A History of the UW in 120 Frames

I love watching things change over time.

Buildings, landscapes, street grids–everything morphs with changing technologies and cultural priorities, and time-enabled mapping can help us visualize and understand the changes that have occurred.

When I started this project for the University of Washington, we had just celebrated the centennial of the 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition. John Stamets, who teaches photography at the UW College of Built Environments, had co-authored a book about the 1909 event, documenting  with maps and then-and-now photos. He had aligned a number of historical AYPE plans in Photoshop, transforming each until they all lined up with a modern map. Using this method, he was able to pinpoint the locations of the historical photographs, and take photos of the current conditions from the same location and angle.

He gave me his collection of digitized AYPE plans, which I took and georeferenced. Using the plans as a guide, I then digitized the building footprints and created links between the new geometry and the existing historical database. Once the 1909 buildings were digitized, I researched plans and maps of other eras, looking forward and back from the year of the Exposition. Where there were additions to buildings over the years, I georeferenced old construction plans that enabled me to show the evolution of the building shapes over time. Over the course of several months I was able to put together a spatial database of nearly all the UW buildings that ever existed, tied in with a rich historical database. The timeline features of ArcGIS allowed me to create a 4d map, showing any of the buildings at any specific time between 1885 and 2015.

This timeline video is a distillation of the information collected and created.

Cool things to look for:

The Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition was the single most profound influence on the layout of the University. Although most of the AYPE buildings were demolished shortly after 1909, the landscape retains much of the physical form of that event. Rainier Vista is the most obvious remnant, but the influence can also be seen in the layout of much of the central campus. The HUB Yard area had a circle with a band stand. Frosh Pond/Drumheller Fountain was larger in 1909, but was in the same location. Stevens Way is essentially the same route as the parkway in the 1909 layout. Some of the AYPE structures were put to use as institutional buildings for years or decades–the Forestry Building, at the site where the HUB now stands, was used until 1930, when its rustic timbers were deemed too rotted to save. The Washington building was used first as a library and then as the High Energy Physics Lab until demolished in 1961. Its foundation survived as a landscape element (not shown) until the construction of the Allen Library. Gradually, over the years, most of the surviving Exposition buildings were torn down. Now, only three remain.

Five years after the AYPE, the Lake Washington Ship Canal was completed, and Lake Washington dropped by eight feet.

At the end of and just after WWI, from 1917-1922, barracks stood briefly where Guggenheim Hall is now. The post-WWII (1946–mid 50s) era saw a tremendous construction boom, including the erection of temporary barracks all across the UW to house returning soldiers. Located in the center of campus, in the north campus where Dempsey Hall and Paccar Hall now stand, and especially in the eastern campus, at the site of Center for Urban Horticulture–none of the barracks remain.

The original Lander and Terry halls were built on the site that is now the Sound Transit University of Washington Station (at Husky Stadium). These were built in 1917 and demolished in 1928.

Some buildings morph over time–watch Suzzallo Library, the Art Building, the power plant, and the Applied Physics Lab.

in 1937, 15th Ave NE was widened to the east. This necessitated the construction of the retaining wall along the west edge of the UW campus. I was surprised to learn that this wall was designed by Bebb & Gould.

Watch the changes in the Southwest and West Campus. In 1937, the University’s grand boulevard to and from nowhere, Campus Parkway, was cut through what was a neighborhood of modest single-family homes, removing scores of houses. The era of urban renewal hastened the change.  Properties were condemned by the city and deeded to the University, allowing the consolidation of lots, the re-routing of streets, and the construction of most of the University-owned structures in the area. in 1962, I-5 was completed. NE Pacific Street was re-routed in the 1970’s. The UW’s suburban office-park buildings along Boat Street were completed in the 80’s and 90’s. 15th Ave NE was re-routed in the late 90’s, in between the construction of the first nasty Portage Bay Garage that cut The Ave off from the waterfront and the second nasty Portage Bay Garage addition that was ironically LEED-certified. All of these changes altered the street patterns, destroyed old neighborhoods, and cut the University District off from surrounding communities.

Some Caveats:

The building data should be pretty accurate–I spent a lot of time and did a lot of research to create it.

The original downtown Seattle campus is not included in this project.

The campus landscape, paths and roads are accurate at several points along the timeline, but they aren’t coded year-by-year as the buildings are. Really, they’re only accurate from 1895–>1930 or so. After that, the 1930 landscape stretches out to 1960, and the 2013 landscape stretches back to 1980. Between 1960 and 1980 there is a very noticeable lack of landscape.

The roads, modified from Seattle right-of-way GIS data, are approximate. Again, they aren’t coded year-by-year. I did a snapshot for about every decade starting in the 1900s.

For all layers, there will be points when two things exist in the same place at the same time. This is a result of the coarseness of the time data. For buildings, this will mean that a building was demolished and a new building was erected in the same place within a single year.

 

GeoSIMS–An Application for Interior Mapping

In my years at the University of Washington, my greatest accomplishment was envisioning, designing and managing the implementation of GeoSIMS–the Geographic Space Information Management System.

FloorPlanGISThis online application utilizes a multi-campus set of georeferenced floorplans to enable the tracking of room information. The implementation was a challenge–a  lot of different people and departments had to be brought together to make it work. Some groups were indifferent. Some were resistant. Ultimately it all came together, and the UW has a system of space tracking that is streamlined and automated.

For those of you interested in a bit more detail on the background of the program and its uses, you can download my presentation to the University for the GeoSIMS rollout (warning–10 mb Powerpoint file).

 

City of Seattle, 1908


Seattle, 1908

Every once in a while, here at Spatialities world headquarters, our research department (me) runs into an old archived map that our marketing department (also me) thinks would look great on someone’s wall.

I found this 1908 USGS quad while researching the former location of the Lake Washington shoreline. It’s from an important time in Seattle’s history. The the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition was about to happen, which would shape the University of Washington campus for the next century and beyond. Because the Ship Canal had not been built, Lake Washington was eight feet higher.  The Duwamish River still meandered, and South Park and Georgetown were towns in their own right. People were still waiting for the interurban. Rail travel within and between cities was still the best way to get around. Freeways hadn’t been invented.

I did a considerable amount of clean-up to this map–removing old rubber-stamps and imperfections.  It’s now ready for your wall.

You can order hard-copy prints of the files I’ve cleaned up here…

1908 Map of Seattle--Archival Paper Print
1908 Map of Seattle–Archival Paper Print
1908 Map of Seattle--Wrapped Canvas
1908 Map of Seattle–Wrapped Canvas

 

 

 

 

Continue reading

UW Transportation, Past and Future

As part of a recent historical research project, I georeferenced a ton of old plans and maps of the University of Washington campus and surrounding neighborhood. One of the things that has stood out in my mind about this project is the old transportation patterns, and how our society relied so much more heavily on rail to get around.  The University District was served by several streetcar lines in addition to the rail line that was used by passenger trains–now the route of the Burke-Gilman Trail.

Modern Subway, Historical Streetcar

We are slowly returning to an era of mass transportation. This 1920 map shows the location of at least two streetcar lines, as well as the old heavy-gauge NPRR line and depot. I have overlaid the alignment of the Sound Transit North Link subway and platform location of the new University of Washington Station. The detail that jumps out is the location of the old streetcar turn-around loop, now the location of the subway station. We’re looping back around to an abandoned form of transportation that should never have been abandoned. This time, we’re making sure that the passage of the rail cars isn’t hindered by private cars.

I sat on a bus for over half an hour yesterday, getting from the U-District to downtown. I’m looking forward to the eight-minute ride that the subway will enable.

Planning for Safe Routes to School

The McDonald International School re-opened in 2012, after 31 years of being mothballed and leased out to various NGOs. Even though the school is in a very walkable neighbSRTS_CoverPageorhood, having been built in what was originally a streetcar suburb of Seattle, little attention had been paid to the walkability of the immediate school area. The streets around the school need a lot of work to make them safer for all kids, their parents and caretakers.

As a final project for my Sustainable Transportation certificate, I researched and wrote up a plan to create safe routes for the McDonald International School. This plan deals primarily with the physical environment within the school reference area, but also touches on some of the social and cultural aspects of walkable cities. This was my first project dealing with active transportation issues, and led to my involvement with a variety of other bike & pedestrian advocacy organizations, including the Seattle Ped Board and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

McDonald School SRTS Plan

A Transportation Plan for Wallingford, Seattle

Wallingford is my neighborhood. I’ve lived here for over ten years, commuting out to Redmond for the first year via scooter and bus. After that, I started working at the University of Washington, with an exact mile commute, door-to-door. I still take my ratty old scooter, but I’ll just as often walk, bike, or bus.

Wallingford Transportation Plan
Wallingford Transportation Plan, Phase III

For those of us who work at the UW, Wallingford is in an ideal location–easily walkable, if you don’t mind traversing I-5 and its associated on and off-ramps. You can quickly bike there if you don’t mind the cranky and sometimes aggressive car commuters. The bus is great, except for the winding, plodding 16 and the always-late, always SRO-packed 44. In addition to these indignities to the non-car commuter, Wallingford is more isolated, transportation-wise, than its U-District and Fremont neighbors. This paper, which I co-wrote with two other authors, creates a plan to remedy these problems. It deals with both land-use and transportation issues, which should always be planned in concert, but sadly often aren’t. We focused on enhancing connections to neighboring communities, as well as to downtown Seattle, decreasing the isolation of the neighborhood and allowing for a more compact and energetic local business district. My contributions were the introduction, land-use, rail, and summary chapters.

Wallingford Transportation Plan