(click to enlarge photos)
In 2012, landscape architect Guy Michaelsen found himself strolling the Alaskan Way Viaduct as part of a Seattle Department of Transportation team inspecting the roadway’s structural integrity. Just below Pike Place Market, he fell in love.
A gray-green sign bridge — beneath which he had driven hundreds “if not thousands” of times — stopped him cold. “It was a treasure hiding in plain sight,” he says. “Once I got to see it at walking speed, I realized it was remarkable.”
The curving steel legs, 33 feet tall yet showing only 16 above the deck, bore art deco ornamentation and oval cutouts — infrastructure from another era, made, as Michaelsen puts it, “with a sense of design, not just utilitarianism.”
The viaduct itself long divided Seattle. Opened in 1953, the double-decker highway offered automotive commuters a free, front-row view of Elliott Bay. But concerns about seismic safety — and the noisy barrier separating downtown from its waterfront — eventually won the day. The viaduct came down, replaced by a 2-mile tunnel that opened in 2019.
For Michaelsen, the sign bridge’s curves were an argument for preservation. By 2014 he was making slideshow presentations to anyone who would listen, lobbying to save at least one piece when demolition came. “Dreams don’t die,” he says. “They’re just deferred.”
Fourteen years after that first walk under the market, his vision was realized on March 30 when the salvaged structure was rededicated as a neighborhood gateway.
For Angela Brady, acting SDOT director who spent 15 years with the city’s Waterfront Seattle program, the ribbon-cutting was a charged moment. The sign bridge is, she said, “the sole and only reflection of the Alaskan Way Viaduct” that exists today.
Barbara Lee, project manager for the Waterfront Seattle program, has watched with satisfaction as the sign bridge draws curious eyes. “As I give tours,” she says, “there are fewer and fewer people who remember the viaduct. The sign bridge will bring curiosity. It’s a little piece of history that isn’t going to be erased or forgotten.”
Michaelsen, however, resists nostalgia. “It’s a portal,” he says, “but not one about passing through spatially. It connects you back to a different time and a different place — while also getting new life as a sign of Belltown without having to be a sign for Belltown.”
He does harbor one small, whimsical wish: a push-button, somewhere on the structure, that triggers the sound of tires thumping over the old expansion joints.
“Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump,” he beatboxes, drumming out the viaduct’s vanquished rhythm. “It was loud and terrible, but I miss that. If you know it, you know it. And if you don’t, you’ll never get it.”
WEB EXTRAS
To see our on-site 360 degree narrated video, click here!
For more photos of the sign bridge in situ on its last go-round in 2019, see below.
This first set is from Clay Eals:
A few more of the last day wandering the Viaduct in 2019.
