The Hilltop Slip: Seattle’s Shifting Waterfront
Decades before the regrades reshaped the city, residents of the Belltown waterfront watched their homes slide into the bay as the ground beneath them turned to quicksand.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A large landslide has occurred on the bay below Front street, parallel with Lenora street. Some weeks ago, the earth cracked at this point, and a family residing in a house below Front street on Lenora became alarmed and moved out. The house was afterwards moved to another portion of the lot. The land from this point to the bay, including four or five acres, has gradually settled until the lower blocks that the house formerly rested on are now ten feet below their former level. The rear end of the fence has broken off and is still standing, having been carried to an adjoining street. Along the bank which marks the extent of the slide, large roots have been torn from stumps and trees, and at the water’s edge, trees have fallen into the bay. The cause of this slide does not appear, but it is probably caused by quicksands underlying the bed of clay at this place. A small stream of water runs in under the clay into the bay, which has probably worked the sand from underneath.
“The land from this point to the bay, including four or five acres, has gradually settled until the lower blocks that the house formerly rested on are now ten feet below their former level.”
This 1878 report captures the unstable, hilly geology that defined early Seattle before the massive regrading projects of the early 20th century. While we no longer deal with these specific waterfront slides, the struggle to balance development on Seattle's precarious slopes remains a constant theme in local urban planning and housing safety.
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