Jun 27, 2009 08:14 pm
by Scott Schrantz
In Seattle Waterfront History, Chapter Six, Paul Dorpat takes a close look at the Seattle waterfront, before humans covered it up with train tracks, parking lots, and viaducts. This week he starts out by looking at the beaches below Belltown, and the original bluffs that are sorta still there in the area where the Battery Street tunnel comes out into the sunlight. He looks from up close, then from far away using a couple of early panoramas of Seattle, which show the Belltown area as a wild forest far from town. It’s all excellent stuff, and quite possibly the most in-depth examination of Seattle’s original shoreline that has ever been done.
Thanks for noticing Scott. As for “most in-depth” it depends on what is being waded into. I do not think it likely, however, that anyone has taken a half year off (for me from writing Keep Clam, my bio of Ivar yet to be completed) to write an illustrated history of the Seattle waterfront unless invited and mildly subsidized to do it. By dint of nearly constant writing, I did have a few decades of it on several waterfront subjects behind me and some pretty good files beyond that to help. And the city council gave me something comparable to one of those old minimum wage CETA grants to artists that came out of – yes – the Nixon administration in the early-mid 70s. Really, that – or Nixon – is how I got started studying regional history. Soon I’ll post Chapter Seven. How many there will “ultimately” depends on how I section it. I suspect there may be another sixty or seventy chapters to come. So they will continue through the new year. If someone needs to read ahead for a project or even pleasure – imagine! – city council did give copies to all the libraries. But I am adding to it with this blog version. Back to Ivar.