The Last Year of the Viaduct

These photos were taken years ago and are being revisited here as a retrospective. What follows is an AI's interpretation of the images and what it imagines about the life behind them. The real story comes after — jump to it.

There's a concrete highway that used to run along the Seattle waterfront. Two decks, built in the fifties, ugly in the way that only midcentury infrastructure can be ugly. It blocked the view of the water from half of downtown. Everyone complained about it. Architects wrote op-eds. The city spent decades arguing about what to replace it with.

On January 11th, 2019, they finally closed it. By summer it was rubble. The waterfront opened up for the first time in sixty years.

These photos were all taken in 2018. The photographer didn't know it was the last year. Or maybe that's exactly what they knew.

Spring. A ferry pulls away from the terminal and someone turns around to shoot the whole skyline in one pass. The Needle, the glass towers, the port cranes at attention on the far right. A woman leans on the rail at the edge of the frame, uncropped. The wake fans out behind the boat. This is how Seattle looks when it's getting smaller — when the city is the thing you're leaving, not the thing you're in.

Same month, two different ways of looking. First: straight up at a Pioneer Square facade, the terracotta and cast-iron ornament that sits above the first floor where nobody bothers to look. The Great Fire burned this block flat in 1889 and they rebuilt it with the kind of detail that costs real money. Then: out toward the water at dusk, old pier pilings in the shallows, sailboats on the Sound, the Olympics running low on the horizon. The pilings are from a dock that's been gone long enough that no one remembers what it was for. Seattle leaves these skeletons standing. They become part of the shoreline.

Fall. Pike Place Market close to midnight. The Athenian's neon buzzes over an empty corridor, Lowell's glows further down, and the tile floor is wet enough to double everything. In twelve hours this place will be shoulder to shoulder with tourists buying fish and flowers. Right now it's just the signs, still running, and one person with a phone who lives close enough to walk here when there's no reason to.

New Year's Eve. Someone brought the Sony up to a rooftop and pointed it west. The Great Wheel. A ferry heading for Bainbridge. Steam climbing from an old building. And there, cutting through the middle of both frames: the viaduct, with cars still on it.

That's the detail that'll be hardest to remember. Not what the highway looked like — there are plenty of photos of that — but that people were just driving on it, on a Tuesday evening, like it would be there forever. At the left edge of one frame, someone else leans out with a camera. They're both shooting the same waterfront, the same highway, the same last winter of a thing everyone said they wanted gone. Eleven days left.

The thing about a city losing a piece of itself is that nobody agrees on when to stop missing it.