Metronatural: Inventing and Taming Nature in Seattle - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 105

Figure 5.4
Hydraulic sluicing activities at Bell Street and Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle. Source :
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Lee 20022.
rock—the regrading efforts would have been impossible. 72 In short, avail-
able technology as well as geologic conditions in Seattle conspired with
the Progressive logic of landscape improvement to create a wholly new
relationship between Seattleites and their surroundings.
The hydraulic sluicing technique greatly accelerated the regrading ef-
forts and was used for the majority of the almost sixty regrading proj-
ects over the next three decades (see fi gure 5.5). The elevations of more
than twenty downtown streets were altered, and several large hills were
removed with the fi nancial support of downtown property owners, who
would benefi t from increased property values and business revenues (see
table 5.2). 73 In some cases, the municipal government was forced to use the
power of eminent domain to compel uncooperative residents to support
the regrading efforts. Some of the most indelible photographs of Seattle
from the early twentieth century feature “spite mounds” with buildings
resting on precariously small patches of land spared from the giants. 74
All of the recalcitrant property owners would eventually give in and the