Metronatural: Inventing and Taming Nature in Seattle - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 109

the estuary was a disordered landscape that introduced uncertainty and
constant change rather than solidity and stability. It was an unfi nished
landscape in dire need of improvement.
Filling of the tidelands began informally in the nineteenth century, as
volumes of municipal solid waste and sawdust from the early sawmills
were deposited on these unbuildable lands, mirroring efforts throughout
the United States to rationalize these landscapes for productive use. 82 The
regrading efforts produced massive quantities of fi ll for the low areas of
the city, and the industrial process of regrading was extended to involve
the systematic fi lling of the tidelands. Spoils from the regrading activities
were washed into sluiceboxes and loaded into carts for transportation to
the tidelands and low areas, where they were dumped. 83 The goal was
to establish grades two feet above extreme high tide; in some areas, this
meant raising tidefl at elevations as much as forty feet. Overall, an esti-
mated twelve hundred acres of tidefl ats were fi lled with spoils from the
regrading projects. 84
The tidefl at reclamation project was supplemented in 1914 with dredg-
ing activities in the lower Duwamish River to straighten and deepen the
channel as well as fi ll in the estuaries at the mouth of the river. Within eight
years, contractors had moved 24 million cubic yards of soil and replaced
the river delta with what was at the time the world's largest artifi cial island,
Harbor Island, which would eventually become a platform for industrial
activities. 85 In the mid-1930s, the City of Seattle received federal funding
from the Works Progress Administration to build the Alaskan Way sea-
wall along the downtown waterfront. The seawall created a permanent
boundary between land and water, ensuring that waterfront buildings in
the central business district would not be undermined by water. These
activities created “a new place for nature in the city subjected to an ever-
greater disciplinary control” and formalized the divide between nature
and culture. 86
Big Engineering and Social Inequity
With all of his large engineering projects, Thomson espoused social and
economic reform through the modifi cation of material conditions. Histo-
rian Matthew Klingle notes that “clean water and level land were ethical
as well as economical and political goals for Thomson.” 87 The material
reordering of the city would simultaneously fulfi ll the Promethean goal of
controlling nature while ensuring societal progress: the classic formula of
Progressive urban reform. 88 However, the grading and fi lling activities were