Tukwila: cradle of Puget Sound civilization
From site of one of the earliest white settlements to crossroads of the metro area, the once-humble Seattle suburb is looking back on more than a century of history. That history includes a disappearing river and an airplane that never flew.
By Daniel Jack Chasan
January 07, 2008.
People who don't think of Tukwila, Wash., as a real place may be astonished to learn that on Tuesday, Jan. 8, the Seattle suburb will kick off its centennial celebration. Known primarily as the site of the Southcenter shopping mall, Tukwila has actually been incorporated since 1908. Originally, the Black and White rivers came together there to form the Duwamish, which then meandered north through a broad floodplain, spread out in a vast estuary, and finally emptied into Elliott Bay. Now, the White has gone elsewhere, the Black has gone, period, and, instead of a place where rivers combine, Tukwila has become the place where Interstate 405 joins Interstate 5.
People farmed the Duwamish and Green river valleys back in 1908. There was already a Tukwila post office. The old electric interurban streetcar between Seattle and Tacoma stopped there. (Now, Sounder commuter trains stop there, and next year, Tukwila will briefly become the southern terminus of Sound Transit's new Link Light Rail system.)
The first non-native homesteaders had settled along the Duwamish in 1851. When the Denny party, whose members went on to found Seattle, arrived at Alki Point in rainy November 1851, the earlier settlers shared food with them. The next winter, with food running low, David Denny and a companion got a couple of Indians to paddle them up the Duwamish to a native village, where they bought potatoes – introduced by the Hudson's Bay Company in the 1830s – to help them through the long winter. All the villages in the river valleys had cleared garden plots at the time, but settlers soon ran the natives off, burning their cedar longhouses and taking over the already cleared and cultivated land.
The Black River that flowed through early Tukwila drained Lake Washington, flowing south from the lake at what is now Renton, picking up the Cedar River just beyond the lake, and curving west to join the White just below what is now the Starfire soccer center in Fort Dent Park. The White, which started below the glaciers on Mount Rainier, flowed northwest, picking up the Green River below what is now Auburn, then heading almost due north to its rendezvous with the Black.
Salmon swam up all those rivers, and natives gathered wapato roots on the low-lying land of Fort Dent. Archaeological evidence suggests that people may have occupied, or at least camped on, a hill southeast of Fort Dent for some 8,000 years.
Even before Tukwila was incorporated, the White River had literally gone south. In the great floods of 1906 - when an interurban train with 106 people on board was stranded overnight by floodwaters just south of what is now Tukwila - the White jumped its banks, flowing through the channel of the minor Stuck River into the Puyallup, and finally into Tacoma's Commencement Bay. King County farmers, tired of getting flooded out, didn't want it back. Armed groups stood guard to keep anyone from re-diverting it. And they didn't have to take it back, although King County settled a legal dispute by agreeing to pay 60 percent of the cost of levees and other flood control measures in Pierce County.
By the time Tukwila was incorporated, two years later, only the Green and Black joined there to form the Duwamish. Then, in 1916, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finished the ship canal from Lake Washington to Salmon Bay. Lake water flowed out through it, the lake level dropped 9 feet, taking it below the level of its old outlet into the Black River, and the Black simply disappeared. You can still see a trickle entering the Duwamish just north of Fort Dent, where the Black used to be. The disappearance of the Black River marked a milestone in people's reshaping of the landscape.
It was merely a side effect of building the canal - which can be thought of as a failed economic development project - but, of course, early 20th-century residents of the Seattle area saw nature as no impediment to their civic ambition and personal greed. By the time the Black River vanished, the "regrading" of Seattle had already removed much of Denny Hill between the central waterfront and Queen Anne, the dredging and straightening of the lower Duwamish had begun (and dredge spoils were being dumped into the old salt marshes to create new industrial land), and Seattle had started importing both drinking water and electricity from the Cedar River.
No longer a crossroads of rivers, not yet a crossroads of freeways, Tukwila largely just was for most of its first 50 years, but it became a focus of regional commerce when Southcenter opened in 1968 – the very same year Seattle-area residents turned down a rail transit system that would have gotten a 90 percent federal match and might have channeled Eastside suburban development toward rail stations before it grew into the current cars-only sprawl. Southcenter wasn't the area's first shopping mall, but it was the largest. It didn't persuade anyone to vote down transit, but it symbolized the regional commitment to automobiles. It still does.
Twenty-one years later, in 1989, Tukwila annexed the south end of Boeing Field - aka King County International Airport - which brought into its city limits the Museum of Flight, the largest private air and space museum in the country. The museum recapitulates a great deal of aviation history. It contains the "Red Barn," the old wooden, two-story boat-building shed converted to Boeing's first aircraft factory, which was barged upriver from its original site beside the Duwamish, and a huge array of planes, including the very first jet Air Force One, a pre-World War II Boeing 40B mail plane, a high-flying Blackbird reconnaissance plane, and a supersonic Concorde.
At the south end of Boeing Field stands the big, featureless Boeing Developmental Center, where Boeing workers fashioned the first all-composite fuselage section for the new 787 jetliner, and where their predecessors once created a full-scale mockup of the planned American SST. If the Museum of Flight stands as a monument to what has been, the Developmental Center stands as a monument to what has not, an icon of the road not taken.
By the 1960s, Boeing's 707 had given the U.S. the lead in commercial aviation. Britain and France hoped to supplant the U.S. by building a supersonic transport, the Concorde. The U.S. of the early 1960s wasn't about to let that happen. Just as John F. Kennedy resolved to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, so in 1963 he resolved to build a supersonic transport plane that would compete with the planned Anglo-French Concorde. Congress put federal money into the effort. Boeing beat out Lockheed for the right to build the plane. This was going to be another giant step forward for commercial aviation. The commercial jets of the 1960s - the 707, 727, and 737 - all carried passengers at around 600 miles per hour. The SST was going to triple the speed, carrying passengers across oceans and continents at 1,800 mph. There in the Developmental Center, Boeing workers built a full-scale mockup of the sleek, needle-nosed plane.
That was as close as they got to building a full-fledged SST. The plane soon ran afoul of bitter Vietnam-era politics. Some critics worried that if the plane went supersonic over land, sonic booms would disrupt people's lives. Others speculated that a whole fleet of SSTs, cruising above 60,000 feet, would shred the ozone layer, letting in more ultra-violet radiation and triggering an epidemic of skin cancer. The late-'60s "counterculture" and much of liberal America had an anti-technology bias. Late-'60s conservatives didn't much like government subsidies. The economics were also questionable. Congress pulled the plug on the SST program at the end of 1970.
By that time, the aerospace industry had hit a large air pocket, Boeing had laid off two-thirds of its work force, state unemployment rose to 12.5 percent, and Seattle plunged into the recession that inspired the famous billboard: "will the last person leaving Seattle--Turn out the lights." Losing the SST was hardly Seattle's biggest problem, but it seemed both significant and symbolic. (On the other hand, losing the project may have been a blessing in disguise for Boeing. Only the British and French national airlines ever bought the Anglo-French Concorde, and no one ever bought the USSR's TU-144.)
The United States was mired deeply in-and divided politically by-- the Vietnam War, and pulling back from building the SST seemed somehow to reflect a broader loss of American hubris. We weren't even trying to be number one.
By scrapping the SST, the nation also turned away from the so-called "technological imperative"-the idea that if we can do something, we will. For perhaps the first significant time in our history, we just said no.
So here's to Tukwila - not just a stop on the rail line or a site of early settlement, but the place where rivers no longer meet and where people built the mockup of the plane that never was.
Comments:
Posted Mon, Jan 7, 8:50 a.m. Inappropriate
Just wondering, but what in the world do they do with all that cash? City Hall is nice, but it isn't spectacular.
FWIW the South Park neighborhood, as well as it's neighbors on the hills to the east and west are probably the best near Seattle value. It's got a bit of Tacoma's grit and also some beautiful old houses. The riverfront stuff runs the risk of flood from the Green River, but it hasn't happened yet.
Also, a little known fact - there is a class 2+ whitewater rapid on the Duwamish, near the East Marginal Way/99 Bridge. It is right at tidewater, so it only appears rarely, never figured out the tide numbers, but it is a spot worth checking out.
Posted Mon, Jan 7, 11:43 a.m. Inappropriate
The historic significance of Tukwilla to me is that's where I first realized that Frederick & Nelson was toast. In the Southcenter store, I saw that the linoleum floors were filthy and in disrepair while the merchandise was of not much higher quality than the floors. I now judge the health of a retail establishment by how well it maintains its floors. Just before Larry's Market bit the dust, the floors in the Kirkland Store were horrible! Dirty, worn to the point of dangerous in some spots, and quite obviously neglected. Floor maintenance is always the first to go.
Still...I suppose even Tukwilla is entitled to some sort of history even if it doesn't have a soul. After all, even the Black Hole of Calcutta is home to somebody.
Tukwilla?
The Piper
Posted Mon, Jan 7, 11:52 a.m. Inappropriate
Boeing SST mockup: The Boeing SST mockup is alive and well at the Hiller Aviation Museum near SFO; exhibit information and photos here.
Posted Mon, Jan 7, 1:47 p.m. Inappropriate
Back then, the Lake Hills and Robinswood areas of Bellevue were just sleepy suburban sub divisions filled with many blue collar Boeing folks, or people who worked for Boeing suppliers. Of our 12 neighbors who worked at Boeing in 1965, only 2 remained so employed by 1975. I recall boycotts of Wisconsin Cheese, and a dozen vacant homes on the route to school, each with stern warnings posted on their windows that any vandalism would bring the FBI to respond...
But looking back thanks to a number of great books, it appears the layoffs had far more to do with the history of the 747 program. A program that had spent all it's R & D money, (more than 90 percent of the profits from the 707 and 727 programs), and needed about a half billion more to make it right. With the lack of orders, no bank would back another half billion. The only avenue left for Boeing was to self finance, which in turn intensified the harsh layoffs.
Even the Boeing web site speaks about it:
"As the '70s began, a number of factors came together to push Boeing into a crisis. By the end of the '60s, the big Apollo project wound down and the company hoped to increase sales of commercial aircraft to make up for the decrease of space-related business. Unfortunately, due to the recession in the aviation industry, Boeing went 18 months without a single new domestic airplane order. The huge jumbo jet, the 747, had not yet established itself in the market and had unexpectedly high startup costs and initial delivery problems."
"The end of the SST program dealt another blow. Aided by federal funds, Boeing had made major progress, but Congress "pulled the plug" on SST funding in March 1971, forcing Boeing to cancel the program."
While many recall and fault the cancelation of the SST, it appears more that it was harsh management realities which later paid off.
Juan Trippe of Pan Am was among the aviation leaders who envisioned that once we all were flying the SST, the 747 would be the cargo ships of the future. SO much so, it was engineered with it's iconic hump to allow the cockpit wiring and hydraulics to remain unimpeded when a cargo door and hinge were added up front to maximize cargo loading.
That part of the vision remains accurate. More than 1500 747 later, it has delivered profits that allowed R & D of the 767, the 777, and even some of the Dreamliner advancements. A tour of the Everett Plant makes this point to even the casual observer. Most of the current 747's being built are Freighters.
Posted Mon, Jan 7, 4:55 p.m. Inappropriate
Wow! I was in college in those days, and of course I remember how bad it was (Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?), but I had no idea Boeing went that long between orders. Compared to what we're used to seeing, that alone is a staggering statistic.
Curious...how many planes has Boeing sold within the past 18-months?
Still...the rancor over the SST was bitter with many here believing people in other parts of the country were kicking a PNW dog when it was down. Dick Cavett hosted a late-night show on ABC in those days that went head-to-head with Johnny Carson, and he wasted no effort in ripping the SST such that he was required by the FCC (the blatantly un-Constitutional "Fairness Doctrine" was in effect then) to have someone come on his show in support of the project.
Whether the 70's downturn was caused by the SST cancelation or not, it was still a huge blow to local morale. And it cost my mother a ton of money when she tried to sell her house in 1972.
Tough times then...
The Piper
Posted Thu, Jan 10, 7:41 a.m. Inappropriate
http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5390
http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=1750
Collins figured prominently in civic affairs
http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=3525
http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=3521
Posted Mon, Jan 21, 6:59 p.m. Inappropriate
You're forgetting Tumwater: Tumwater, just south of Olympia, was the site of the first settlement in what is now Washington state. It is also on Puget Sound. Tumwater is the cradle of Puget Sound civilization . . . And it is much less heinous than Tukwila.