The Looming Bottleneck: Seattle’s Growing Pains in 1888
An architect’s urgent warning to city leaders echoes through time: invest in infrastructure now, or pay ten times the cost later.
In a very important and timely letter printed in another paper, Mr. W. E. Boone, the well-known architect, calls attention to matters of the highest public interest. The extension of Front street south, as Mr. Boone suggests, is a matter which we cannot postpone without enormous loss to the taxpayers. Sooner or later the thing must be done, and the sooner the better. Five years from now the cost will be five or ten times greater than now, and in the meantime, until the extension is made, improvement of the property adjacent to the proposed street will be delayed. San Francisco had a hard experience in this line, and Seattle should profit by her example. The matter has already been too long delayed. Every citizen should read and carefully consider Mr. Boone’s suggestions, not only as they refer to the extension of Front street, but respecting sewerage also. These are matters which ought to command public attention.
“Five years from now the cost will be five or ten times greater than now, and in the meantime, until the extension is made, improvement of the property adjacent to the proposed street will be delayed.”
More than 135 years later, W. E. Boone’s warning about Front Street (now 1st Avenue) feels remarkably contemporary. His argument that delaying infrastructure projects leads to 'enormous loss' to taxpayers is the exact logic currently driving debates over Seattle's transit expansion and the maintenance of the city's aging underground utilities.
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