Sign advertising land on Perkins Lane in Seattle. “No Slides.” Apr 14, 1938. Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.
Slide @ 2445 Perkins Lane. Jan 27, 1954. Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.
Perkins Lane: No Slides
July 28th, 2010 @ 12:01 am by Cliffe | Sorted Photo Exposure |
Perkins Lane — it’s been called “the ground-zero of Seattle landslides.” See the sign advertising land with a view in 1938 and below in 1954 a homeowner finds out what “no slides” really means. If you can afford a house on this street maybe you also have enough money to watch your house fall into the ocean, scrap it, and build a new one. Click for the high res.
Sign advertising land on Perkins Lane in Seattle. “No Slides.” Apr 14, 1938. Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.
Slide @ 2445 Perkins Lane. Jan 27, 1954. Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.
Sign advertising land on Perkins Lane in Seattle. “No Slides.” Apr 14, 1938. Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.
Slide @ 2445 Perkins Lane. Jan 27, 1954. Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.
I was curious to see what house was on that spot now. I can’t use Google streetview at work, but I did look at the tax info online. The current house with that address was built in 1963 and is still standing. Did they wait almost a decade to rebuild or was there another house/landslide during that time? Did they build on the same spot after reinforcing the land or did they just move the new house forward & take a chance? So many unanswered questions!
This must have been before Truth in Advertising, right? Back when caveat emptor still applied and our court system had little to occupy itself with. Great photos Jess. The doleful posture of the onlooker suggests that he now wishes he’d taken that Basic Geology class in college instead of Introduction to Business Management.
I was hired by an insurance company in the late 90′s to salvage a list of items out of a house that slid on Perkins Lane. It was terrifying! Every thing in the house was on the floor, we had to dig under piles of things to find the dressers, desks and cabinets that the items were located in. There was plenty of alcohol, the owners had a large bar that survived and the drinks made the us workers much more fearless.
Nice find! Gotta love real estate advertising. Always so honest.
Who was that civil engineer?
That area was the site of a major lawsuit in the 1990′s when several houses slide down the hill. Ultimately, fault should have been placed with the Geotechnical Engineer (Geo Engineers, Inc) for not completely a more thourough study on a steep slope especially if it was a known slide area from the 1950′s. The City is not at fault for these situations. The contractor may have had some fault as well for improper site maintainance and soil movement during construction, but that cannot be properly known. Nonetheless, the lawsuit nearly bacame a huge precident in our legal system. Basically, the six year statute of limitations had just run out months before the slide. The one year statute of discovery may have run out as well. As such, home-owners were technically unable to sue the original designers/contractors. Had the home-owners been allowed to sue the designers/contractors, who were clearly at fault, it would have set a huge precedent opening lawsuits to future projects under-going any calamity however small. There was no middle ground to be had. Obviously there was a tremendous amount of pressure from Builders’ lobbists who are already one of the top power-houses of politics in Washington. Even the houses themselves, while mostly intact, or even somewhat habital, had been completely vandalized during the lawsuit. With the houses being unoccupied, they were havens for gangs, druggies, drug deals, the homeless, etc. They became covered in graffiti, filthy, trashed full of garbage, and yes feces and urine. So, in the end, home-owners got nothing. Actually, they got less than nothing because a majority of them were still required to pay off their home loan or commit bankruptcy.
If your slope is not solid bed rock, it is moving downhill.
That is a fact of nature. It may be so slow you cannot see it but one heavy rainy season, or an earthquake can make that fact all too evident. I have lived on the same slope for 60+ years, trust me it is moving. Luckily it is not a problem….YET1
Jack: Too right! Here’s a story:
In considering whether to buy our first house, a 1912 cutie, I called an engineer whose name and number I had been given and worried out loud about a big crack in the foundation where it had bulged into the basement. This breach had long ago been buttressed with concrete and with big wooden beams you couldn’t buy today. It looked ugly but seemed stable. This engineer heard my description of the situation and when I was through gobbling he asked me in a thick mid-east accent, “tell me, when you buy something do you expect it to be perfect?”
“Wut?” says I, taken aback.
“I mean when you buy something — a vacuum cleaner, a car — do you expect that you will never have any troubles with it?”
He had heard my question but he had correctly read my fear, and he went on to tell me that every foundation in every house on Queen Anne is slowly, slowly moving, and every house is sliding down the hill, and that every hill in Seattle is slowly becoming not-a-hill. That is the nature of life among hills. He said if I wanted to throw money at him he would come over and “talk to the wall” but that he advised me to buy the house if I liked it, noting that “only Allah makes perfect things.” We bought the house. The basement leaked in three places, but not from the broken part of the founation. We lived there happily seven years, sold it to a couple who were willing to take the same risk. Not sure what my point is, but there you go.
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