Curving ramps connect Waterfront Park to Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market.
Photographer: James S. Russell/Bloomberg CityLab
Can a Waterfront Park Wake Up Downtown Seattle?
After demolishing an elevated highway and digging a $3 billion tunnel, the Pacific Northwest’s largest city is eager to show off its “new front door.”
Toddlers crawling up a rope ladder inside a wooden jellyfish were among the Seattleites who celebrated the grand opening of its long-awaited Waterfront Park on Sept. 6. The 25-foot-high play structure is part of an aquatic-themed playground for the new park — one of the largest and most logistically challenging public projects in the US.
Transforming this 1.2-mile stretch along Elliott Bay took 15 years and required the replacement of a crumbling seawall and the demolition of an earthquake-damaged highway viaduct. It cost more than $800 million, not counting the $3.3 billion it took to dig a two-mile highway tunnel for the traffic the viaduct once carried.