Visitors and even longtime residents in Seattle’s Belltown and Denny Triangle neighborhoods are often surprised to learn about a major hill that existed in the area over one hundred years ago, a hill that was completely razed in one of the most ambitious (and some say foolhardy) public works projects in city history. What is left of Denny Hill is now mostly at the bottom of Elliott Bay, the homes that existed on top of it long gone. Seattle’s goal of creating more developable land by regrading the hill ultimately came to be, but it took decades for the area to be fully built-out after the massive undertaking was completed in 1911.
In this video from the Seattle Municipal Archives, created in the 1980s by the Seattle Engineering Department (which became SDOT), narrator Ward Collier walks through what it took to make the regrade happen and touches on some of the plans for the city that Seattle’s past generations considered and rejected, including the Bogue Plan. Completed at a time before environmental review, the Denny Regrade ultimately represents a very different kind of public works project than is possible now, but also the type of significant undertaking that Seattle has been pursuing ever since.
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including Capitol Hill Seattle, BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.