Seattlest Urban Archaeology Club: the Seattle Municipal Railway

Here is the view along 34th Street, looking east, as it crosses Fremont Ave. The Fremont Bridge is to the right.

Note the asphalt that has been scraped away. Were we prone to spewing post-modern drivel, we might utter something melodramatic like, "notice the thin veneer of modernity blanketting the ruins of the collective past that we so quickly forget!" Then we'd make a crack about the quick rise and fall of the automobile as an efficient means of tranport in the ever-increasing density of the city --and how we can look to the past to save us in the future. Oh, History!

Ahem...

First they just gave us this rusty spike, which has quickly become one of our prized urban archival possessions. It looks just like a railroad spike that you might find while walking along modern tracks except a lot rustier.

Notice that this wild cross-section is much different from the typical cross-section of dedicated rail track that one frequently finds while trespassing on grade-separated "heavy" rail. Apparently, this design in more common in trams and similar "light" rail uses.

Our guy then took a wire brush and cleaned off this gem which is a stamp of the manufacture date of this track. What's more, the length before this part apparently had Bethlehem Steel stamped on it. Bethlehem Steel is pretty symbolic of the might, history, and heyday of American steel production. These days, the only mighty industrial product coming out of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is Peeps.

Beautiful bricks still line the intact sections of track. The workers here only excised a small section of track. Presumably, long lengths of track still lie buried below a few inches of asphalt in the rest of Fremont and/or other parts of the city. Without gloating or patting ourselves on the back too much, we only now realize the significance of this photograph. In the top right corner, we see the concrete of the new roadway as it abutts the existing street and the old railroad tracks beneath. This interface between the contemporary and the historic has since been covered up with a fresh layer of asphalt.

Here is a wider view of the brick-paved street with inset rails.

Again, back to a view of the uncovered tracks. The linear set proceeds eastward while the curved set (left) turns north onto Fremont Ave. We suspect the eastward tracks proceed this way while the northward tracks went up the hill toward Woodland Park.