(The following story by Paul Dorpat appeared on the Seattle Times website on March 11, 2009.)
SEATTLE — For the historical construction scene, a photographer from the Webster and Stevens studio stands on what was then a trestle on Fifth Avenue South a few feet south of King Street to record this work on Union Station.
The steel supports for the train station’s vaulted roof are being set. The waiting lobby below it — what is now called the Great Hall — gave Union Pacific and Milwaukee railroad riders a sublime welcome and/or goodbye. At its peak, the Washington-Oregon Station (its other name) employed more than 100 men in the baggage room to handle the almost 40 daily train arrivals and departures.
The station was built in 1910-11 at the corner of the reclaimed tideflats close to what would become the Chinatown International District. Three years earlier, the photographer would have looked into the sprawling gas-manufacturing plant that then still filled this pit, which was sometimes called Gas Cove. (In 1907 the gas makers moved to Wallingford, now Gas Works Park, and lower Queen Anne Hill, the “Blue Flame Building,” to open the cove for the coming railroad.)
Three decades before that, trains loaded with coal were charging directly through this scene over a trestle to carry them up and onto the King Street wharf where California colliers waited for the coals of Newcastle and Renton.
Now, much of the old cleaned-up cove between Fifth Avenue and Union Station is covered with pavement. The International District/Chinatown Station next to Union Station now is the southern terminus for the Downtown Transit Tunnel; soon, Sound Transit Central Link light-rail trains will be stopping here as well.
A century ago the Union Pacific Railroad still had plans to continue north from here with its own tunnel beneath the city.