Regrading in Seattle

A central concern of Thomson's work in Seattle was to connect disparate parts of the city together, allowing easier movement.

[5] Thomson was quoted as saying that the city had developed the land "with but little regard as to whether the streets could ever be used or not, the main idea being, apparently, to sell the lots.

One of these, which he undertook in 1901, was to dig a canal from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington by cutting through Beacon Hill[6] in roughly the area of Spokane Street,[2] sluicing earth into the tide flats.

His effort was defeated by unstable soils, which caused several cave-ins, and by the legal and political maneuvering of Judge Thomas Burke and others aligned with the Great Northern Railway.

The Jackson Regrade between 1907 and 1910 slashed 85 feet (25.9 m) from the hill,[4] requiring the demolition of the public South School and the original Holy Names Academy[2] but providing fill for the tide flats below Beacon Hill that stretched south from King Street, filling in today's SoDo.

Before regrading, the much-admired Denny School[10] and the upmarket Washington Hotel stood atop the hill,[11] along with numerous residential buildings.

[12] The two-storey high Denny School was found on Battery Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and was considered "handsome in the extreme.

[8] Much of the motivation for the regrade had been to increase land values, but the area opened up—the heart of today's Belltown—was left as a strip cut off from much of the rest of the city by the remaining eastern half of the hill, whose western face offered no route of approach.

This time, the technology was power shovels rather than sluicing, with earth carried to the waterfront by conveyor belts, then placed on specially designed scows and dumped in deep water.

Most of the new lots sat vacant into the 1940s;[1] the area (especially east of Sixth Avenue) remained a gray zone into the early 21st century, when it finally began to gain an urban or suburban identity as the west edge of the new growth of South Lake Union.

Thomas Burke questioned the Denny Hill regrade, stating to a reporter at the closing party of the Washington Hotel that "from a commercial point of view, and certainly from an aesthetic one, it would have been much better to have saved Denny Hill by carrying Third Avenue under it, thus obtaining the desired result, while preserving in all aspects the natural beauty that means so much to any city.