The Regrades

Reginald Heber Thomson arrived in Seattle in the early 1880s, became city surveyor in 1884 and city engineer in 1892, then spent a generation reshaping the city.

His diagnosis appears in the 1908 Annual Report. Seattle's founders, he wrote, had platted the land "with but little regard as to whether the streets could ever be used or not, the main idea being, apparently, to sell the lots."

Seattle's earliest claims and plats produced durable boundaries, including the seam that became Yesler Way. Here the city's own chief engineer states the consequence: much of the grid was drawn to sell land, not to follow usable grades, so the ground would be changed to fit it.

His remedy was equally direct. "Seattle was in a pit," he later wrote, "that to get anywhere we would be compelled to climb out if we could."

Seattle's hills are largely glacial clay, sand, cobbles, and boulders rather than solid bedrock. Engineers could therefore cut them with water under pressure.

A hydraulic giant—an articulated nozzle operated by a crew—turned hillsides into slurry. On Jackson Street, water emerged at about ninety pounds per square inch and a crew could move roughly a thousand cubic yards in an eight-hour shift.

The city's drinking water was not used to wash Denny Hill away. On the Jackson Street job, only about a quarter of the water came from the Cedar River supply; the rest was pumped from Elliott Bay and Lake Washington.

Denny Hill covered about sixty-five city blocks — a little over two hundred acres — roughly between 1st Avenue, Westlake, Pike and Broad. It topped out around 220 feet, half the height of Queen Anne or Capitol Hill, with its northern summit at 4th and Blanchard.

It was not empty. A survey of the area in 1893 counted at least 320 single-family homes and 69 multi-family buildings, along with 26 stables, 218 sheds and 10 hotels.

That is 389 buildings of housing—a figure often missing when the regrades are remembered mainly as quantities of earth.

When the last of the hill went in 1930, the Seattle Times described what had been cleared as "ill-kept streets, run-down residences, aged public and semipublic structures." That is the era's own account of what it thought it was removing.

A regrade required a petition from at least half the affected residents. Ordinances then defined the work and financed it through a Local Improvement District, charging owners according to an appointed panel's estimate of each property's gain and loss.

The problem was not really the process. It was what came after it. Homeowners had ten years to repay their assessment at six percent interest. They also owed tax on the new, higher assessed value of the land. And they owed the contractor, separately, for lowering their own property.

HistoryLink summarizes the result plainly: many could not afford the payments.

The arithmetic resembles a development pro forma—cost, increase in value, financing term, interest, and carrying costs—but imposed across a neighborhood. The households for whom the numbers did not close still had to absorb the change.

Six isolated buttes remained above the flattened hill in 1910. Seattle later called them "spite mounds" and told stories of owners refusing to cooperate, sometimes reaching their houses by ladder. The surviving record does not support that account.

As far as the records show, none of the five owners opposed the regrade. Zachariah Holden told a reporter he did not have the money to lower his lot; he later borrowed it. James Kelley, owner of two mounds, had been away when the contractor sought permission and rejected the accusation of spite when he returned.

The famous photographs appear to record financial constraint and project timing, not stubbornness. A century of retelling turned that hardship into a civic joke.

The fourth regrade finished in 1911, but little development followed for seventeen years. The final project began in 1929, using electric shovels and conveyor belts instead of water. Self-dumping scows carried the earth into Elliott Bay.

On 10 December 1930, Mayor Frank Edwards took the ceremonial last scoop. Hundreds watched, including people born and schooled on the hill. "There were many moist eyes," a reporter wrote.

The final regrade moved 4,354,625 cubic yards and cost $2,261,800. Across all five projects, 11,112,025 cubic yards of Seattle went into the bay — most of it, on HistoryLink's account, unused for any purpose.

Not all waste. The third regrade's spoil was carried off on a small steam railway and dumped around Pine and Olive, which is the gentle slope that now runs up past the Paramount towards Capitol Hill. If you have walked it, you have walked on Denny Hill.

Jackson Street Hill ran from Washington Street to Lane and from 6th Avenue S to 12th, part of the ridge joining First Hill to Beacon Hill. Its streets reached grades of nineteen percent, and hauling goods up them could cost five times what it cost on the flat, because the work was still done by horses.

Property owners petitioned in October 1905 and the council passed the authorising ordinance on 8 February 1906. Then the city ran into the fact that much of the hill was privately owned, and had to condemn it.

For six weeks in 1906, a Seattle jury heard six hundred condemnation suits and returned a verdict in every case. Many ratified negotiated agreements; others were bitterly contested.

Six hundred cases give the project a human scale. Alongside the cubic yards were an ordinance, a condemnation docket, an assessment roll, and hundreds of individual properties.

When the owners signed the Jackson Street petition they agreed to an assessment of six dollars a foot. When the city actually levied it, the figure came out nearer nine.

Owners sued, and in 1908 the Washington Supreme Court invalidated the assessment. Many then refused even the original six-dollar figure, depriving the city of money needed to pay the contractor. Work stopped with the job about 70 percent complete.

Enough owners later returned to the original rate for construction to resume, but fewer than half had committed by spring. The work finished with a quarter-million-dollar deficit still unresolved.

The lesson the record actually teaches is not that the owners were unreasonable or that the city was crooked. It is that a public work financed by charging its beneficiaries depends entirely on the estimate being right, and the estimate was out by fifty percent.

By the end, Jackson Street's grade had come down from as much as seventeen percent to five, and King Street's from nineteen and a half to six. About 3.35 million cubic yards were moved. The Board of Public Works accepted the job on 8 March 1910. It remains the largest single hill ever removed in Seattle.

The work killed people. A hose operator dropped his nozzle and it whipped round and struck him. Another man drowned in the flume that drained the pit. A worker thawing dynamite over an open flame set it off and killed a nine-year-old boy standing nearby.

The engineering premise weakened almost immediately. The case for the Jackson Street regrade centered on the difficulty of hauling freight by horse. Motor trucks arrived within the decade and substantially reduced the cost of moving goods on steep grades.

The regraded district became the western part of Chinatown and later the Chinatown-International District. Yet the specific transportation problem that justified thirty months of work and cost three lives was soon being addressed by a different technology.

Seattle began changing street grades before Thomson's major projects, in the aftermath of the 1889 fire.

A month after the Great Fire, Seattle decided to raise nearby streets by as much as thirty-five feet. Retaining structures held the fill while new roadways and sidewalks were built above the old grade, leaving rebuilt ground floors and passages below. That remnant became the Seattle Underground.

It is the clearest thing in the city about what a regrade is: not the removal of a hill, but the decision that the ground is at a different height now, taken by ordinance, with everything already built on it left to cope.

The map's Topography layer draws the City of Seattle's 2016 LiDAR contours—index lines every fifty feet, with ten-foot lines appearing as you zoom in.

North of Pike Street those lines go quiet, and stay quiet across sixty-five blocks. That silence is not terrain. It is eleven million cubic yards of removal, five contracts, two ordinances, an assessment roll and, in 1893, three hundred and eighty-nine buildings of housing.

Slope affects excavation, access, drainage, and whether some housing forms fit at all. Much of Seattle's flat central land is flat because the city paid to make it so—and billed the people who stood on it.

The quiet contour lines are therefore not neutral terrain. They record contracts, assessments, displaced buildings, and deliberate decisions about the ground.