The Battle for Shilshole Avenue
The Ballard city council faces down powerful railroad interests after a heated mass meeting at Berg's Hall.
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The Ballard council took the question of railroad franchises in hand on Tuesday night and acted on the applications after a four-hour struggle. They adjourned to Berg's Hall, where a mass meeting of citizens was held and addressed by representatives of the different railroad companies. The hall was packed. The situation is this: Shilshole Avenue is 100 feet wide and extends from Railroad Avenue to Broadway. Over this street each company is asking for a franchise. The Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern road ran a spur along the avenue before the town was incorporated and claims certain rights, but is willing to accept a franchise if satisfactory. The Great Northern has a franchise on the south and westerly side of the avenue but has been unable to build a station because the Lake Shore track grade is in the way. For three months, the Seattle & Everett Railroad Company has been striving to obtain a franchise on the avenue, which many Ballard citizens suspect is merely a scheme to gain better facilities rather than to actually build to Richmond Beach. After the meeting, the council rejected the Seattle & Everett franchise 5 to 1 and granted the Lake Shore a fifteen-foot franchise with strict conditions, including the removal of their station house from the street.
“Many of the people of Ballard openly expressed the opinion that it was a scheme of some railroad to obtain greater facilities on the avenue than it now has.”
Railroad rights-of-way and the control of industrial land have defined Ballard since its earliest days. This 1892 debate over street-level tracks and competing rail giants echoes the ongoing civic tension regarding the city's waterfront use and the dominance of corporate infrastructure in dense neighborhoods.
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