Seattle, WA Real Estate Information

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Seattle, WA Photos

The gold rush led to massive immigration. Many of Seattle\\\’s neighborhoods got their start around this time. Downtown Seattle was bustling with activity; as quickly as previous inhabitants moved out to newly created neighborhoods, new immigrants came in to take their place in the city core.

Once the obvious extensions of downtown had been made along the flatlands to the north and south, streetcars began providing transportation to new outlying neighborhoods.

Following the vision of city engineer R.H. Thompson, who had already played a key role in the development of municipal utilities, a massive effort was made to level the steep hills that rose south and north of the bustling city. A seawall containing spoils (dirt) sluiced from the Denny Regrade created the current waterfront. More spoils from the Denny Regrade went to build the industrial Harbor Island at the mouth of the Duwamish River, south of Downtown.

The Denny Regrade wasn\’t the only radical reshaping of Seattle\’s topography in this period. The slightly earlier Jackson Regrade had already reshaped Pioneer Square and the International District. The 1911–1917 construction of the Lake Washington Ship Canal included two major \”cuts\” (the Montlake Cut and the Fremont Cut), four bascule bridges, and the Government Locks (now Hiram M. Chittenden Locks). The level of Lake Washington dropped; the Black River, which formerly ran out of the south end of the lake, dried up completely, and Seward Island became the Seward Peninsula, now the site of Seward Park.

All of the expansion was happening without zoning, leading to \”different land uses and economic classes everywhere [being] mixed.\”

At the same time as the city was expanding dramatically, the city planners began to put in parks and boulevards under a plan designed by the Olmsted Firm, providing numerous parks and about twenty miles of boulevard which link most of the parks and greenbelts within the city limits. Much of the ambiance of Seattle today derives from this project.