Marvelous creations, even when unseen

The Seattle Aquarium at Pier 59 on the central waterfront opened its new Ocean Pavilion to great acclaim a year ago, and, as enthusiastic patrons of such things, we had to sheepishly confess to friends, who asked, that we had not yet made time to see it for ourselves. The signature architectural feature of the Alaskan yellow cedar clad new building is an oculus let into the bottom of the nearly‐500,000‐gallon Reef exhibit tank that is suspended above the cantilevered entrance, home to creatures from the Coral Triangle region of the Indo–Pacific, which, because of its biodiversity, was characterized in 2018 as the Amazon rainforest of the ocean by Dr. Rob Dunbar, then and now the W.M. Keck Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University.¹ One stands beneath the oculus to gape at the fish, sharks, and rays swimming overhead amid some of the more than forty species of coral that are at home in the water.

The City of Seattle is nearing completion of its new twenty‐acre Waterfront Park, with the major elements of construction done and only the shine and polish remaining before the ceremonial ribbon‐cutting. Because the Seattle Aquarium marks the north border of the new park and fair weather was in the forecast, the same friends to whom we had made our confession of delinquency joined us Monday afternoon this week in a visit to the aquarium and for a stroll around the neighboring features of the park.

We began at Pike Place Market where Victor Steinbrueck Park overlooks the aquarium, first stopping for lunch at Cafe Campagne to be sure the food was up to par. It was later difficult to bid farewell to the charm of and good service at the cafe, but we had a schedule to keep and so eventually pushed back from our table, whereupon the aquarium became the focus of our attention. It is reached from the market by crossing the new and aptly named Overlook Walk spanning Alaskan Way, beneath which preparations were being made for the installation of the 2025 Ann Hamilton art composition named Guests, which the artist — who has won the Heinz Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other honors — describes as, A congregation of large‐scale puppet‐like figures who greet and witness the street, the water and the setting sun. Hamilton previously created the excellent LEW wood floor in 2004 in the Rem Koolhaas‐designed Seattle Central Library building, and I am eager to see this new work from her. We stepped down onto the concrete apron before the Ocean Pavilion and, unabashedly, stood transfixed by the creatures swimming beyond the oculus, a luminous porthole into a sibilant world, as, somewhere nearby, a sea lion barked its stonks of resolution.²

Around us were all manner of changes to the cityscape done for the creation of Waterfront Park, which we had also come to see. Before we set foot in the aquarium, we had begun making plans to return to the park, which has taken fifteen years to develop, to promenade along its entire twenty‐six‐block length. In some ways, the park may be said to have been on meeting agendas since shortly after the first stretch of the sixty‐foot‐tall, 7,600‐foot‐long Alaskan Way Viaduct opened on April 4, 1953, when, as local architect Paul Thiry in 1947 had predicted it would, the elevated freeway had become a blight and created a slum along the waterfront.³ It took damage from an earthquake in 2001 and then eight years of debate to decide to tear down the viaduct and replace it with a deep‐bored tunnel to transport the 110,000 vehicles that were carried on it each day past Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. Construction on the tunnel began in 2013. It opened to traffic six years later, and the viaduct was demolished. Walking through the volume of space once occupied by that great monster of a fence and then across the ground beneath which the tunnel that replaced it is concealed quickened my pulse, particularly because at the same time, a BNSF train bound for Interbay emerged from the Great Northern Tunnel across Alaskan Way from the aquarium entrance.

A chance moment in my teenage years helped to ignite an enduring interest in the subterranean realm of cities. I was meandering around Pioneer Square and the International District of Seattle, probably not in school where I belonged that day, when I happened to see a railroad tunnel portal at Main Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues into which tracks aimed directly toward the center of the city disappeared. The portal was unglamorous; stained with soot; without decorative relief; framed by weeds and litter; carved into an embankment at the end of a trench at the foot of Jackson Hill into which the tracks had been laid. I easily recall how sensational it was to discover the tunnel, and, although directly behind me was an active passenger depot and little doubt that the tunnel was not an abandoned relic, I waited until a train passed beneath the crown of the portal to satisfy myself that, indeed, there was an operating railroad tunnel dug below downtown Seattle. I had no idea then where it led, but I later learned that it was 5,141 feet long, deposited its traffic below Pine Street near the seawall, and, when completed in 1905, it was the tallest and widest tunnel in the United States, having been built at the direction of James Hill, the owner of the Great Northern Railway, after Reginald Thomson, the Seattle City Engineer, required its construction in order to ease congestion on the streets above.

In that hour of discovery, I would have also recently taken Bill Speidel’s tour of nearby Seattle Underground (as he called it), which explored storefronts and sidewalks entombed when the city rebuilt on top of itself after the Great Fire of 1889. There I learned that the district had been a low‐lying island amid the tidal flats and deltas of the Duwamish River when non‐Indigenous settlers began building the city in the 1850s, and, because the tides of Elliott Bay caused floods of raw sewage to flow from the pipes in that neighborhood where the city was founded, the streets were raised after the fire by as much as 32 feet to address the problem, leaving behind an enclosed mall where merchants could display goods from their basement windows, and people could walk from store to store while avoiding the rain. A 1907 bubonic plague outbreak led to the passageways being sealed and largely forgotten until Speidel, a writer for The Seattle Times, described in his column the historic ruins underlying the city. His tantalized readers wrote to ask him to act as a guide, so he formed a company to do so and led its first tour in 1965.

Because the Great Northern Tunnel was an unheralded feature of the landscape, calling no more or less attention to itself than any nearby street lamp, and yet was a landmark of infrastructure in the vein of the Pont du Gard, only hidden from view to all but those whose business warranted its use, it gripped my imagination. Why was the clear genius of its builders not memorialized with great éclat? How could it be that an environment as complex as that beneath skyscrapers must surely be allowed for a railroad? It was, of course, a settled problem for civil engineers: the Whitney brothers of Boston and New York City had begun answering the question at about the same time as the Great Fire had razed Seattle, and, before them, the London Underground had proved that a railroad beneath a city could be made a reality,⁴ but I had never been provoked into thinking closely about what the society of engineers had found to conceal within the earth upon which stood a metropolis, nor how they had gone about it, until I watched a train slip through a hole they had made in the shadow of the Smith Tower. Boosted by having learned from the Seattle Underground tour that surprises could be found beneath the sidewalks and that the sidewalks themselves could be a masquerade, the die was cast on my quest to drink from the fountain of knowledge whenever it flowed with intelligence of the belowground exploitations of cities. It is a thirst not yet quenched.

The February 1997 issue of National Geographic Magazine included an article about New York City underground⁵ that felt as if it were aimed squarely at me. I recall originally poring over the detailed illustrations that accompanied the text of the article — it is the only copy of the magazine I own today, having grown up in a household where bookshelves were stuffed with its issues and subscribing on my own for years thereafter. In the article, we learn all manner of trivia, including that some 465,000 manholes punctuated New York streets. Photos by Emmy Award‐winning Bob Sacha capture the scene in the crawl spaces below Grand Central Terminal, where fifty people lived in 1989. Those illustrations by Don Foley show cutaway views from the street to the main sewer, descending through electrical cables, water mains, parking garages, subway stations, pilings, and more. I was thumbing through it again just now, and it never fails to require a complete reading once I get started, despite its age. The article was a milepost flashing by as my life rushed past.

According to the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, in 2023, there were 562 highway tunnels in the country.⁶ I have driven through the Mount Carmel Tunnel in Zion National Park, at 1.1 miles the longest of its type in the United States when completed in 1930, and the Wawona Tunnel in Yosemite National Park in California, the longest highway tunnel in the world when it opened in 1933. I have driven through the 13,300‐foot Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel into Whittier, Alaska, the longest highway tunnel in North America. The terrible power unleashed on the earth to drill those conduits through its raw substance was made plain where its effects were framed by virgin fields, serving to make the demonstrations of having controlled such violence well enough to ram holes beneath busy city streets without spilling anyone’s Chardonnay seem almost miraculous. How fortunate I am, then, as an avid student of the transformations of the environment needed to animate a city, to benefit from a local embarrassment of accessible examples of the tunneling arts. There is, for example, the Interstate 90 Mount Baker Tunnel — Portal of the North Pacific – dug beneath a Seattle neighborhood, opened in 1940, expanded in 1989, and, at 63.5 feet in diameter, the largest diameter soft‐earth tunnel in the world, through which I have driven countless times. Another? Regional government began construction in the 1980s of a tunnel through downtown Seattle that would become an element of public transportation service, where transit buses and, later, light rail would run, and into which I have plunged an equally countless number of times. That transit tunnel passes beneath the Great Northern Tunnel at Pioneer Square with a clearance of 4.5 feet, and, several blocks to the north, Benaroya Hall, the home of the Seattle Symphony that opened in 1998, sits atop the Great Northern Tunnel, its performance hall resting on elastic cushions to isolate it from the outer shell of the building that absorbs vibrations from below.

The earthmoving is yet another story. The topography of central Seattle has been radically altered since the city was founded in 1851. Because the city was built on the beach, almost immediately, portions of the steep, encroaching hillsides were cut away with shovels and tossed into the shallow water of the tide flats. With the filling of what was then Railroad Avenue (today’s Alaskan Way), the 161‐foot‐long derelict three‐masted bark Windward was buried intact in the late 1880s on the tideflats at Marion Street, where it remains. The raising of the streets of Pioneer Square after the Great Fire took years of hauling dirt in an era before dump trucks, largely obtained by carting the tops of those hills into the streets at the bottom. One imagines visitors to Pioneer Square in those days feeling obliged to bring along a bucket of dirt to help fill the site, as legend says that, in the eleventh century, the citizens of Ragusa on the Adriatic Sea carried stones to build the walls of Lovrijenac to thwart an invasion by the Venetians.

Entire hills were sluiced into Elliott Bay as regrades of the city were undertaken. What at the time was the largest artificial island in the world was created in the bay from dredge spoils and the soil dug for one such regrade when, in 1909, Harbor Island was completed at the mouth of the Duwamish River. Approximately seventy‐seven million cubic yards of central Seattle were displaced to sculpt its landscape into its present form, equalling nearly one third of the 240 million cubic yards of earth that were moved to build the Panama Canal.

It is what is beneath all of that dirt that the train emerging from the Great Northern Tunnel at the edge of Waterfront Park had caused me to recall. By the dawn of the twenty‐first century, around one hundred tunnels of all purposes spanning over forty cumulative miles had been constructed in Seattle since the Great Fire.⁷ Because it opened just six years ago, those figures do not take into account the longest highway tunnel in the forty‐eight coterminous United States: the 9,270‐foot State Route 99 tunnel over which we had just stepped on our way to the aquarium. As we entered the kingdom of the fishes, I was still wondering about the estate of the worms.

Update January 1, 2026
The installation of Guests beneath Overlook Walk was completed several weeks ago. This is a six‐minute video produced by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture featuring an interview with the artist about the work: Ann Hamilton’s Artwork on Seattle’s Waterfront. I was in the neighborhood eleven days ago and regrettably forgot to walk down the street to admire the piece.