"One thing is clear: along the Duwamish I made no distinction between the odd things I created"

-- Richard Hugo, poet, technical writer for Boeing

Since the 1880's, the Lower Duwamish Waterway has been Seattle's largest industrial shipping and manufacturing district -- the river's historic use has left a complicated legacy. In September of 2001, five miles of the Lower Duwamish Waterway became a Superfund site, a designation that has drawn attention to the river's environmental problems and impact on public health. In addition to producing PCBs and other toxins, the river's long-term industrial use has made a significant impact on the regional economy. It has also influenced Seattle's social and cultural fabric, and inspired one of Seattle's best-known poets, Richard Hugo.

Is there a way to clean up years of industrial damage, while still keeping the cultural heritage of the region? Now that Seattle is beginning to look towards cleaning up the river, will it become something else?

"A tax collector couldn't find this place with holy maps"

Over one hundred years ago, Governor Semple and city boosters promoted dredging and straightening the Duwamish to encourage industrial growth along the river. The river provided a perfect deep-water port for loading ships. Industry created jobs, settlement, commerce, and a city; the plan worked well enough to create Seattle.

In Seattle's early years, timber, shipbuilding, brickyards, breweries, and canneries helped build the city. Along the banks grew a culture of industry and immigrant settlement. Richard Hugo celebrated this culture in his early poems. Places like Georgetown, South Park, and Riverside, grew up on the edges of Seattle's working waterway. Traces of the river and its influence on these communities still exist in small pockets along the water.

Today the river's edge is a place for both heavy and light manufacturing. The Duwamish industrial area's once ubiquitous inexpensive warehouse space is now downright rare. The east and west side of the waterway is an extensive working neighborhood of cement plants, shipping yards, shipbuilders, and construction companies providing services and products unavailable in any other part of Seattle.

According to a report by the Duwamish Coalition in 1995, a consortium of groups interested in a spectrum of social, economic, and environmental issues, the Duwamish Industrial Waterway employed 67,000 people accounting for a tenth of all the jobs in King County. In 1990, 26,000 salmon were harvested in the river, which makes the river one of the larger salmon runs in the region. In 2001 Seattle had over 120,000 industrial jobs with an average wage of $50,900 a year. Many of these jobs are along the river.

What does any of this have to do with historic preservation? As the city's economy changes, so does the culture of the place and civic priorities. The remains of the city's earlier water-dependent economies, some of which are still viable, are under active consideration. Fisherman's Terminal, another water-based industrial zone, was the focus of considerable controversy a few years ago when the Port of Seattle reviewed the possibility of accommodating pleasure craft within the century-old working fishing community.

The future of Seattle's waterfront along Elliott Bay is a primary urban design issue embraced by Allied Arts and city planners - the physical remains of the urban working waterfront are now virtually invisible. Seattle's waterfront, once the center of the city's economy, has been taken over in large part by business and services attractive (almost exclusively) to tourists.

"One tug pounds to haul an afternoon of logs up river."

Cleaning the river will change it and the communities along the water's edge. Preservation, or at least maintaining a preservation ethic, is one way to protect the historic character of the region while changes take place. And the process of preserving the industrial past, and its associated places has brought communities together around an identity they knew was quickly passing away. Elements of the past have helped these neighborhoods reinvent themselves (Georgetown is the most exceptional example) within authentic and unique historic places.

On the east side of the river, extensive community efforts, local investors, and some governmental support have helped revive the Rainer Cold Storage and Ice Building, the Seattle Brewing and Malting Company complex, the King County International Airport Terminal Building, the Hat n' Boots, the Starbucks Center Building (originally a Sears catalogue plant), Georgetown City Hall, and the Georgetown Steamplant.

On the river's west side, along West Marginal Way, the West Seattle Cultural Trail is perhaps the most extensive effort to honor the history of waterway as it changes. The trail's end, Terminal 107, was originally a Duwamish Indian settlement, then home to the immigrant squatter community of Riverside. It is now a public park managed by the Port of Seattle.

Terminal 107 is one of the few places the public can sit on the grass and watch the river. Local Research Artist Don Fels designed public art on the trail, which provides a perspective into the history of the human and natural dynamics of the place. He recently finished a book, Waters' Edge, based on his work and experiences in industrial Naples, Italy and his time researching and creating art on and about the Duwamish River.

In Waters' Edge, Fels writes:

"Of course, the very act of putting art along a working body of water like the Duwamish changes how people experience the place. Working industrial sites rarely co-exist with art. The Duwamish is a transition zone in a transition period. Nobody knows when, but at some point in the future, straightened or not, the waterway will no longer be seen as working."

Making an effort to tell the story of the river's history, Don realizes that public art will bring eyes to the river, much like environmental cleanup. He hopes his art will help people see the culture of the river. Currently he is working on a piece that will acknowledge how the industrial Duwamish River and Riverside community (now Terminal 107) inspired the poems of Richard Hugo.

Conversely, the poet's beloved work may inspire us to acknowledge the place of history in the river's revival.

"Morning brings a new wind and a new white coat of weather for the shack ..."

View last month's Preservation & Environment article

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