Scale in the City 1900-1909

Edith Macefield died peacefully at home in June. She was the Ballard resident who refused to sell her home to a developer who then built around her bungalow, surrounding and overshadowing it.

The picture of Edith’s small two-bedroom house engulfed by huge concrete walls that snuggle up to the kitchen windows tells many stories. One of them is about how cities change over time gaining and losing definitions of place, some for the better, some for the worse. One of the transforming factors – illustrated so well in Edith’s circumstance – is the change in scale that happens as cities ebb and flow.

Edith’s house dates from the first quarter of the 20th c., probably within ten years of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Obviously, the sole mega-store that now engulfs the house represents a huge change in scale as a cluster of single family houses and low-rise industrial buildings in the shadow of the Ballard Bridge got gobbled up. Although the Edith’s example suggests that it takes one hundred years to make such a big change in scale, the truth is that within 20 years of the Klondike Gold Rush and just before the A-Y-P, downtown Seattle experienced a gigantic shift in building scale.

Comparing the 1892 Interurban Building and its neighbor, the 1914 Smith Tower, makes the point. The Interurban on the southeast corner of Yester and Occidental like most of the Pioneer Square buildings built immediately after the fire of 1889 has masonry load bearing walls. In buildings like this, the exterior brick walls keep the weather out and hold the building up. The Interurban Building’s six-stories occupy a small portion of the block with 14 bays of narrow windows facing Yesler Way. Its scale is typical of buildings constructed in Pioneer Square after 1889.

Just across the street from the Interurban on Second Avenue and standing very tall and proud at 35 stories, the Smith Tower trumpets the change in the scale of the city that took place in the decades following the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. It is a classic steel-frame skyscraper with a curtain wall of white glazed terra-cotta and glass whose only purpose is to keep the weather out while the steel frame holds it up. Indeed, pockets on the back of each terra cotta panels are filled with lead into which a simple hangar has been fixed. The hanger holds the panel in place while the spaces between the panels are filled with a matching white mortar. Gladding McBean of Nevada provided the terra cotta while Gaggin and Gaggin of Syracuse, New York designed the skyscraper for the Smiths.

The technology to build skyscrapers was not new. The first one was constructed in Chicago 30 years before the Smith Tower. The elevators and electric light bulbs that make tall and deep buildings possible are both 19th c. technologies. Seattle only lacked the money, increases in population and the demand on space that the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush brought in spades. Built in 1904 with profits from the Klondike Gold Rush in the Beaux-Arts style, the 14-story Alaska Building on the southeast corner of Cherry Street and Second Avenue introduced skyscraper technology to Seattle. The building, now being converted to hotel uses, housed the offices of the Scandinavian-American Bank. Founded in 1892 by Andrew Chilberg, the bank was a primary beneficiary of the Klondike Gold Rush. Chilberg, of Swedish descent, served as the President of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. It is a marvelous example of the change in scale that occurred as soon as Gold Rush money hit town. Like most of Seattle’s early skyscrapers, it was the work of out-of-town architects, in this case Eames and Young of St. Louis.

The buildings and grounds of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition represent another major change in urban scale. Even though the site was ideally located on a tract of land near downtown piers, train stations, hotels and stores, it was essentially undeveloped land covered by a vast old-growth forest of evergreen trees. The Fairs landscape architects. the Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts, cut down most of the trees on the 250 acre site carved broad sweeping streets and captured vistas from them. With lead architects from the San Francisco of Howard and Galloway, they designed massive fountains and a cascading stream whose size showed how people could transform nature to suit their own purposes. The Olmsted’s defined the scale of the fairgrounds making sure the promenades were broad and sweeping, that the views were long and dramatic and that moving from one zone to another was easy wherever one started out.

The Fair’s curving roadways were a marked departure from the straight streets set at right angles to one another that are found almost everywhere in Seattle’s 19th and early 20th c. urban plans. They belonged to the progressive movement as reflected in the design schemes developed for the 1983 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (See accompanying Featured Story on the City Beautiful movement). The A-Y-P designs and the short time allowed for their completion signaled to Seattle’s public that whole neighborhoods could be cut from a single cloth and that they could have an integrated design that did not have to connect to the surrounding city at every street corner.

The demise of the grid and A-Y-P innovations leads to the cul-de-sacs and sweeping circles of contemporary suburbia even though they first found expression in Seattle’s gated communities (The Highlands, Broadmoor). The Olmsteds effective redefined the scale of the city making it more humane not only because their plans made it much easier to move around in the new neighborhoods, but also because the places for large-scale developments were self-contained.

The ability to visualize the structure, shape of the neighborhood, the park, the campus, made it possible to insert giant exhibition halls or classroom buildings on a new scale without overwhelming the people who they served.

Interestingly, the giant neighborhoods with their giant buildings did not immediately transfer to existing cities. Manhattan’s orthogonal grid of 1812 resisted intrusive curves. Suburbs with small free-standing homes or low-rise apartment houses set far apart from one another in grassy gardens are the most prevalent signs of Progressive urban planning of the 20th c. Only now in the 21st c., are we seeing – especially in Asia – new neighborhoods designed with streets not unlike those proposed by the Olmsted’s for the A-Y-P to accommodate the imposing demands of buildings well over 10 times the height of Seattle’s 1904 Alaska Building. Edith Macefield’s challenge to the developers who wanted her home has been echoed in China. Unfortunately, easements are among the very few tools available to landowners who choose to resist development. They are the only way simple folks can outlast the brutal forces of ‘progress’ from generation to generation, and they only work in a litigious democracy such as ours.