LAST GOODBYE TO ALASKAN WAY VIADUCT

   This Saturday was just like any other Saturdays, except I witnessed the tear down of the Seattle’s iconic structure, Alaskan Way viaduct. I have been seeing that structure for the last 12 years since I have been living in Seattle area. The Washington State Department of Transportation held a commemorative walk from 9:30am to 12:30pm on the top deck near the stadiums as crews demolished large sections of the viaduct, and walkers, including myself, enjoyed great views of the city from the structure that helped shape Seattle's waterfront. Even though it was a cold and rainy morning, thousands of people came to for the last sights of the structure. The Rat City Rollergirls and a motorcycle stunt team took over the Viaduct for half an hour. The roller derby team and the motorcycle stunt team called the Seattle Cossacks won a contest to spend 30 minutes on the viaduct.  The Rollergirls showed off their derby skills along several blocks of the viaduct and the Cossacks built human pyramids and performed stunts on their vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

The Alaskan Way Viaduct, completed on April 4, 1953, was a double-decked elevated section of State Route 99 that runs along the Elliott Bay waterfront in Seattle's Industrial District and downtown Seattle. The viaduct runs above the surface street, Alaskan Way, from S. Nevada Street in the south to the entrance of Belltown's Battery Street Tunnel in the north, following previously existing railroad lines.
The viaduct was damaged in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, and is proposed to be replaced, in part by an underground tunnel running beneath the city's downtown core.

The viaduct opened that year was built with enough steel to construct two Liberty ships, enough concrete to pave 30 miles of residential streets. And 18 minutes after the structure was opened, police had to deal with a traffic jam on the south ramp.

Emergency telephones were installed on each deck of the viaduct with a direct connection to police headquarters. Lights, 77 florescent kind spaced 60 feet apart on the lower deck, were the first of their kind in Seattle.

The Battery Street Tunnel didn’t open with the first viaduct section, leaving a missing link to Aurora Avenue North. It was completed about a year later.
The viaduct was built partially in response to traffic congestion along Alaskan Way, which was called Railroad Avenue until its 1936 renaming.

The viaduct was proposed to help alleviate downtown traffic after a 1946 survey by the State Highway Department and City Engineering department recommended building it.

Former city engineer R.W. Finke, who served from May 1948 to December 1952, was a strong supporter of the project. The first viaduct contract was awarded Dec. 29, 1949 and work started in early 1950, according to archived P-I accounts. H.W. Tyler was the principal design engineer and R.M. Murray was a design consultant. The Bureau of Public Roads and State Highway Department checked the original viaduct plans, and Corwin A. Pilon was resident engineer in charge.

On January 12, 2009, the state of Washington, King County, the city of Seattle, and the Port of Seattle revealed that they had agreed to replace the viaduct with a four-lane, 2-mile long underground tunnel. The tunnel would have a south portal in SoDo, near CenturyLink Field, and a north portal near Thomas Street, north of the Battery Street Tunnel.

The project is estimated to cost US$4.25 billion, with the state, city, and county promising funding well short of the estimate. The state will fund boring of the tunnels, while the city and county will fund surface street improvements and repairs to the Alaskan Way Seawall. There is at present no publicly-known timetable for the construction and opening of the tunnel. Construction of the tunnel has been scheduled to end in late 2015, with the potential length of the project being 6 years.