clean liness of water, through God­

given Cedar River, and with cleanliness in light, also through God-given Cedar

River, that we have just begun the question of mu nicipal cleanliness:'22

We Order the Parts of Our Modern City

Thomson was an unabashed reformer but he was also a political pragmatist. To

move mountains and rivers, he would need more than faith; he would need the

power of the purse and the law. And he would need backing from the business­

men and from the public he distrusted. His political strength came not from

his quasi-religious zeal but from his effectiveness as a charismatic bureaucrat.

He was the quintessential Progressive, never so fanatical as to lose sight of his

goals.

Thomson faced his first challenge as the city moved to acquire the Cedar

River, thanks to the 1893 decision of the Washington Supreme Court. The

Cedar's watershed lands were a crazy quilt of parcels, big and small, owned by

the federal government, the Northern Pacific Railroad, homesteaders, small

mill operators, and the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, which had quickly

become one of the nation's largest woodland owners and lumber producers

after its founding in 1900. The court had required Seattle to pay owners just

compensation, provided they wanted to sell or be reimbursed through the

legal condemnation process, but the acquisition of land to build the pipeline

aroused cries from opponents of municipal ownership. They backed an 1894

plan by a shadowy investor from New York City, Edward H. Ammidown, to buy

the lands for the city in exchange for retaining title. In response, municipal­

ownership advocates argued that the doctrine of prior appropriation (the prin­

ciple in western American law that allocated water rights on a first -come, first­

served basis), as a result of the original surveys by Williams and Thomson, was

the source of the city's claim. Voters turned down the so-called Ammidown

plan at the end of 1895, approving instead, by nearly two to one, the $1.25 mil­

lion bond for Thomson's Cedar River project. 23

Thomson, chastened by the potential expense of purchasing all of the lands

in the upper Cedar River basin at once, now struck a deal with the federal

government, the largest landowner in the watershed, to cooperate with the city,

and in 1899 he persuaded the General Land Office to withdraw all federal lands

in the drainage from sale, settlement, or other disposal in the expectation that

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 99

Seattle would build a pipeline to the Cedar River. Workmen fanned out across

the countryside to lay wooden and cast-iron conduits from the intake at the

town of Landsburg, on the lower Cedar River, across the Renton Valley and the

Black River at the south end of Lake Washington, and into the city. 24

Building the system was a technical and environmental challenge. Workers

assembled custom-designed wooden stave and iron pipes, built in Seattle to

Thomson's specifications, along a precisely measured grade in order to use

gravity to draw the water to reservoirs on several ridges throughout the city.

But geology conspired against the workers. Unstable glacial deposits turned to

mud, or settled suddenly and snapped pipes in two. After three years of back­

breaking work, and after fending off lawsuits charging backroom deals and

fraud, Thomson's careful calculations paid off, and, in January 1901, the pipe­

line opened.25

Seattle had acquired its pure water at last, and not a moment too soon,

because as Thomson put the finishing touches on the Cedar River pipeline he

had already begun his regrades to level Seattle's center city hills. Here, too, he

needed to cobble together support from real estate speculators and downtown

businesses. Local improvement districts, an innovation borrowed from eastern

cities adopted in Seattle in 1893, put the onus of paying for developments like

streets or regrades on individual property owners, thereby linking individual

benefits to costs incurred by the entire city. Thomson considered the local im­

provement concept a godsend, telling an editor in Portland, Oregon, that with­

out it "Seattle would have continued until this day to have been designated

'the stump town'" that he wanted to leave behind. Thomson and his subordi­

nates, meeting with neighborhood improvement clubs and businesses, took

them through flipcharts and blueprints, pointing out how regrading would de­

liver significant "financial, hygienic [and 1 aesthetic benefits" by reducing costs for shipping and time to travel, increasing property values, and containing or

eradicating unhealthy slums. The technological management of place was his

view of the world. It was a very persuasive view, to a point, after which the

engineer relied on political shrewdness. Thanks to Thomson's campaigning, al­

though the city used eminent domain to bully recalcitrant residents and busi­

nesses, most supported regrading. Thomson had appealed to particular groups of Seattle residents through their pocketbooks because he soon realized what other reformers had discovered decades before in cities like Chicago: the pub­ lic interest often ended at the neighborhood's edge or the business doorstep. 26

The first regrade, completed in 1898 along First Avenue at the foot of Denny

l

100 The Im agination and Creative Energy of th

e Engineer

Hill, set the agenda for subsequent re grades: remove the earth and wait fo

r

the benefits to follow. Steam shovels a nd horse-drawn carts hauled off near

ly

120,000 cubic yards of earth, some of it used to fill tidelands along the city

's

waterfront. Property values along Firs t Avenue, now flattened to a reasonab

le

grade, soared in an already hyperinflat ed market. By 1902, businesses and resi

­

dences along Second Avenue clamore d for their own regrades and property

owners elsewhere in the city quickly f ollowed suit. Given the volatility of th

e

real estate market before regrading, de termining its effects on property value

s

is difficult, but evidence suggests that s ome projects yielded healthy returns, a

t

least in the short term. V. V. Tarbilliater w rote in the Harvard Business Review

that, after the Second Avenue regrade i n 1906, street-front lots sold for $2,000

per front foot at the corner of Pike Str eet. One block to the north, where Sec

­

ond Avenue still ran into Denny Hill, similar frontages were worth less than

$300 per front foot. Two years later, T homson estimated that regrading had

boosted business real estate values 400 percent and residential real estate 1,00

0

percent in the affected neighborhoods.2 7

Even Thomson, who distrusted realtor s, made them allies in the "struggles

to up build this city:' The businessmen and real estate agents who opposed

Thomson on the municipal ownership of utilities supported the regrades in

return. George Emerson, a local lumbe r magnate, told the stockholders of the

Metropolitan Building Company in 19 07 that regrading was one step "along

the only path leading to Seattle's co mmercial heights:' Emerson extolled

Seattle, which had devoured its hinterla nds, for now cannibalizing its hills for a

higher cause. Thanks to capital and labo r, with government and business work­

ing hand in hand, all under the guidan ce of the municipal engineer, Emerson

concluded, "we order the parts of our M odern City:'28

As Emerson noted in his speech, techn ology would channel human labor

,

but technology led back to the Ceda r River. Demand for regrading bega

n to

mount, as Thomson expected that it would, and horses and steam shove

ls be­

came inefficient. Contractors hired b y the city engineer turned to mining

tech­

nologies instead, brandishing hydr aulic cannons, called "Giants;' again

st the .

hills while burrowing tunnels bene ath city streets or running sluices

above

them to carry the tailings or "slicke ns" to the waterfront for disposal. A

t first, ;.

workers used water pumped from n earby lakes or Puget Sound, but e

ngines

failed and the salt water corroded pi pes. The arrival of the Cedar River

gave Thomson a more efficient scourin g agent. Using gravity to build the

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

- . _____ � ______ . ___ ._. __ ._._ .. ___ . __ .. _,,_IW. ._ ... .. _---- ...

-----_ ... ,,-- . .. .... .... .. -.. -... . ----.----� !HI

Vllftl/NIA .r OIfI#INAL �RAD£ ___ �� �RADC- M

1:1 ---------""---- -1: • I.

i, [.

1fE- QR.�:4D�"'�. �=:i=r���:::,,� 1-------r!-rJ.�'--===-=--:.:::-.-- -- .,1

( 'IfOI"IL' _ Vllt«INIA .... l!Il.ANCH""D IJTlfEEr. MUff/MAL ....... /fAD£,.

DEN NY HIli. REGRADE.

101

The first Denny Hill regrade, side profile showing the original and regraded slopes,

c. 1910. (Courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry, Seattle, SHS 16,998)

essary pressure, engineers could accomplish the work in the most economical

fashion. Nearly all of the city's large-scale regrades were undertaken only after

the pipeline was finished.29

The sheer power marshaled to reverse eons of geology captured the at­ tention of residents and visitors at first, even as regrading, as Thomson had

envisioned it, began to erase the city's most blighted neighborhoods. On the first Denny Hill regrade, engineers and contractors shoveled or sluiced nearly 5·5 million cubic yards of dirt and rock into Elliott Bay, removing over half of the 250-foot mount, at the same time displacing squatters' shacks along the shoreline. On the Jackson Street regrade, workers carted off or washed away approximately 3-4 million cubic yards of soil as city inspectors condemned Whole blocks of homes and apartment buildings in the largely immigrant and

Working-class neighborhood. And these were only the largest. Statistics citing

LH

102 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

the total amount of earth moved in all of the regrades varied, but estimates

went as high as 50 million cubic yards. Others calculated that more than one­

eighth as much earth had been moved as had been excavated in construc­

tion of the Panama Canal, the yardstick for big engineering at the time. In the

words of one engineering report, hydraulic sluicing was the "application of a

natural world-making force applied to . . . municipal improvement:'3o

It was the Pleistocene played all over again. Workers used explosives to dis­

lodge large boulders from the glacial hardpan, and set abandoned structures

ablaze before undermining them with steady streams of water, washing the

remains out to sea. Along the tide flats fronting Jackson Street, settling basins

made with earthen levees and wooden walls captured the dissolved hillsides

to create twenty-seven new city blocks where slums, "awash with the usual de­

bris and garbage;' once stood, adding to the man-made land already created

by private developers at the southern end of Elliott Bay since the 1890S. On

the Denny Hill project, the process was far less complex-contractors merely

dumped debris along the shoreline, a move welcomed by the Northern Pacific,

which was expanding its piers and improving its track beds.3l

Since many regrades proceeded simultaneously, city engineers also had to

think systematically in order to coordinate the energy and labor vital for effec­

tive operations. Regrading was not a novel idea in city planning, and Thom­

son may have had Boston's experience in mind, but unlike Boston's assault

on its hills in the antebellum period, where workers used horse-drawn carts

and shovels, S eattle's attack was thoroughly industrial. Not surprisingly, the

hydraulic cannons consumed tremendous volumes of water. On the Jackson

Street regrade alone, the giants spewed between 9 and 12 million gallons each

day, nearly one-third of the city's daily water capacity. Contractors worked with

the Water Department to ensure sufficient supplies without disrupting resi­

dential or industrial use. Often operations ran at night, lit by floodlights, with

electricity supplied, in part, from a second hydroelectric dam on the Cedar

River, approved by voters in 1902 and completed in 1904, which gave S eattle

one of the nation's first municipally owned electrical systems and endless light­

ing for workers. Giant operators were as specialized as the machinery they

used, usually "Alaskan veterans . . . experienced and expert in hydraulic mining

operations" who had the masculine "skill to 'squirt' water" at high pressure in

order to "'herd' earth and mix water" without losing time to accidents.32 Thomson's contemporaries saw technology as an instrument of beauty, be-

Smith Cove

J

N 1

ELL/OTT BAY

_ Jackson Street Regrade (1907-1912) - Denny Hill Regrade #1 (1903-1911) - Denny Hill Regrade #2 (1928-1931) CJ Filled tidelands and shoreline .... Regrade spoils deposited

Contours (50 foot interval) Present.day streets

o .25 .5 .75 I Mile ,---, ,

Major regrades in Seattle, c. 1900-1930.

104 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

cause beauty arose from pure function and from a careful assessment of nature's

needs. It was an aesthetic of place congruent with Progressive Era ideals of effi­

ciency and equity. Many were impressed with the modern industrial creativity

of regrading. Phillip Kellar, of The World Today, wrote, for example, how "this

regrade work, in addition to being stupendous, has been picturesque:' Asahel

Curtis, a member of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, brother of the pho­

tographer Edward S. Curtis and a skilled photographer himself, chronicled the

regrades, capturing spectacular landscapes that dwarfed individual observers

with their immensity. His elimination of the individual human presence was

not accidental. Engineers had created, albeit temporarily, an urban version of

the sublime with modern industrial technology. Often such representations

played upon regional pride. A. H. Dimock, a Thomson assistant at the time,

later wrote in 1928 that the regrades were "the product of Western conditions"

and "pioneering engineering methods:' Editorials in the leading engineering

periodicals, from Engineering News to Scientific American, extolled Thomson's

vision, and Charles Evans Fowler, a noted New York engineer visiting Seattle,

pronounced that regrading gave "full play ... to the imagination and creative

energy of the engineer:' If the engineer's imagination made Seattle, then that

imagination demanded hard work. The local historian Clarence Bagley later

commented how "no great city on the American continent has overcome so

many natural obstacles encountered in its growth:' Seattle was "virtually one

vast reclamation project:>33

Reverend Mark Matthews, in a 1911 address at the exclusive Rainier Club,

the watering hole for Seattle's rich and powerful, proclaimed, "The building of

a city cannot be left to men of mediocre brains or determination ... it must be

built by men who have broad views, whose perspectives are those of giants:'

Invoking the famous sermon by John Winthrop, who, in turn, had taken the

metaphor from the biblical account of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, Matthews

concluded: "We are truly a city set upon a hill; we cannot be hid:' Matthews

was likely talking about his friend and parishioner. It was not hard to see that

Thomson, in the minds of some white Seattleites, was perhaps their version of

the Changer or Transformer that Puget Sound Natives believed had prepared

the world that whites had stolen from them. But at his zenith, three months be­

fore he left office in December 1911, Thomson the transformer would discover

that there were limits to what brains and machinery could do. Power had limits

he could not transcend.34

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

We People Who Live in Your Regrade

Districts ... Are Martyrs

105

By the end of the twentieth century's first decade, Seattle had become a major

city, outstripping its rival to the south, Portland, and surpassed in size only

by San Francisco and Los Angeles in the West. In 1900, Seattle was the na­

tion's forty-eighth largest city; two decades later, it was the twentieth largest.

Annexations of outlying towns between 1907 and 191O-tree-lined Ravenna,

industrial Georgetown and Ballard, bucolic West Seattle and South Seattle­

further boosted the city's population and added thirty-seven new square miles

of territory. Meanwhile, the reformers, consolidating their power, succeeded in

taking City Hall, thanks to the efforts of the Municipal League. George F. Cot­

terill, who served as an assistant under Thomson from 1892 to 1900, ousted the

corrupt Hiram Gill as mayor in the 1912 election. The next year, he reported to

the city council about the tremendous work undertaken by his former boss: in

a twelve-year period, beginning in 1900, nearly 200 miles of streets had been

paved, 400 miles of water pipe laid, 525 miles of roads built, and 800 miles of

sidewalk poured.3s

Cotterill had little time to celebrate this achievement, however, because he

had inherited a city where organized labor, energized by Seattle's position as a

leading shipping center on the Pacific Coast, was now challenging the indus­

trialists who ran Seattle's shipbuilding companies, steamship lines, railroads,

mills, and factories, inSisting on better wages and working conditions. Some

joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IW W), a militant union, founded

in 1905, that espoused socialism and advocated the abolition of the wage sys­

tem. IWW organizers and members, known as "Wobblies;' were busy in the

extractive industries of the Far West at the time, and Seattle soon became a

Wobbly stronghold. Others, fearing the red tide rising around them, struck

back against the labor radicals. A mob attacked the suffragist speaker Annie

Miller outside the IWW office during the Potlatch Days parade, a new citywide

boosters' celebration, in 1913. The center of reform politics in Seattle could not

hold. Voters removed Cotterill from office in 1914, electing none other than the

tainted Gill, who claimed the mantle of ProgreSSivism even as the language of

progress was beginning to lose its luster. 36

Many historians have chronicled these political disputes as evidence of

Seattle's devolution into social turmoil, but none considered how the equally

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 106

massive changes to the physical environment ref lected and amplified urban

conflic t. Regrading and municipal waterworks w ere more than mere infra­

structure; they were the apotheosis of Progressivism manif ested in concrete

and steel, water, and earth. Yet Thomson and his associates, on the hillsides

of Seattle and on the mountainsides of the Ce dar River, instead of offering

stability, had crafted hybrid landscapes, neither ful ly natural nor fully under

human control. Engineers had produced, very often, landscapes more danger-

ous and less reliable than those they had altered.

The first troubles began along the Cedar River, which the city had tapped

for its water but did not control completely. Most of the watershed, totaling

nearly 142 square miles, remained largely out of the city 's hands. The mill towns

of Barneston, Cedar Falls, and Taylor, all above the c ity's intake at Landsburg,

were home to hundreds of loggers and homesteaders wh o could contaminate

the city's water supply. Thomson faced a challenge-ho w to acquire the en­

tire watershed without plunging the city further into de bt. The first pipeline

soon proved inadequate as the city, from 1900 to 1910, ne arly trebled in size

from 80,600 to 237,194, prompting construction of a secon d pipeline in 1908.

Thomson was convinced the city needed jurisdiction over th e entire watershed

even as citizens had become suspicious of spending still m ore money to feed

Seattle's public works binge. Three bond measures, beginning in 1895, enabled

the city to control, on paper, nearly 38,000 acres by 1914-onl y a fraction of the

area. Still, landowners refused to sell unless the city agreed to reimburse them

for the market price of harvestable timber in addition to the va lue of the land.

With timber the unchallenged mainstay of the regional econom y, city attor­

neys could not easily persuade other watershed occupants to pu t up their land

and trees for sale. Ironically, the key to the watershed was to cont rol the trees,

not the river, forcing Seattle to pursue a pragmatic strategy by e xchanging

timber rights for land titles while endorsing logging on its own pro perties to

pay for further land purchases or system construction. Seattle's dil emma was

unique among cities at the time. In the Northeast, cities turned alread y logged­

off lands into municipal watersheds, or bought out small logging con cerns and

individual landowners using eminent domain to acquire protected water sup­

plies. In California and U tah, forested lands in the Sierra Nevada a nd Wasatch

Mountains did not produce timber as commercially valuable as that in the

coastal Northwest. Thomson had to navigate a more complex so cial landscape.

Major companies, like the Northern Pacific Railroad, the larges t in the water­

shed, or Weyerhaeuser signed contracts with the city that incl uded stipulations

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 107

on logging or transportation to protect water purity. Local logging companies removed the trees for the timber sellers, and afterward Seattle would purchase the logged -off lands at a fraction of their timbered price. With smaller owners, city attorneys combined intimidation and persuasion to compel them to sell their lands with the timber rights, or else face the legal condemnation pro­ cess.37

Although separating the land from the trees could give the city what it wanted at a price it could afford, Thomson and other impatient officials wanted complete control sooner, fearing disease or unanticipated water shortages. Events soon sharpened their concerns. In 1906 the Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Paul Railroad applied for a right-of-way across city-owned lands in the lower watershed. The resulting controversy-some residents worried that trains would dump raw sewage as they sped along the tracks-led to a special com mission, chaired by a national expert on sanitation, William T. Sedgwick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sedgwick's report simply emboldened city officials to confiscate even more of the watershed because, as the sanitary engineer warned, if"even the spit of one come down with typhoid" entered the water supply, an epidemic was likely.38

Acting on these recommendations, the Department of Water tightened regulations over its watershed lands. The Milwaukee Road was required to fol­ low strict sanitary guidelines; watershed guards locked out hunters and unap proved loggers; and the city began a three-decade fight to condemn and eradi­ cate the towns of Barneston and Taylor. In the interim it needed more money to fund watershed expansion, especially after voters in 1910 approved the con­ struction of a permanent masonry dam to replace the timber crib at the mouth of Cedar Lake and create a larger reservoir for water and power. Ignoring grave concerns about the stability of the dam's location-the northern wing abutted a large glacial moraine, an unstable ridge of gravel and mud-the city served notice that year to those landowners whose trees would be flooded: the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Pacific, and Weyerhaeuser. The Forest Service filed a counter-lawsuit, but city health commissioner J. E. Crichton argued in an affidavit that, for safety and sanitary reasons, the city required "absolute power and dominion of all lands within Cedar Lake Basin:'39

Seattle officials had hoped that the city might ultimately get all of the fed­ eral watershed lands through condemnation as well. However, the u.s. Forest Service, which now administered the Snoqualmie National Forest, set up in 1905, stiff-armed the city and refused to surrender its lands. In frustration, the

108 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

city appealed to Washington's Senate delegation, and Con gress passed legisla­

tion, in 1911, requiring the Forest Service to sell to Seattle nearly 20,000 for­

est acres at a discounted price, the appraised value of th e timber plus $1.25

an acre. Forest Service officials were dismayed. An assista nt supervisor com­

plained that the bill was equivalent to a "gift of $600,000 w orth of timber" to

the city. The Forest Service's concern was understandable : a report in 1910 esti­

mated that Forest Service lands contained as much as 270 m illion board feet of

mature Douglas fir and western red cedar, ready for the axe and mill. If Seattle

prevailed, the Forest Service concluded, it would set a dange rous precedent by

subj ecting an important forest reserve "to the varying vicissit udes of municipal

politics:' The Forest Service started a campaign to block the city's plans.40

Seattle tried to play tough, but the city's engineers and sanit arians were at

a loss when it came to managing timber. Forestry, like engi neering a new pro­

fession born in the P rogressive Era, was to the forests what e ngineering was to

the city, a rational and scientific enterprise designed to imp rove old practices.

Realizing its ignorance, the Board of Public Works, which was responsible

for managing the watershed lands, hired Hamilton C. Johns on, a graduate of

the Biltmore Forest School, as the first city watershed ranger in 1912. The next

year, Johnson called for a far-reaching solution: cutting tre es on city water­

shed lands and then replanting them to generate revenue with out endangering

water security. Although sawmills were eager to buy the tim ber, the Board of

Public Works, in an effort to streamline city management, put all watershed

management under the command of the Department of W a ter. L. B. Youngs,

the department's superintendent since 1895, another civil eng ineer and an ally

of Thomson, deemed reforestation too expensive and shelved Johnson's report.

Youngs appealed to the Forest Service to compromise, as it had with numerouS

other cities throughout the western United States. In 1915, the city abandoned

its fight to seize national forestlands. Although Youngs belie ved that the en­

tire watershed should eventually be put under city jurisdiction, that goal could

wait, and he focused on acquiring more private lands. In th e name of saving

money, he contracted with one firm, the Pacific States Lumb er Company, in

1917, to clear timber from city and Northern Pacific Railroad pr operties. After

loggers cut the trees, Seattle would get the land. It was a sh ortsighted policy

to ignore Johnson'S warnings and not put watershed manage ment under pro­

fessional foresters. Soon inspectors were complaining that re ckless operations ,

were endangering both public health and timber quality.41

As the Water Department was logging and gaining still mor e land, city

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 109

engineers marched into the watershed to domesticate the Cedar into a reli­

able source for water and power. Engineering would marshal the river to turn

turbines and fill pipelines, and to remake the Cedar into a reliable hydrau­

lic machine. The engineers' ideal river, however, had already disappeared be­

cause logging had changed the hydrology of the basin even as the Cedar re­

mained an undisciplined watercourse, ebbing and cresting with precipitation

and snowmelt. Engineers discovered that freshets from the logged-off slopes

above Cedar Lake could raise the level of the now-impounded lake as much as

forty feet in one week. Downstream, the problems were equally dire. Dredging

and construction by the Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Paul Railroad along its

new right-of-way had shifted the Cedar River dangerously close to the city's

Number One pipeline. The railroad assured a worried Thomson that no harm

would come to the city's water lifeline. Storm surges in November 1911 proved

them wrong when floods exploded the original timber crib dam at Cedar

Lake, washing away the pipeline, drenching the town of Renton, and depriving

Seattle of potable water for almost a week. Afterward, public pressure mounted

to build the new masonry dam with all due haste.42

Meanwhile, another calamity was unfolding upstream. Logging was alter­

ing the local environment to the detriment of the forest and the city dwellers

downstream. To improve taste and clarity, in 1914 Water Department crews

removed alder trees and surface soil lining Cedar Lake and secondary reser­

voirs in the watershed to reduce turbidity. They also planted exotic deciduous

species-black cottonwood, hickory, and eastern white ash, among others-to

shade the new reservoirs. Although reforestation efforts were piecemeal until

the mid-1920S, such plantings transformed the forest and its waters. Remov­ ing mature trees exposed streams and lakes to direct sunlight, elevating tem­

peratures and encouraging algae growth that imparted unwanted tastes to the

water. Migrating salmon could not reach their historic spawning grounds in

the upper Cedar River, above the city's intake, because health officers feared

that decaying fish carcasses would contaminate water supplies. The salmon got

no break below the intake, however. Logging along the lower reaches of the

river also harmed salmon by exposing the gravel nests, called redds, built to protect eggs and j uvenile fish, to fatally warm waters and predators. Moreover, in response to citizen complaints, Water Department crews began to apply copper sulfate to lakes and rivers in the early 1920S, and chlorinated water entering city pipelines to eliminate noxious flavors.43

Aggressive logging also made fires more common in the Cedar River

110 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

watershed. Embers and hot exhaust from the donkey engines used for winch­

ing logs, combined with the abundance of slash left from logging, repeatedly

led to burning during the dry summer and autumn months. Huge blazes had

swept across the watershed before. One consumed most of the drainage about

three hundred y ears before Seattle's founding, but industrial logging increased

the danger. Before 1920, only two fires grew large enough to threaten market­

able timber; after 1920, big fires occurred with frightening regularity, some­

times as many as nine in one season. The Department of Water, now dependent

on timber revenue for its operations, vainly tried to prevent fires, but like a toy

top losing its momentum, the Cedar River forest was spinning out of control

environmentally.44

A change in administration brought a bleak new perspective that logging

was now harming, not helping, water quality. George F. Russell, who succeeded Youngs in 1923, did not share his predecessor's monomaniacal focus, and in a

letter to the city engineer of Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1924 he outlined

the double bind facing Seattle. "At the time; ' Russell admitted, harvesting tim­

ber to purchase land "seemed a wise thing" to pursue. The timber was ready to

harvest and the city could not afford to buy land outright, but "time has dem­

onstrated this was a serious error:' "In our Pacific Northwest we are particu­

larly fortunate in having supplies of water of great purity, which gives us a fine

standing in the world for healthfulness;' he concluded, but "the purity of the

water is in great measure preserved by standing trees:' Russell's confession had

shown that for all of its energy and optimism, the Progressive ethic of place,

extolled by Thomson and its colleagues, could and did go wrong.45

As the regrades had dramatically shown, no utility was as important for

progress as securing reliable water supplies, but unexpectedly, along the Cedar

River, controlling the terrain and its vital watercourse began with controlling

its trees. In trying to control one resource, water, by transforming it into a com­

mon form of property, the Water Department ran headlong into another form

of property, timber, which proved harder to control. The city valued water; log­

ging corporations and the Forest Service valued the trees. Reconciling the two

had proved impossible. Downstream, city engineers discovered that some of the problems that confronted them along the Cedar River-an unpredictable and disturbed environment and an intractable array of political opponents

bent on protecting their real estate-now confronted them in Seattle.

The Seattle Mail and Herald in 1903 compared regrading to "grasshoppers in a Kansas cornfield:' "Nature has been worked over from a thing of beauty

"'··,·: .. 1, .. ·· .... , .i. 1 ,I ' ' . : " '. ,� � ; !r'l!: ::*!: "j,

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 111

to an angular checkered surface;' the writer bemoaned, "with scarce one fea­

ture left to know it by:' Others attacked regrading as profane and destructive

to property. A 1910 editorial in Engineering News, which had supported the regrades at first, now called them a mistake: "It is a pity that a city, which has

such a magnificent natural site, with such commanding views as Seattle, would

have lost such a great opportunity to lay out its streets to conform with the

natural features:' Thomson brushed off such criticisms. "Some people seemed

to think that because there were hills in Seattle originally, some of them ought

to be left there, no difference how injurious a heavy grade over a hill may be to

the property beyond that hiH:'46

What Thomson forgot was that avarice, anger, and natural forces could

thwart his splendid plans. He and his engineering associates first had to con­

front the unpredictable properties of water and earth. The same glaciers that

had created Seattle's hills had also armored them against removal. Glacial errat­

ics-Iarge boulders, some the size of small houses, carried in the ancient ice

streams-could be dislodged only with explosives. H ydraulic sluicing mim­

icked the power of rivers or glaciers in the city's center, unleashing landslides

that swept away houses and turned unfinished streets into muddy, impassible

quagmires. Streams of slickens scoured holes in iron and steel flumes. Sluice

intakes, called "grizzlies; ' clogged with debris, and men had to dislodge the

chunks with crowbars and gaffing hooks against water running at thousands

of pounds of pressure per square inch. W hen slickens reached Elliott Bay, the

city had to spend time and money to obtain separate permits for each project

from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to prevent interference with maritime

navigation. One beleaguered engineer on the Pine Street regrade of 1904 listed

every possible delay in his weekly reports: clogged water lines and sluices, tired

workers, landslides, rain, more rain, and mechanical malfunctions.47

Although Seattle residents were used to living in a city under constant con­

struction around them, the regrades taxed their tolerance. The same new laws

that gave engineers and their contractors the authority to regrade also gave

individual citizens the ability to protest. Local improvement district files at city

hall soon bulged with scores of letters complaining of blocked streets, broken

water and sewage mains, shattered windows, collapsed foundations, mudslides,

debris, noise, dust, and snarled traffic. James Love, pastor at the Reformed Pres­

byterian Church, located along the Olive Avenue regrade, remarked that with

the autumn rains "patience, even the Presby terian kind, ceases to be a virtue"

because "nearly impassable" streets and sidewalks prevented parishioners from

112 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

worshipping. When contractors on the Jackson Street regrade fil led the tide

flats before raising buildings to the new grade, they worsene d sanitary condi­

tions by blocking sewer outfalls, which in turn spilled noxious waste onto city

streets. Neighborhoods that supported regrading at first now im plored con­

tractors to finish early, and in turn the Engineering Department often blamed

contractors for the subsequent mess. The fair foundation for mun icipal soli­

darity envisioned by Thomson turned out to be both broken and u nfair.48

In the escalating cycle of recrimination and reaction that consumed Seattl e

during the regrades, those who seemed powerless, those who lived in th e tide­

land waterfront shacks or in the apartments along Skid Row, fought b ack. An

embittered resident told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "We people who l ive in

your regrade districts ... are martyrs. Sure, it's a good cause, and all that, bu t

we're martyrs anyway:' But they, as martyrs, did not go resignedly to their fate ;

they often went to court to claim that the regrading had diminished the value

of their property. Thomson and his engineers believed regrading would ulti­

mately benefit everyone, and it was no accident that several of the largest re­

grades, especially the Jackson Street and Dearborn Cut projects, targeted the

city's poorest and most dilapidated neighborhoods. Local property owners

often felt differently, however, and found the courts sympathetic to their plight.

American courts during this period were struggling to define the proper re­

lationship between property as protecting personal wealth and property as

advancing social propriety. The Board of Eminent Domain Commissioners

reviewed every regrade and then held condemnation trials in King County

Superior Court to determine how much property owners would receive in

compensation.49 Complaints over taxes and condemnation awards generated the most

protest because city officials relied so heavily on the advice of real estate agents.

Scott Calhoun, the city corporation counsel, in a page-long editorial in the

Seattle Post-Intelligencer in May 1907, defended the process for the Denny

Hill regrade, claiming that in the 350 verdicts entered, which affected nearly

800 property owners, the city had been "more equitable and just than in any

other large condemnation proceeding tried during the last two years:' What

Calhoun did not apologize for was the inherent inequity in asking those who

stood to benefit most from regrading to evaluate the worth of other citizens'

property. Nor did he mention what regrading had really cost the city as com­

plaints clogged city and superior court dockets, with more than forty separate

cases reaching the state Supreme Court on appeal. 50

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 113

The high court cases that involved personal injury and property damage

were the most harrowing, especially for residents of modest means living in

the poorest neighborhoods targeted by Thomson's regrades. One homeowner,

H. F. Povine, charged the city and its contractors, Hawley and Lane, with neg­

ligence after regrade fill settled beneath his simple house and wrecked it. J. W

Coffer, a timber cruiser living in an apartment on Fourth Avenue, sought com­

pensation when cinders from elevated trains blinded him in one eye, costing

him his job. Peter Casassa and his neighbors sued twice; blasting and sluicing

had undercut the slopes beneath their homes, sending the houses tumbling

into a ravine. Julius Johanson complained that regrades burst his water pipes

and loosened the earth beneath his house, pulling the foundation out beneath

him. In all of these cases, the high court found that assessments were below

fair market value and ruled in favor of the afflicted residents. In other cases,

the justices defended the city against regrading claims that would "render that

means of improving streets impracticable:' Even though the high court also

ruled against unfair assessments, it did not overturn the city's ability to create

local assessment districts, pursue municipal improvements, or levy taxes. 51

Thomson was especially frustrated when lawsuits by the city's more power­

ful real estate developers stood in the way of what he considered the com­

mon good. In one famous case, James A. Moore, owner of the new Washington

Hotel, the former Denny Hotel, atop the south summit of Denny Hill, fought

hard against repeated attempts to dislodge the imposing Victorian edifice that

towered over the downtown district. Moore, a land speculator from Nova Sco­

tia who had arrived in 1886 and quickly bought up property in downtown

Seattle, had acquired the hotel from a band of squabbling developers, who,

after the Panic of 1893, had left the hotel unopened and unfurnished. Moore

had planned to make it the premier watering hole in Seattle. At first, he refused

to budge. Finally, in 1906 the city council and the Engineering Department per­

suaded him to sign a special agreement, named for him, whereby he and other

private owners in the neighborhood would pay to remove their own earth in

exchange for no special assessment on their property. According to Thomson,

the resulting boost in real estate values on nearby lots persuaded Moore to

join the city. Smaller property owners, left out of the "Moore Agreement;' were

not impressed and filed suit. The state Supreme Court eventually sided against

the city and Moore, calling for a reassessment of the condemnation awards. In

addition to sacrificing his grand hotel, Moore eventually paid over a hundred

thousand dollars out of pocket. It was only a temporary setback. After the re-

114 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

grade, he opened a long-planned theater, on e of the finest in the Northwest, in

the shadow of the former hill, and soon m ade back his fortune. 52

Moore had the resources and connections to turn lh omson to his will.

Most other citizens acquiesced to the engineers .lhose who resisted faced ex­

pensive, sometimes embarrassing, consequenc es. Since regrading operations

had often preceded judicial decisions, contractor s removed earth and destroyed

buildings before court proceedings had concluded . Under local improvement

district guidelines, individual owners arranged for t he regrading of their own

property upon approval of a given project. W ithout a n owner's consent, con­

tractors could still remove earth to the edge of the lo t but no farther, leaving

lots and homes atop pinnacles of earth, popularly kn own as "spite mounds:'

towering above the new streets. In the resulting mess that t he regrades caused,

the courts tried to validate the sanctity of private propert y while upholding the

common good. Former owners who sold their property du ring regrading es­

caped assessment taxes, leaving the new owners responsible for unanticipated

debts. Renters ejected from their homes still had to pay the ir landlords who

were, in turn, responsible for assessment taxes.53

One story among hundreds captured the human cost of lhom son's war

against Seattle's hills. Sandy Moss, who migrated with his family from Topeka,

Kansas, to Seattle in the early 19oos, was one of the hundreds of A frican Ameri­

cans and Asian immigrants who had settled on Beacon Hill, tak ing advantage

of the then inexpensive prices at the south end of Seattle.lhe Mos s home was

along the Dearborn Street regrade, which would cut through Beaco n Hill to

connect Rainier Valley with downtown, and his father refused to va cate. lhe

hydraulic cannons tearing into the hillside became unbearable, and th e family

took rooms across the street where they could keep an eye on their home . One

morning their house had vanished. "So we walked over to the brink of th e hill

and looked:' Moss recalled, "and the house was three blocks down below, a nd it

was about two hundred feet lower and it was just a bunch of matchwood dow n

there. It was all broke up . .. like you would step on a apple box and crush i t:'

lhe Moss family had to move, like so many others, because his family re ceived

some compensation from the city "but not enough to pay for what the hom es

and the property was worth:'54

Local resident J. W. Charlton had warned lhomson in 1910 that r egrad­

ing projects had "piled up so fast" that many residents, overtaxed an d over­

whelmed, would "lose their homes:' Many citizens did. A spirali ng cycle of

municipal debt and unfinished projects, lawsuits against recalcitra nt contrac-

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 115

tors for malfeasance, grievances from more and more citizens, and uncollected

taxes from property owners unable or unwilling to pay had trapped the city.

lhomson tried to speed up the regrades in order to finish them as quickly and

cheaply as possible. On the Denny Hill project, the city's largest, lhomson's

strategy, according to his assistant 0. A. Piper, had led to "cooperative disregard

for street lines, the paramount idea being the rapid prosecution of the regrade

as a whole:' Decaying public support and shaky financing had ended Seattle's

regrading mania by the beginning of the First World War. By 1911, lhomson

had left the post he had occupied for nineteen years to help found the munici­

pally owned Port of Seattle. Even as lhomson moved on to his next project, the

battles raged over how he and his engineers had left behind them in the heart

of the city acres of newly hazardous spaces. 55

Conditions were at their worst in the former Jackson and Dearborn re­

grade districts, where the hydraulic cannons had punched the hole through

Beacon Hill (and Sandy Moss's home) and engineers filled the gap with bridges

linking the southeastern districts of the city to downtown. In their speed to

finish, contractors had left huge portions of the now-exposed hillsides barren.

Rainstorms pounding on the exposed clay soil triggered damaging mudslides

that swept away homes and knocked out the Twelfth Avenue Bridge-one of

the city's main north-south thoroughfares-repeatedly for the next decade.

Eight lawsuits made their way to the state Supreme Court between 1914 and

1927; in all but one, the justices ruled against the city. As Justice Tolman wrote

for the court in 1927 in Wong Kee fun v. Seattle, the last of the so-called Jackson

Street regrade cases, city engineers were to blame for the catastrophe they had

created by "causing slides" through their "permanent invasion of private prop­ erty:'56

Empty lots now dotted the space where half of Denny Hill once stood be­

neath the broken summit of its jumbled remains; to the south, denuded slopes

of raw earth loomed above Jackson and Dearborn Streets. Real estate agents

and civic boosters tried to put the best face on a bad situation, churning out

flyers and promotional materials, touting the affordable real estate north of

downtown in the newly minted Denny "Regrade District:' A birds' -eye map

drawn by architect Dudley Stuart in 1917 proclaimed the area as "Seattle's

Coming Retail and Apartment - House District:' detailing imaginary businesses and brownstones against the scenic backdrop of the Olympic Mountains and Elliott Bay, but his map was a fantasy. Fearful of larger assessments, residents had reached a compromise with city engineers in 1906 to regrade only the

116 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

portion of the hill nearest Elliott Bay. The remainder loomed over empty lots

waiting for a boom that disappeared when Seattle slipped into a depression

after the First World War. 57

Only a year after Dudley Stuart's boastful map, city engineers faced a real

crisis. After the ruinous 1911 flood, the Water Department had thrown itself into

completing the proposed concrete dam at the mouth of Cedar Lake, ignoring

warnings that the basin's porous glacial soils were unstable. From the time that

workers poured the first column of concrete in 1914, the dam leaked, some­

times profusely, at its edges. Engineers proposed sealing the lake bottom with

asphalt, but that proved too costly and risked endangering water quality. At the

recommendation of consulting engineers, Thomson, now in private practice,

and William Mulholland, architect of the famed Los Angeles Aqueduct and

the head of that city's Department of Water and Power, workers ran a kind of

reverse regrade, sluicing mud and gravel onto the submerged lakebed to stop

the hemorrhaging. Their efforts staunched the leaks until the dam was finished

in autumn 1918. It was a temporary fix.58

In the evening of December 23, 1918, Charles Moore, the night watchman

for the North Bend Lumber Company in Edgewick, a small logging town in

the Cascade Mountains, was making his rounds along the company's millpond

on Boxley Creek. His job was important-to keep an eye on the creek's waters,

whose tempo rose with heavy winter rains. Almost two miles to the south, on

the other side of a high ridge, Cedar Lake lay behind a new $2 million masonry

dam, now leaking on its northern wing and pushing its way through the gla­

cial moraine that separated the reservoir from Boxley Creek below. Only days

before, W. C. Weeks, president of the North Bend Lumber Company, had com­

plained that the b anks above the creek were seeping. Seattle's city engineers had assured him that the fissures would disappear with time. Moore thrust his

lantern through the rain and observed that the creek was rising, a foot every

two minutes. The engineers were wrong.

Moore ran to the mill, pulled hard on the steam whistle, tied it down and then sped from door to door, shouting, "Out of your beds, the dam is going to

go!" Residents scrambled to put on their clothes and dashed out into the night

and onto high ground, with the muddy waters reaching their ankles, then to their knees, then up to their shoulders. Those who hesitated almost lost their

lives. A wall of water and mud a story high had pushed through the moraine,

swallowing over a half million cubic yards of earth as it rushed into Boxley

The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer 117

Creek. The mill and bunkhouses held back the torrent briefly, long enough for

the dawdlers to climb to safety. They huddled around a bonfire until daybreak.

AmaZingly, no one died.

The next morning, Christmas Eve, the residents of Edgewick picked through

the remains. Automobiles were perched atop broken homes or jammed into

ruined kitchens and living rooms. The surge carried most of the town down­

stream, clogging the Snoqualmie River with debris and cutting the main line of

the Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Paul Railroad to Seattle in two. Initial damage

estimates were more than a quarter million dollars for the North Bend Lumber

Company alone. The company and the town were totaled. 59

Who was to blame for the "Boxley Burst"? The city's two principal news­

papers called the proj ect a "white elephant" and said there was "no practical

way to make a water container out of a sieve:' Both lambasted the city council

for ignoring the advice of its paid consulting engineers, especially Thomson,

but the papers also noted that the same experts had promised that leaks could

be fixed. "The present predicament of the city;' the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

concluded, "would seem to be a refutation of those optimists:' Engineering

confidence was part of the problem. It was a lesson that many citizens of Seattle

already knew all too well. 60

The challenges of building a workable, efficient city had tantalized men like

R. H. Thomson, driven to surmount the physical environment's shortcomings

by improving upon nature's flawed design. Men like Thomson tried to write

new social rules and physical processes onto what they saw as a clean slate, and

in many ways they were successful. Engineers, business elites, entrepreneurs,

and planners-the paragons of Progressive virtue-tried to rationalize the so­

cial and environmental workings of the city all at once. Their idea of the pub­

lic was a people policed, regulated, marked out, and defined. Drawing social

boundaries on the city served the same purpose as drawing physical bound­

aries: it provided for the efficient delivery of goods, government, and services.

After all, the goal of the engineer, as Timothy Mitchell notes, is "to simplify the

world;' to rise above the exigencies of place, and thereby to gain "the powers of

expertise by resolving it into simple forces and oppositions": nature and tech­

nology, public good and private interest, efficiency and waste, order and chaos.

This is not necessarily a mission devoid of ethical purpose. Without Thomson's

efforts, Seattle would not have had pure water, cheap electricity, or clean sur-

118 The Imagination and Creative Energy of the Engineer

roundings. For Thomson the engineer, the physical environment was a source

of energy that, properly exploited, could vanquish disease, repel vice, and for­

tify the common good.61

It was a principle that Thomson would cling to after he left his office to

pursue other public-minded endeavors. He remained consumed by his work,

a human perpetual motion machine, serving on the Seattle city council from

1916 to 1922 while continuing to design the first floating bridge across Lake

Washington and facilities for the Port of Seattle. He even returned in 1930, for

one year, to oversee the completion of the Diablo Dam on the Skagit River

for Seattle City Light and his former protege, J. D. Ross. In his autobiography,

Thomson wrote that while he had accomplished much, there was a great deal

left to do "because a city is a growing thing, and what might satisfy today will

be insufficient tomorrow:'62

Thomson had failed to anticipate that physical processes, such as water

pushing against a dam, or frustrated citizens, such as angry homeowners,

could undermine the boldest plans. The regrades and the waterworks sprang

from a deep desire to reconcile cities with their environment in search of so­

cial order. That was the promise Thomson had in mind when he imagined

lifting Seattle from its "pit;' the promise he made, along with other reform­

ers, to remake Seattle's environment, hoping to achieve efficiency, equity, and

sometimes beauty. Thomson's ethic was an engineers' ethic, one fixed to a place

through his mastery of technology and knowledge deployed in the pursuit of

usefulness for the greatest number. In the minds of many citizens at the time,

Thomson's philosophy saved Seattle and its residents from disease, fire, and

pestilence plus the fraudulent machinations of corporate monopolies. Through

bending rivers and moving hills, the city engineer fortified Seattle against its

human and non-human enemies while turning it into a fit place to live. Yet by

linking social progress to the ability to improve nature, Thomson had, unin­

tentionally and ironically, further inscribed inequality and instability into the

landscapes of Seattle and its hinterlands. When his aspirations fell short, when

some people and some places suffered more than others did, many wondered

if the idea of improvement had failed. The battles that followed over civic jus­

tice and environmental protection had their beginnings in Thomson's anodyne

philosophy, and in the coming years they would grow ever more hostile.