June 1, 1977: Just Say No To Concrete

History's never for certain, and the 1970s, revisionist rumors notwithstanding, were not entirely a wasteland of cocaine, disco, and narcissism, nor the true nadir of the apex of 1968. Not all who were deceptively quiet in Framptontime had truly abandoned the radical, as heavily evidenced by the Freeway Revolts, a low-profile yet high-impact citizen activist movement against freeway construction plans which first unfolded during the 1960s--and fully bloomed in the 1970s--in several major US cities, including New Orleans, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington DC, and, last but not least, Seattle.

Here, still stung by the fresh memory of the ongoing transportation disaster known as Interstate 5, citizen activists, beginning in 1969, organized a series of protests against the R. H. Thomson Expressway, a proposed concrete monstrosity that would, if approved, have bulldozed a grievously gasoline-fueled path across Seattle's eastern edge, running north from Interstate 90 through the Central District, Montlake and the University of Washington Arboretum, and ominously onward through Ravenna to an interchange with an also-proposed Bothell Freeway.

The Thomson proposal, conceived by the same sort of civic non-thinking that also once nearly bulldozed Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market, was named for Seattle's erstwhile city engineer Reginald Heber Thomson (1856-1949). Voters initially approved the project in 1960, but when inevitable changes of plan that would have bulldozed much of Montlake were revealed in 1969, Citizens Against the R. H. Thomson Expressway organized to oppose the project, thus bringing Seattle into the fold of the Freeway Revolts. Our heaviest involvement in the movement in question occurred between 1969 and 1972, the latter being the year of passage of a ballot referendum which withdrew funding for the Thomson project. On the date in focus here, the Seattle City Council at long last cancelled the R. H. Thomson Expressway, thereby bringing a quietly official closure to the grandly grassroots activist affair.

Funny how chemistry and concrete were once thought to be the modern saviors of the human species. Now we're slowly learning: Without grassroots citizen activism, life itself would likely be impossible. Sources: Seattle Times archives; Seattle Post-Intelligencer archives; HistoryLink.org