Seattle Laid Out Its Streets for 7,000 People. It Was Already Too Small.
In 1883, Seattle citizens worried that the young city's twenty-foot business streets could not carry the growth already under way, and a movement began to widen them to eighty feet.
The citizens of Seattle are not a little concerned about the narrow and cramped condition of their streets, which were planned with reference to the attainment of a possible population of six or seven thousand. The principal business streets are only twenty feet wide, and at times almost impassable. A movement is now on foot to secure a width of eighty feet. The city has already surpassed its former most sanguine expectations in growth, and yet it has but fairly begun. Another decade will see it more than double its present size. The laying out of a city in the new northwest demands the skill of engineers and the most intelligent planning. — Spokane Chronicle.
“The principal business streets are only twenty feet wide, and at times almost impassable.”
Seattle's street grid still carries the marks of decisions made when the town expected only a few thousand residents. Today's fights over road capacity, sidewalks, bike lanes and transit are the long afterlife of those 1883 choices — and the complaint that growth "has but fairly begun" could be lifted from a modern civic meeting.
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