The outrageous traffic, that makes my commute home every day on I-90 feel like sitting in a parking lot, reminds me that it is once again baseball season.
Before the Mar iners we had the Pilots — but just for one season
in 1969. Here is Max R. Jensen showing us from the air how it was done back at Sick’s Seattle Stadium.
Click for the high res.
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| A Major League Baseball game in progress here in Sick’ s Seattle Stadium. Downtown Seattle and Elliott Bay are seen in the background. Color photo by Max R. Jensen. |
Cool photo! What’s that viaduct over MLK? Is that the state road that used to go over the floating bridge?
I think you’re actually looking at the “viaduct” crossing over Rainier Ave. in the picture. MLK is the arterial in the immediate foreground. If this is a 1969 picture then that would indeed be the old road heading off to the (original) floating bridge.
Yes, that’s 1-90 crossing over Rainier Ave. and heading into the turn that dumped it out onto Dearborn, where there was a light. All the way from Boston with only two red lights — one in Wallace, Idaho, and one just yards shy of the Emerald City.
Mind-boggling that you can see right through downtown to the roof of the Coliseum here.
Oh, Seattle, you haven’t changed one bit!
http://i44.tinypic.com/24gljr4.jpg
I don’t think that overpass went over MLK back then, but over Empire Way. I drove from Renton to Uwajimaya this week, marveling all the way how so many things have changed but so many are the same. One thing that’s cool is now knowing how the Dearborn cut & Columbian Way got to be the way they are.
Matt The J: It’s still the Coliseum to us….. Key Arena? Sounds like a term something like David Stern would use.
I grew up on Beacon Hill and remember coming home from trips to Bellevue Square. We had to wait at a stop sign to turn left across traffic from that I-90 overpass and onto 17th Avenue to get home.
When I see the amount of traffic heading around that bend today, I can’t fathom that we’d actually have to turn in front of them!
Steve, wow, I just took a look at that spot on HistoricAerials.com. The 1969 dataset shows a traffic engineer’s nightmare of a 4-way stop there. I drove (rode, in the back seat of the family car) past there a million times and never noticed that.
Does anyone know why the ramps for the 1-90/I-5 interchange stood hanging unfinished in midair for twenty years? Those ramps to empty space were a part of my childhood that we just accepted, never thinking they’d ever connect to anything. Then suddenly, when I was in college, work resumed as if nothing was amiss. The same thing was true for the piers for the new East Channel Bridge from Mercer Island to the “mainland” Eastside. They stood there in the water for decades like…well, like piers waiting for a bridge. And then the bridge was built years later. Was it funding dearth? Political opposition? Did someone forget where they left their tools?
The empty ramps were in part do to the multitude of lawsuits et all that kept everyone wondering if they would be used and if so where to…
The last 10 miles were the most expensive in interstate history prior to the big dig in Boston. Everyone held I-90 ransom to lids, parks and fencing etc. Everyone piled on and then there were still some idea as to where stadiums would go, and so on…
As to the East Channel Bridge, if I recall correctly there was small but significant error in the height and angle of the columns that involved litigation, and nothing could move forward till it was decided who would pay for what and how much… I seem to recall the pillars were too high, and off by some distance like a foot or two of where they were supposed to go. They had to be modified before they could be used.
They had to be built the new East Channel bridge much higher than the old bridge as they were taking the bulge out of the old floating bridge, and it would no longer be able to open. The second bridge was also never to open, and so the East Channel bridge had to be some 25 to 28 feet taller… I may be off by the numbers but I do recall the issues…
As an aside, long before the Pilots, when the Rainiers took the field there were cheap seats up on the hill. My dad recalls that before those apartments were built on the ridge to the east, they were small plots of land often planted by farmers and were the “cheap seats” to watch the games from.
Matt, weren’t there stoplights along I-90 through North Bend until the mid 70s, before the road was re-routed to it’s current alignment?
Sean, you’re right, by golly. I just remember this factoid of there being one stoplight left on I-90 during the ’90s and it was in Wallace, Idaho. So after they bypassed downtown North Bend but before they connected I-90 to I-5…please insert my comment in that time-frame. Thank you.
What I wouldnt give to have a debate with you about this. You just say so many things that come from nowhere that Im quite positive Id have a fair shot. Your weblog is wonderful visually, I mean people wont be bored. But others who can see past the videos and the layout wont be so impressed with your generic understanding of this topic.