loading . . . UW students resurrect Seattle cityscape that I-5 erased By
Jean Sherrard
Special to The Seattle Times
BURIED GHOSTS BECKON from beneath the concrete of the Interstate 5 corridor. The homes and businesses it displaced in the early 1960s contained the stories of all who lived there — families, laborers and shopkeepers, yes, along with rogues, miscreants and scofflaws.
For the past three years, Elisa Renouard, a lecturer in the University of Washington Department of Architecture, has led her students on a remarkable adventure. Called “City Erased,” the project maps lost neighborhoods plowed under by the massive freeway.
“For architecture students,” she says, “this is a surprisingly rare opportunity to dig into old maps, photos and city records. For me, it’s a real treat to spend time down the rabbit hole with them.”
Renouard’s students build faithful, 3D digital and physical models, reconstructing streets that no longer exist along with prominent lost structures like the Hotel Kalmar at Sixth Avenue and James Street, a favorite of architect Victor Steinbrueck.
Also included are what Renouard calls “quieter stories” that reveal the ordinary fabric of a city that progress chose to pave. In Seattle and other cities across America, that path fell disproportionately on immigrant neighborhoods and communities of color.
Case in point: “the castle,” a boardinghouse at Sixth and Jefferson whose records drew architecture graduate Rebecca Schaffer into archives and yielded what many old buildings contain — the comedy and pathos of everyday life. Weddings. Burglaries. Speeding tickets. Edward Harris, a “castle” resident facing 29 traffic violations in 1951, admitted to the judge, “I guess my foot’s a little heavy on the accelerator.”
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One family gave the building its soul. Tolia “Tony” Tolias, a Greek immigrant and sea captain, arrived in Seattle in 1918 and stayed for more than 30 years. Schaffer says she imagines him in retirement watching the boats come into harbor while the city slowly filled in, views narrowing. Tolias died in 1956, two years before the freeway demolished his block.
“It’s bittersweet,” Schaffer says. “It’s made me feel a sort of grief over a loss that I never knew.”
Student Leslie Diaz de Leon Flores puts it another way. The old records, she says, “provide a treasure hunt to understand the secret lives of buildings — to start to imagine what it was like to live in this city, in this particular year, and to walk down those streets.”
“City Erased” is on display at the UW’s Gould Hall, across from the College Inn. The exhibit runs through May 29 and is free and open to the public.
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Jean Sherrard is a contributing writer for Now & Then. Check out his and Clay Eals' blog at pauldorpat.com to learn how to schedule the two for presentations on local history. They share their 360-degree video at the YouTube channel Now & Then 360.
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