May 4, 1969: Hit the Highway, Freeway

The concrete monstrosity that has long divided Seattle into two absurdly disconnected halves like a brain operation gone horribly awry–a.k.a. Interstate 5–was never a civic inevitability. Long before its official opening in February 1965, citizen activists and elected officials alike fought for a better solution to the city’s emerging need for a major transportation corridor that would connect Seattle with the other major cities on the West Coast. Unfortunately, in 1958 the Washington State Highway Department trumped local desires for a sane solution (such as building the Seattle segment of I-5 on the east side of Lake Washington, still underdeveloped at the time), and we’re still left with the garish results of that dreadful lack of foresight today.

Fortunately, eleven years later, a group of local citizen activists, appalled by the results of the decision to build I-5 in the heart of the city, organized a series of protests against what could have been a much greater infrastructure disaster, namely, the R. H. Thomson Expressway. At the time still under proposal, the Thomson Expressway, if completed, would have followed the Lake Washington shoreline throughout Seattle, running north from Interstate 90 through the Central District, Montlake, and the University of Washington Arboretum, and ominously onward through Lake City to an interchange with an also-proposed Bothell Freeway.

The first of these protests occurred on the date in focus here, when several thousand marched through the Arboretum to protest the expressway’s impending construction. The initial expressway proposal–named for Seattle’s erstwhile city engineer Reginald Heber Thomson (1856-1949)–was approved by Seattle voters in 1960. But when inevitable changes of plan, in which much of Montlake would have been bulldozed, were revealed earlier in 1969, Citizens Against R. H. Thomson organized to oppose the project.

Unlike the earlier, much less passionate opposition to I-5, these protests were eventually successful, benefiting greatly from the local environmental movement that had emerged since 1965. In February 1972–by which time a full-blown anti-freeway movement had emerged nationwide–a special-election ballot referendum was passed in Seattle that withdrew funding for the Thomson project. Finally, in June 1977, the Seattle City Council voted to officially cancel the R. H. Thomson Expressway, thus bringing a joyful closure to a crucial episode of local grassroots activist history.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: Maynard Arsove, “Concrete Dragons,” Helix, April 3, 1969, p. 16; Clayton Van Lydegraf, “CART … Dragonslayer?,” Helix, April 3, 1969, p. 18; Russell, Charles, “‘Save, Don’t Pave’,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 5, 1969, p. B; Walt Crowley, “Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle” (University of Washington Press, 1995).