Escalator City

How to Get High in Seattle With Little Effort

The other day I was downtown and overheard someone complain about how steep the hill was that he had just ascended. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was lucky. Nearly all of Seattle’s downtown streets have been shaved down, or regraded, making them less steep than in the past. (I use the lower case regraded to refer to small scale projects, as opposed to the upper case Regrades, which reference the city’s famed obliterations of landscape, such as the Denny and Jackson Regrades.) We have also lost some of our steep streets due to projects, such as I-5.

As you might imagine, the fellow I heard was not the first to complain about the hills. One of Seattle’s legendary knolls was once known as Profanity Hill. Just east of downtown and formerly topped by the King County Courthouse, the rise was so steep that lawyers used “cuss words…not conducive to judicial dignity.” (Seattle Times, 3/26/1903) To paraphrase Renault in Casablanca, I am shocked, shocked, to read of this behavior.

Some proposed that the way to eliminate issues such as this was to tunnel under the hills. Others took a more technological approach. In 1905, Assistant Engineer H.W. Scott suggested building escalators to aid would-be hill climbers though his focus was more on horses than people noting. “When one considers the enormous amount of freight that has every day to be hauled…there is a monstrous need for the Yesler Way escalator right now.” Scott was not alone, as ten years later the papers were full of news about plans to build escalators (called a “Charlie Chaplin moving stairway”) on Seneca between Second and Fourth and on several downtown side streets. The city engineer even prepared plans for potential escalators.

Image 75-83-1: Courtesy SPU Engineering Vault

Like many transportation projects in Seattle, talk was louder than action and none of these ideas came to fruition but if you so desire you can escalate from 1st Avenue to 5th Avenue in our modern downtown. You will rise from 33 feet to 160 feet above sea level.
Here’s how to do it.
1. Enter the glass doors of the Norton Building on 1st between Columbia and Marion and find what in 1959 (when the building opened) was the longest elevator west of New York. Coincidentally, Seattle’s first escalator (1906)—in Jules Redelsheimer’s clothing store—was at this exact location. It was one of a handful in the country and ran “with a noise like the engines of war.” Perhaps we need a commemorative marker.

2. Exit the Norton, turn left on 2nd, walk to Marion, cross the street and go up the habitrail escalators of 999 DocuSign Tower. Work your way either through the lobby or around the exterior to 3rd Avenue.
3. Cross the street and enter 4th and Madison Building and its lovely marble and granite lobby. This is the one spot where you will need to go up stairs (6 of them). There is an elevator on the south side of the building, too. (You can also access the outside patio space on the south side. It’s a nifty, hidden public gem downtown.)
4. Exit the 4th and Madison, cross the street to the Seattle Public Library and find the city’s most colorful conveyance, a chartreuse-accented Chaplin stairway. If you want to keep going, you could ride the library escalators to the 10th floor.

In 1947, Sophie Frye Bass wrote: "Seattle's hills have been its pride and they have been its problem.” The downtown slopes may still cause pain almost 80 years later but at least now there’s a way to realize the dream of early Seattleites and ride an escalator up our glacial carved topography. If anyone knows of other fun routes like this please let me know.

Seattle Star July 17, 1917