Lately there's been a little buzz about those development holdouts who won't sell and wind up having their houses thirty feet in the air on a mound of dirt while construction goes on all around them. Boingboing listed this guy, who's a historic Seattle holdout.
Imagine a time when downtown Seattle was a swampy mess that was basically right at sea level, where the toilets would overflow at high tide. Looking north there was Belltown, built on land once claimed by a guy named Bell, which occupied everything from present day Second Avenue down to the water. Everything between there and Capital Hill was hilly and rough and ended on the western edge in cliff several stories tall. So that whole stretch from my place on Second Ave through the Space Needle and EMP up to Queen Anne was basically unoccupied. This was the horse & buggy period, so nobody wanted anything to do with this stretch, too much of a pain to build on and nobody would drive there even if you could. So this guys gets a bright idea: let's get rid of the bluff. "Lets wash it away." So you know what they did? They literally hosed the entire hill down towards the water. Think about that: guys with hoses sitting there all day, washing dirt down towards the water. Totally changed the look of things, ya know? (That blur between the hills is a house built after the regrade.)
Then there's all sorts of primo location land opened up for development. There are big plans for civic centers and a very cool bus system by a big shot architect. But the big downtown property owners along Pike and Pine Streets were not too pleased and wound up killing the project. Sounds like Seattle is still pretty much the same, huh?
For more on this check out HistoryLink.org and Wikipedia.
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